May 2026

Writing evangelistic Kovol Bible lessons is a huge task. The Gospel has never been presented in the Kovol language before. Where do you start? Well, we start at the beginning. Our lessons start in Genesis 1 and tell the story of the Bible to the end. We aim to pick up the big themes of the Bible and use its narrative to teach them. Doing so has several advantages. Firstly in an oral culture like we find ourselves in stories are important. The Kovol people are used to hearing and retelling stories and using them to make points. Teaching chronologically allows us to do just that.

I’m spending a lot of time in my office under the house. The idea was to have guys sit alongside me touch typing while I worked on whatever I was doing. The result has been better than expected. Two of the guys are addicted to improving their touch typing score and they’ve been coming every single working day. The program has them typing out a set of lines, requiring them to reach a certain speed and accuracy. If they reach the right speed they progress to the next level which adds more characters. One of them is up to lesson 4 already and is typing with all his fingers.

Once everyone arrived it was time for the important talk. I pulled out my voice recorder and got 30 minutes of talk in a mix of Kovol and Tok Pisin. Upon my return home I wrote some notes and loosely translated what was said for the benefit of my coworkers. They’ll need to give it a listen and see what they catch from it. I’d put my comprehension level at about 80%. 20% of the time, even re-listening to the recording I’m not confident on exactly what was said. I just wanted to say that to give you an idea of how tricky it is to understand what I’m hearing.

This last month has seen the literacy classroom getting further and further along. After an initial few days of being on hand to answer questions and provide “encouragement” the community have settled into their own rhythm. They have never built a classroom before and were uncertain about how to do it “right”. As time as gone on it has been great to see them taking initiative as they have grown in confidence.