Postscript

We’re doing one month of intensive French study. Knowing more French will help us both to connect better with colleagues from French-speaking countries in Africa and Europe.  This is something we’ve considered doing for a while.  This year God provided a way for it to happen.

Our intensive study won’t give us fluency–that can take years to achieve.  However, it will give us a jump start in basic French that can form a foundation for more learning.  So far we’ve gone through present tense verb conjugations, definite and indefinite articles, basics for how to introduce yourself, and mountains of vocabulary. It’s been a lot to take in!

Pray for us that we’ll be able to retain what we learn this month and that we can keep up with the pace of these intensive lessons.

Merci beaucoup!

Back in April I was involved in a meeting with several of the area communications coordinators to discuss some of what we had accomplished over the last few years and what we needed to do to better reach some of our goals.

One of the outcomes from that meeting was the recommendation to form a new global story gathering team.  After a few months negotiating how this could work and finding potential staff members from other teams, we finally had the very first meeting of the Wycliffe News Network – WNN – this month in Austria.  It was an exciting week to dream together about what God would have us do in this next year.

The Wycliffe News Network is a small team of Wycliffe journalists that gather stories about what God is doing worldwide through Bible translation and language development for Wycliffe participating organizations worldwide to use in their publicity.

I’ve been asked to lead this team for at least the next year in order to give it a solid structure and purpose.  We have a lot of work to do to make this really work.  The team we’ve put together is photographer heavy, and we don’t yet have a single full-time writer.  However, this is the team God has provided, so we’re thinking about strategies to make this work and how to leverage our strengths well including continuing to utilize volunteer writers.

You might be wondering what this means for my work in Africa. It’s interesting timing how this came together.  My desire from the time Jeff and I moved to Kenya was to find someone from Africa to take my responsibilities so that an African could represent communication in Africa.

Just a couple of months ago, Florence joined the Africa area in order to work in communication.  She previously served for many years in communications with a Wycliffe organization in Kenya. She’s taken about half of the job that I was doing — the portion related to consulting and training in communications in Africa.  I’ll probably continue to take part in some of these things at times on her request.  However, her taking this role left me free to focus on story gathering.

The WNN team has responsibility for gathering stories about Bible translation worldwide, joining with some of our other offices who also do some of this.  I’ll also be providing leadership for this team’s global story gathering, but as WNN’s primary liaison for Africa-related stories, I will continue to stay closely connected to Africa.

Photo by Søren Kjeldgaard

Anyone considering a job in Bible translation, literacy or any related work with the organizations associated with Wycliffe has to first complete cross-cultural and linguistic training.  Training centers are located around the world.

The last of the stories I’ll be helping with in Europe is on the European Training Programme (ETP). I’ve been in the UK this week conducting interviews.  Since ETP has campuses in Germany and the UK, we’re getting photos and interviews in stages.

It’s been fascinating to learn about it.  The director of ETP UK told me that they shut down the training in Europe for a full year in order to assess how to do it better.  They saw that many people were being trained for things they never did.  In other cases, people received so much training before they began working that by the time they put their training to use, they’d forgotten key elements.

The program now uses a distinct approach which focuses on helping people acquire training and experience which build on each other.  Their just in time training begins with several months of training, followed by an internship for two years, followed by more training with the option of getting a master’s degree.  Then additional training as one wants to expand their skills or refresh their knowledge on a subject area.

Jeff and Martijn drove up to Wycliffe Netherlands for the day to help with another IT project.  It was just a just hour drive from where the office is in Germany to the office in the Netherlands.

The old rack mount.

The office needed a new rack mount for their server switch installed. A network switch routes traffic between computers and is the central point between all the computers in an office. The network at the office had expanded, and the old rack mount wasn’t big enough to fit everything anymore.  A new rack mount would give them the increased capacity they needed for their bigger network.

Out with the old, and in with the new.

This project involved unwiring the network switch, removing the old rack mount, installing the new rack mount and rewiring the network switch.

The new rack mount.

Between the two of them, they finished the whole project in a day, and they were back in Germany by the evening.

Jeff has been working with his supervisor, Martijn, on a cabling project at one of our offices in Germany.

They’ve had to install conduit along all the office walls and in the attic. Then, they’ve been working on running internet and electrical cables through the conduit.  The last part of the job was installing the electrical outlets and internet ports. Jeff enjoyed this project because it combined some of his IT knowledge with his construction skills.

(Click on the images to see them at full size.)