Michael S. and I made two rowboats, one for his family and one for mine.

Historic Tangoa Island

(Photos: Mala takes me in a canoe; Tangoans hew a canoe; view from the Batcock's house on Tangoa;view from South Santo.)

I rode my bike from Talua to the point where Santo is closest to Tangoa island today, and waited for a kindergartner to paddle across and help me cross the channel. Another two boys (Jole and Mala) hopped into the canoe, for a total of more than 300 pounds. Though the water was like glass today, it was scary to cross the channel, having heard stories of men getting their arms ripped off by sharks when they swam across.

It's a historic island, where the Teacher's Training Institute was located for decades, and where Jeff and Sue Batcock completed the translation of the Tangoa New Testament.

Goat climbs tree, surprises missionaries

Imagine our surprise to see a goat climb the Tahitian Chestnut tree outside our front door!

Vernacular Scripture for the Kindle

Translators are always looking for ways to get vernacular materials into people's hands. Now that the Kindle is only $114 (albeit with Buick ads) it's a reasonable option for distributing scripture and literacy materials for tribal or endangered languages. I don't suppose you'd buy one for every person in a village, but maybe one for each school, and put on it all the materials you've ever produced in that language, plus... (would you put English/French materials on it too?) Advantages: the screen is the prefect size; the battery lasts a long time; it's extremely easy to create a .pdf; it takes seconds to upload; none of the materials would go missing, they would never be ruined, the staples wouldn't rust, pages wouldn't fly out. Disadvantage: only one person can use it. What do you think? Post your comments on the blog.
Note that you can develop interactive materials for the kindle, and it also plays mp3s, but only randomly, and you have to know how to navigate the kindle to get to them.
Nuts and bolts of how to do it: since vernaculars use unusual fonts, the books need to be printed to .pdf files, which means the kindle cannot change text size, can't perform searches, won't hyperlink the table of contents, and won't look up words in the built-in dictionary. The books need to be printed to A5, or 5.5 x 8.5, to show up well, because the kindle shrinks .pdf files to fit the screen.

Santo Trip

I spent two weeks teaching cultural anthropology at Talua for students in the B.Min. program. It was rewarding to see the lights come on as they realized the ways in which their own animistic background affects their Christian worldview. After that I went deep into the jungle. I passed the quonset huts Mitchner described, and could not miss the eerie "mile a minute" vine that was introduced by the military and has now taken over Espiritu Santo Island. We went through four language groups in 20 miles, to Angor village where I'm checking the Merei translation of Luke 19-24. Here's a picture of Angor village and the consultant check.

Bee fieldtrip

Caleb said he'd like to see Pastor Gilbert's bees, so I called and asked if we could set up a fieldtrip. It turns out that Gilbert was going to feed sugar water to the bees the next day, so we all joined him today (despite the cyclone in the northern islands pounding rain on the kids in the back of the truck). See attached video for our trip. Gilbert has about 200 hives throughout Efate. Some agriculturalists rent the hives for cross-pollination. He's hoping to teach Tannese how to use their bees to make money with the sale of honey, but there's a steep learning curve, and it takes a while to become income-generating.

At the end, he gave us a bottle of "Gilbert's Honey" to enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksH3nPu3BS8

Modern day parable for Vanuatu

If Jesus were telling the parable in Vanuatu today, would he say, "Nobody puts new rice in old rice bags. If he does, the weevils from the old rice will spoil the new rice. Instead, they soak the old rice till the weevils float. And everybody knows that old rice is better."