Sunday, September 19, 2021 PM

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Sunnyside Baptist Church Verne and Denny Johnson Missionary Report

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Johnson's and listen to them as they update us on their ministry, that we have partnered together with them over the years, what a blessing they've been to us.
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And so then we will have, you know, a time of fellowship after they finish and we can catch up with all the latest details.
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Okay, Vern? Get this mic on me and I'm a little bit nervous because usually
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I get to turn it on and off, but I heard about the one missionary not used to technology and he's in the bathroom not realizing it's still going.
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Anyway, Denny's concerned about the pole. I'm a little bit sorry about that because this light, trying to get the light off and still leave lights on, it's on this side of the pole.
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So if you want to shift, I understand just turn them all off. Now I'm going to wish
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I had it right in the middle. Okay, just real quick.
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I know there's some of you that aren't really familiar with us. So some of these slides may be kind of repeats for those of you that know us.
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Our first interaction, this is interesting,
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I just found out two days ago, our first interaction was with Jenny, Jenny Brown at the time.
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And she came out and actually helped us build our house when we moved into the village where we're at in Africa. I didn't realize that when she came back, she didn't come back to Sunnyside.
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They were still, Browns were still living in Washington at the time. So then they moved down here, and by the time they get down here, we came home on furl, and that was 91.
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So that was our first interaction with Sunnyside, and we've tried to come back every time we're back from Africa since.
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We were trying to get back here last year, but because of COVID, Brother Michael said not to. One of the,
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I'm going to have to speak a little bit for myself, and I'm going to try to hurry through these slides so Denny can have some time to talk. I'm just going to try to introduce you to what's going on.
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If you think of a question as you're going through, there will be time afterwards to probably raise those questions.
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One of the things for me was I liked John 3 .16, but when it said go ye into all the world,
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I kind of wanted to pick and choose what that looked like. It was like,
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God, I don't want to get to the end of my life and think that I picked how I was going to work for you.
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It's not like it was my gifting or anything, and I was really hesitant to give him a blank check because really, he might send me to Africa.
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In so doing, and I was about 20 at the time, I gave him a blank check.
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I said, let's go for broke. At the time, it was going beyond the Iron Curtain, Russia, not fun. Thank you,
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God, there's God smugglers. It seems like if there's somebody that's interested, maybe there's Bibles available. Option two,
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Muslim countries. Same thing. I didn't realize at the time that Russia has a lot of languages, but at that time,
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I thought Russian was it, Muslim countries, Arabic. Then I knew about option three.
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There are people in the world that have never heard, if you don't go. My parents, we were raised in what was then
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New Tribes Mission. It's now called Ethnos 360. Honestly, I had seen the pros and cons of the mission itself, and I think you'd say this about any church, any organization.
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I'm not trying to point fingers, but God, really? They're the ones that are doing the work probably better than anybody else.
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Anyway, God doesn't steer a parked car. Put in your application. Please, God, close the door here.
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Nonetheless, knowing that you're giving God full sway, and going into the mission,
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I was single. Denny and I met in the training, and so I'm just trying to catch up on my story, how much
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Denny wants to give of her own. I think maybe she already shared some things with the ladies this morning, so you probably know her already better by what she has shared.
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This is going to be fun. I can see it now. Right now, there are 7 ,360 languages in the world.
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704 have the Bible. 15 ,251 have the complete New Testament. 1 ,160 have portions.
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That leaves 3 ,945 languages without anything.
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These are SIL, Wycliffe Bible Translators, stats on the website. You go to Wikipedia, English has 450 translations.
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Again, if you're asking God, where's the biggest need? Here in the U .S.,
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I know that it's becoming a very sin -sick world, and there's a lot of people that really probably haven't heard it as well.
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But for me, it's like these people have never heard it. In saying that, we ended up over on Ivory Coast.
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That's where Ivory Coast is. We usually have to fly through Europe. There's no direct flights to Ivory Coast. I'm not sure why
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Americans aren't flocking there. But we have to go through France because Ivory Coast was a
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French colony until 1960. This is where we're at. I put a picture of Josh and Chris in here because Chris is our daughter, but she's also one of your missionaries.
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I'm just showing you real quickly, this here is Mali, this here is Burkina Faso. They're in red because the
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U .S. State Department considers them no -entry zones because of terrorism.
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We call them insurgents because we don't know really who they are at this point. I've heard that there are as many as three different Muslim groups that are behind a lot of this, and there's actually a certain amount of infighting or competition about trying to make a lot of these countries up here in West Africa a
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Muslim state. Because there are now actual incidents in Ivory Coast just about 60 miles from where we're working, this circle is kind of the
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Kapalka area. The red zone for the U .S. Embassy has now dropped down below into Ivory Coast, and Josh and Chris are only 30 minutes from where we live.
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It's nice to be able to see them, but that's where they're at right now, and you guys were having to ask for me to live as Christ to die as Cain.
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It's a whole lot closer. So I'm just letting you know these things and where we're at.
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For you that haven't actually seen what we actually do, one of the biggest things that constantly goes through my mind when
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I think about the grace of God is I didn't choose my place of birth. I could be sitting in some
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African village, have no concept there might be a missionary coming. If you're a
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Palaka person, you're probably like a lot of Africans, especially in the villages, you get up as just little.
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As girls, you're learning to put little cans of water on your head and go to the well with Mom, and you're washing the dishes with sand that you can find around, and maybe a few leaves.
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Sometimes you're helping with the cooking, and you're helping with the pounding of the corn. For the women, it's really all -day work just to live.
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When they get done in the morning with their getting food halfway ready at night, off the fields they go, come back in time to cook the meal for the family, they eat around 8 .30,
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and it's up the next day doing the same thing. If you're a boy, Lori, for you that were there at TAG, pardon me, you're going to see some of the same slides.
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I quickly grabbed them out of the presentation. If you're a boy, more often than not, you're going to help
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Dad. If Dad can scrape together $50, he'll be able to put first son in school, and second son will be condemned to no education just for $50 for the year, and take care of the cows.
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That's what you'll be doing. Right now, we had some gifts given, and we were able to give scholarships to,
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I don't know, probably 150 kids that are up in above sixth grade.
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Above sixth grade, it becomes about $300 a year. So we're just trying to help them stay in school so that they become educated.
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I'll talk more just a bit about that later. What have we been doing while we've been over there?
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Again, this is a little bit for you that don't know what you're doing. One of the things about our mission is that we've become convinced that if you want to share the gospel, you kind of have to do it in the heart language.
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Americans are really, I don't know what to say here, not too cool.
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I don't know. Whatever you want to call it. They're monolingual people. It's really rare to find monolingual people in the world, and Americans are one of them.
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You get over to Africa, they know three or four, and they can't even read. But when I say that, they know
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Jula for the marketplace, but you could never reach them with the gospel in that language. They know
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Chebada, or they know some French, but that just gets them into the legal side of it.
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But you can't use that terminology when you're talking about God. God is a heart God, as we learned in Sunday school this morning.
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He's a God of the heart, and he wants us to know their heart. You have to speak their language, idiomatic language.
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So our goal is to do it in the language. That's one thing SIL tries to do with the translation. We believe that God wants them to hear it in their language.
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Aren't you thankful it's in English? Instead of Greek, it would be a whole lot harder. But the other thing is we're trying to establish churches.
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We're different than SIL Wycliffe in that regard. We want to see a church established and that church establishing more churches.
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So now to be able to do that, you have to learn the language, and you also have to do the translation.
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So one of the things to do about learning language, I used to think it was a hard task sitting down and looking at the books like you do in high school.
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But if you get out with the people and you start talking to them, it's amazing how quickly some of those words can come. So here's
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Denny. She was really good at that. One of the things I had to do was come up with the alphabet. Again, I'm sorry about this for those guys that were there at TAG.
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But here's the alphabet, and here's some things that are quick, easy to see, some of the differences, some of the sounds.
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These are weird -looking symbols, but if you know anything about the International Phonetic Symbols, it's not a problem.
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We have discovered, and this is not just us, but if you can come up with one symbol for one sound, you can teach a person to read their own language in six weeks, including
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English. But English is written with about you can have as many as five, ten symbols for a single sound.
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When I cough, what's that? O -U -G -H.
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What is that? It's two sounds. It's a vowel and an F. But that's what
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I'm saying. Thought. Well, that changes the sound. O -U -G -H. Bow.
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Well, that changes the sound, too. So all I'm saying is there's a whole lot of symbols and sounds that make it really hard to learn how to read
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English. Not so in palica. So my job was to come up with that. I'll have to say it wasn't necessarily easy because palica didn't want to follow normal linguistic rules.
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There are some letters that we didn't use. Down on the bottom, we have a single symbol because it's also a tonal language.
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And I give the example so often of I want you to hear the differences in these three phrases. Wake -a -da -jog -a -na, wake -a -da -jog -a -na, wake -a -da -jog -a -na.
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Okay, the first one means we will go to the house. The second one, we will not go to the house.
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And the last one means we didn't go to the house. And if you don't get it right, Jesus died for my sins.
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He will die for my sins. He didn't die for my sins. And you can see where we're going. Okay, so now you kind of know what we do out there, where we're headed.
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I'm trying to give you an update from recently. One of the things that happened in 2002 was there was an uprising.
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They've always been a democratic country since 1960, but they only had one political party. It works pretty well.
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But when you have multiple parties and they learned about it, they had 119 presidential candidates.
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They weren't ready for it, and so they didn't like who was eventually chosen. That's another story.
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Then he actually shared the gospel with the president. So in 2002, there was a rebel uprising.
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They wanted elections all over again. And they were shooting, fighting, and it wasn't a good situation.
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The mission pulled us out. We weren't really allowed back in, although we felt safe to go back in because they weren't after us.
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It was a political thing. So we did finally get out there in 2007. But what had happened, well, we were gone for those five years is that the rebels came in and took everything that we had.
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Our houses were totally stripped. The rebels came in. I mean, who's going to pay a rebel, right? So they would steal wherever they could.
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But when the villagers saw that they were taking our things, they came in as well and made sure there was nothing left.
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I'm saying this because there's an incident, and I'm not going into all these incidents, but there's an incident in which it just became very clear to us that we would believe in your gut, too, if we had the money to take care of our kids when they got sick.
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We had things, and they didn't. And, of course, you know, it became more of a white man's religion, and we don't have what you have.
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And I did wonder, God, what's it going to take to reach them? You going to take one of my kids like every one of their families?
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You going to take all that we have and took all that we had? And so we went out in 2007, and you can see
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Denny cooking outside because we no longer had a stove and a fridge. And the thing was, they came to us and said, why don't we go to start work?
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I said, well, we can't pay you. What? I said, no, we're going to have to pray. I said, and we don't have our co -workers with us, either.
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So you are our co -workers. And to see them start praying with us and to see us on the same page now as co -workers, but it took the loss of everything for that to happen.
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One of the things that happened there, too, is that our co -worker wasn't coming back, so Denny was given the job of translating the
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New Testament at the age of 50. So you guys that don't think that you're getting older, you can still do quite a bit.
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Another thing that happened is Denny had been working one -on -one with a guy that was really sharp, and she decided to create a team, which to this day, she started finding out that creating a team was basically a discipleship program, and they learned more than just how to translate.
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So now the last we saw you was 2015. We go out in 2016, and we were caught off guard.
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This is more Denny's story probably than mine, but it was hitting both of us. She thought she was nearly losing her mind.
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Comes 6, 7 o 'clock when the sun is going down, just paced around the house up to five hours, nearly feeling like she's going to lose her mind, trying to remember how to spell the names of her kids.
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Bad, bad. Do you call it satanic? What do you call it? I don't know, but I really thought we were leaving.
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This wasn't the first time it happened, but each of the times it happened, it seems like when she was starting again, the translation, this kind of thing came up.
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For me, I got out there, and I'd slowly sent out about $5 ,000 over the period of time to a missionary.
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I thought he was holding it for me. No, he was putting it into our decrepit car, because he was using our car, and we were $8 ,000 in the hole and didn't know what we were going to do.
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But anyway, what was interesting is from 8 to 5, Denny had a very clear mind and was working on translation.
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2017, there's a team that came basically from England. They were former missionaries.
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They wanted to come out, and they actually put up this church building. Our believers had been living, having church under a tree for 17 years.
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So they put up this church building. You can see a little Leintuchiten Shelter out in front. That's where they have Sunday school for the kids.
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It's kind of cool to watch them, but they didn't want to have distractions in the church building. What's the church service look like?
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You're watching the first church service inside the building here. The church is extra long.
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They do their teaching from up front, but this whole middle circle is where the ladies dance, but it's not a central type dance.
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They love the Lord. All their songs that they created on their own, they're usually verses. And as they're singing,
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I mean, keep in mind, they don't know how to read their own language. The language had never been written down. They're just now learning how to read it.
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This is how they remember it. So it's kind of cool to see the kids singing as they go out to the field, and unsaved kids are catching in.
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They like the songs, and it's neat how that works. One of the things about 2017 was
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I'd been now spending my time trying to get the house up and going and a lot of other extras.
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2017 came along. We sat down with our leadership, came up with a great strategy. I was really looking forward to it. Two missionary families wanted to join our work and today we really wish maybe they had, but we also realized that if we could say no to them, they would start another language group in Senegal, and we were hoping that the
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Palika would be our team sufficiently enough, and with that strategy statement, I was really counting on Sibri to be a huge help.
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We weren't counting on him passing away. He was educated enough in school that he could go straight from English to Palika, and he did a rough translation of the
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New Testament once he'd worked with Denny and gave Denny a running start at a lot of this stuff. He could help me almost immediately write down any
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Palika word. Now I'm having to come up with a spell checker, and it's a whole lot harder because he's not there to do it.
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He was a great teacher. You can see him there on the left. He was one of the teachers.
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It's like losing three missionaries all at one time. 2018, and I brought in Chris and Josh. They stopped in for about three weeks.
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On their way to France where they were going to learn French before coming back. So when he stopped in, it was neat that the day before he arrived, our shipment arrived.
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We just didn't have the wherewithal to ship the thing, make the shipment in 2016.
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So 2018, the shipment arrived, and Josh put up our panels, and oh my goodness, to have enough power to run a small freezer and to have fans at night and to be able to run six computers during the daytime instead of generators, that was huge.
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You can see at the bottom there, we had a baptism. We hadn't had one since, oh man, 2001 because we hadn't been around to do that.
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But now we had them ask the questions and determine who should be saved and who needed more teaching. And that was an interesting ordeal.
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How do you know that somebody's saved? How do you teach somebody to find out?
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And what was even more interesting was our kids, our sons came out at that time, and you can see one of our sons, probably about 30 at the time, getting baptized along with his new wife.
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2019 was very heavy. One of the first things was that we had our first women's conference.
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Denny can tell you a little bit more about that, but the same team that put up the church came out and put in a floor.
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And it was a whole lot heavier. Denny completed. She got her final check.
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What in the world? Is this a chair here? There you go.
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Thank you. Denny got her final check. In other words, she was technically free to print the
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New Testament in September. And right after that, a team came in and gave us a brand new literacy program, worked it with our language, and so we had brand new materials here.
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They're also on the table. Here's the New Testament, if you want to come read it. We have a few other things, too.
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Anyway, so that's kind of bringing you up to date real quick. The thing that's been interesting is now what you say is, what has
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God been doing? One of the things that I also didn't show you was after, in December, Denny had gotten from a neighboring translator, she'd gotten the idea that maybe it'd be good to read through the whole
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New Testament and create an audio recording. So that's going on while people are learning to read. Josh gave us a great professional recorder.
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She starts recording, but she wasn't counting on the fact that one of the guys on her team was going to bring in unsaved people. And then come these unsaved guys and, wow, we haven't heard that.
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What's that mean? Turn off the recorder, explain it, turn on the recorder, one verse later, what does that mean?
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Turn off the recorder. She didn't get the audio done. But she realized it would still probably be good to finish this.
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And after finishing Mark, the same guy went and he did what none of the believers thought was possible.
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You know, we talked to them. We said, do you think it's possible for your leaders who offer the village sacrifices to get saved?
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Oh, no, they're old. They're going to die. They're too hardened in their ways. Forget about it. This guy, his name is
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Penitibi. He goes and invites them to come in for a check. He said, you guys know all the language.
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You guys might be able to help us with old words, if that's helpful. Will you come in and listen? And here's the guy that's offering up a chicken sacrifice at a wedding.
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Same guy. And they listen to the whole gospel of Luke. So getting through two books, we came home on furlough.
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So now we have a brand new literacy program. We have the New Testament completed, but not printed. And we have these guys that are listening.
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And then he said, this is the end of 2019. Maybe we should break up our home assignment and go back out for three months and try to wrap some of this stuff up.
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Let's finish the audio and get all the printing stuff ready. And then we'll come back home for home assignment. We weren't counting on COVID.
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So we were only home about two months. COVID hit. We were already corresponding with Brother Michael coming down here.
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And the governor just said, you know, and maybe better to wait. And so our mission said, man, we can't count home assignment for you guys because you can't travel.
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So while we're waiting and waiting for everything to open up, including airports, when it finally opened in October, we just took off and let's see if we can get this done.
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So we were out there from October to May. I won't go into some of the details.
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We got held up. Basically, our mission was nervous, found out that we were going out there and weren't too happy because of the militants.
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And they really wanted us to stay at the Baptist Hospital where Chris and Joshua were. We didn't mind hanging out with our grandkids, but it really made the work hard because we weren't with the people in the village.
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So anyway, the deal is, what's God been doing? Man, he's softening hearts. And we started hearing stories all over the place in other villages.
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And not only that, other denominations were getting in on the fun. And they were finding believers of their own.
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And, you know, you get a little bit jealous. We're the ones that have it right, you know. You know, here
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I show Seabody again, but we now have five regular teachers going to other villages just like this.
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You talk about who's a missionary. What I said to the kids at TAG is, everybody is.
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And personally, I don't feel it's a call to go overseas. We're commanded to go. You know, and I would just invite you guys to say,
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OK, God, where do you want me to go? It may be as far as next door. You know what I'm saying? But just make sure you're not the one calling the shots on that.
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The Women's Conference, this picture here was taken after we left? No. No, this one here was this year.
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The women, first week, you need to see this here.
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You need to see this panya. It's called a panya. It's a wraparound that the women use. They put it on their heads, wrap it around.
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But a Southern Baptist missionary put all the foundational Bible teaching stories on it.
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And so the women learned the first year about the Old Testament, second year about the New Testament. This year it was, we need to learn how to teach each other.
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And they get up there just sweating. Some of them had to get help to read the lessons. And this is my lesson.
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And it was a mess because the gal that assigned the stories wasn't there to give them the order. So they're all out of order.
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And I can't tell you how messy it got. But here they were in fear and trembling, standing up in front of the rest of the ladies telling these stories.
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And so this little slide here is just their, come on.
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They have a little march around the village. It's very typical that you do this kind of thing. Singing their songs, a few kids wearing their
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COVID masks. You can hear the xylophone.
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They have a much bigger version than this one here at the table. It's about that big. They're all believers.
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They love the Lord. They have three wheelers that act like little pickup trucks for them.
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We had a missionary come out. Sorry, a friend come out from Wisconsin that had been supporting us kind of off and on over the years and wanted to come out and see what we're doing.
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And saw God in these people. Remember, these guys haven't seen a church. They haven't seen how to do church.
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It's interesting to watch what the Holy Spirit does. When you see them dancing, wait, wait, wait. Dancing's out.
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And we want to tell them how to do it. And all of a sudden, instead of driving the car with all our programs, we're hanging onto the bumper saying,
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God, where are we going? And to sit here and brag, I'm just,
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God, tomorrow it may fall flat and I'm going to look like a fool. You know what I'm saying? When God shows up, it's like, oh, yay.
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This penitentiary, he also is wild about getting people reading. He would fill up one of those three -wheelers, take 20 people in the three -wheeler, 9 o 'clock at night, in the dark, arrive at another village where there are students home on break, and come up with about as many as 100 people in that village thinking that if we can get literacy, if we can get literacy going with the students who can read quicker, that might give greater motivation for those that can't read at all.
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And so here he is. He's become a real nightmare for us. For me, because I need this printed.
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I need that printed. Wait, wait, wait. I'm supposed to be working on lessons for Sunday. And now we need money for this, this, and this.
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And I don't want to just be giving money out left and right, but if we can help with gas to get them to these different places or for printing materials, they just don't have the money for some of that stuff.
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And it's just become really hard. This here was just taken a week ago outside in the church courtyard, and these are all students from other villages who have come in.
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And only about 10, maybe 10, 15 from each of these villages have come in. And I'm just saying the motivation right now is super high for literacy, and a lot of it is
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Penitivi. Penitivi was the one that also went and grabbed the village leaders. And this supporter
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I was telling you about came out and visited for the summer, and she looks at us and she says, I don't know why me and my husband are supporting you guys.
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It seems like you're not really doing anything. I think it's all God. She was dead serious.
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But I wish you could see that. I wish you could see that. Denny's going to talk to us a little bit.
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Let me just give you one more thing. When we were out this time, and I was really struggling with the fact that our mission wouldn't let us go back out in the village when there didn't seem to be any visible reason why the militants were actually an issue.
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At least the people themselves didn't show any fear of the issue. And we should be able to be in the village and working with them.
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Denny said, well, why don't we just grab my team? We'll rent a house, which was rather cheap, and put my team in that for the week, and we'll bring in people from other villages to check, to do the read -through.
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And so we have to finish. She'd only done Mark and Luke. And she's doing the read -through, and she doesn't know who's going to show up.
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This Penitivi guy was doing the same thing. So she would go in and, oh, my goodness, we're in Hebrews today, and I've got
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Muslims. And if you know anything about the Muslim faith, Jesus was no more than a prophet.
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You put him up there in the place of the Son of God and that he's better than everybody, like it says in Hebrews? And Denny's sitting there sweating it out.
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And after a couple of days, this guy says, man, I think somebody's giving me a line about the
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Muslim faith. And it was just neat to see that kind of thing happen. Another guy comes in. He's real good in the French Bible, and he had been taught real well in the educational system.
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Doesn't say that in the French. You can't have that. And Denny let the team do the talking.
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So he said, so how do you want us to say it? We want to get it right. Well, in Palika, I'd say, I guess you did a good job.
31:35
And that happened time and time again. When they saw that we wanted to get it right and they could be a part of it, it was huge.
31:46
These guys don't even have a sixth -grade education. They've got ones that are working with Denny. And we ended up in the canton chief's house.
31:53
Now, this canton chief is responsible for all the decisions for the whole area. The region is called
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Canton. So he was a chief over everybody. If he made a decision, that was the last word.
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He happened to be sick that day. He said, normally I wouldn't take anybody here, but because he had relationships in our village, yeah, come on.
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And he invited all the village leaders in to see us. Now, only about eight showed up.
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These guys did the same thing. They were reading in Revelation, of all places, wanting a checkbook back. And so these guys that all showed up, leaders and everything, they know the old
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Palika words, right? And so let's get this good Palika in there.
32:35
And so they're making suggestions. But then this canton chief says, wait, you guys, if we use those old words, only you guys are going to be able to read the
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Bible. We better use the words that we're actually moving to, which some of them were a language,
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Jula, that is coming in, but they're used all the time. So let's use words that everybody uses.
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And at the end of the day, all these chiefs are just, we had a guy show up.
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I showed you the guy that was sacrificing chickens. His son is next in line to do that job.
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He is, oh man, if there's anybody in anybody's courtyard you want to avoid, it's his. Angry all the time.
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You don't want to get, you're always on his wrong side. And Pentateuch, he invites him to come and be a checker.
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You got to be kidding. And he comes in. And as he gets involved with the process, anybody knew that came in, he's saying, now, wait, you don't know what you're talking about.
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These guys have done a good job. And he became a proponent of the word. Everybody that heard it became a proponent of the word. Remember, they were in all these other villages.
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I was having a hard time that we weren't allowed to go back and into the village. Our mission has lost missionaries because of Muslim militants and others.
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And they get a lot of feedback from families in the states that are wanting to sue because the mission hasn't been taking the proper precautions.
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And so they are trying to take all the necessary steps. I'm trying to be understanding here.
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I was struggling. But here's Denny over at this other house, and here's what
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God's doing. So anyway, Denny, I told Denny just to share some of the things that she, that are personally encouraging to her.
34:28
I need to switch to the prayer request. All right.
34:41
Doing our little planning here on the side. Can I turn the lights on then? Oh, okay.
34:46
Okay. Okay. I think Vern did a really good job of sharing.
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Did you guys have any questions about anything that you heard so far tonight? I can see if I can try to answer some of your questions.
35:02
Mr. Smith? Vern mentioned at several points about the influence of Islam.
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What is the extent of that in the area, and what exactly? And I know there's militants to the north, but what's right there?
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Is there, like, a daily issue at times with Muslims?
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So the northern part of Ivory Coast is known to be more Muslim, and the southern half would tend to be more
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Catholic. And we have seen a change over the last few years. There are more Muslims and more mosques coming in, and a lot more people, the women wearing the burqas, and there's a real strict sect that has come in.
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So far we haven't known the Muslims to be aggressive like what we've heard in other places.
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But our son, Matt, had been in the military years ago, and he used to sort of monitor things when we were there.
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And he said, don't be so foolish as to think that there aren't training camps near you guys there in the north.
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He said, just keep your heads up and be aware, be wise. So that's the thing,
36:16
I guess, with terrorism. You can't always predict when and where it's going to hit. So for now, we feel like the door is still open, and so that's why there is a push for us to finish up and get the scripture to them if the door is going to close at some point.
36:36
We'd like to get it done as soon as we can. They actually had an attack down real close to the capital city in 2016, but we found out they were going after the
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American ambassador. He just didn't happen to show up. So because he didn't show up, they just started gunning people down there on the beach.
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It's a tourist place. There were missionaries hiding for their lives. And so that did happen.
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They were able to get guns all the way down to that point and pull that off. As far as the Muslim faith, most of the
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Africans really believe in the spirits, and they grab onto either the Catholic faith or the
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Muslim faith kind of as a cover. I think a lot of them don't want to be looked at as pagan, and so they'll have a secondary covering.
37:22
So they'll walk out of their church. They laugh at it. Our believers laugh at it now. We used to walk out of church and go off for sacrifices.
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I think that that hypocrisy that they saw in their parents actually helped them make a change to love the
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Lord. They call it folk Islam, folk Catholicism, because it's got a mixture.
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Sometimes the best imam is also the one that offers chicken sacrifices. Going by what we see happening in Burkina, it's the
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Christians in the churches that are being attacked there just north of us. And so we spoke to our believers about that, that these things were going on because they're not always aware of what the news is.
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And we spoke with them, and I said to Verna, the women in our church, in the
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Palika church, the women all sit on one side of the church, and the men sit on the other side of the church.
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And so I was sitting among the women, and we were in Philippians, and we were talking about to live is
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Christ and to die is gain. And they just love Philippians. This was the first time they were hearing it.
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And at the same time, we were talking to them about what was happening in the news just north of us in Burkina.
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And the women just said, well, what can they do to us? To live is Christ, to die is gain.
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And I just thought, how do I even get to sit among people like this? Like, it's just such a different world when we had been discussing with our mission organization the day before.
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And they have to, they have to cover their back. That's their world. But spending the whole day talking safety and contingency, going to church with the
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Palika the next day, and being in Acts where it says, if I don't finish the course that the
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Lord has given me, my life is void. And that they really believe that.
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And I just thought, wow, you know, am I even in the same world? So, yeah,
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I think that they are facing it squarely. They'll say to me, you know, Mama, everybody calls me Mama over there.
39:29
Mama, like, we know that these people that are informants for the insurgents, we know that they're here among us.
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I've been encouraged personally, the chief, the chief who is the chief of all the chiefs, is the way we would say it in Palika, is a believer.
39:47
And when he heard that we couldn't return to the village, he said, does your mission think that I don't know what's happening in my people group?
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He said, I know what's going on, and we have you. We have you. We'll protect you.
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We know what's going on. We'll make sure. And so I think that's maybe one of the better safeguards we can have, is just to have really good relationships with the people who are in the know right there around us.
40:15
Because of these attacks inside of Ivory Coast now, the president has done well to put the military up there, and they've started just going through the brush and trying to find some of these camps.
40:27
And they have told everybody what's happening. In other words, there are insurgents coming over.
40:32
So if you see any strangers going around, they're probably casing the joint. Let us know what's going on. So all the villagers are very aware of what's actually happening.
40:41
And so when she says that, yeah, they're very well aware of it. There's a group of people called the pull people.
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They're all the way from Morocco down to the Cameroon. They drive cows, and it's kind of a love -hate relationship with them.
40:55
We want you to help us with our cows, but please don't let them eat everything in our fields. And the stuff in their fields is great eating for the cows.
41:03
And so there's this just constant attitude. And so the pull people up in the north are oftentimes the ones that the militants are grabbing to help them with their terrorism activities.
41:17
So now they've just pushed all pull people that the people don't know up into Burkina Faso, and they're not happy for their displacement.
41:25
So some of the time the terrorism is nothing but them being upset about the displacement. I'm just trying to give you some of the dynamics.
41:33
Another thing we found out is it's not just one Muslim group. It's like, what, three, and they're not all working together.
41:40
So kind of hoping that they – anyway. Any other questions?
41:45
The printing, is that there at the tribe, or are you going somewhere else to print?
41:55
I mean, how does that practically work now? Okay, for printing, it's a whole new thing for us too, so we're still learning a lot about it.
42:02
Our mission, typically they'll help you with the layout and formatting and design, and there are a lot of questions.
42:11
We're also, in translation, I work with a program called Paratext, and that gives you a lot of checks that you run to make sure things are consistent.
42:21
Right now, like Vern said, he's creating the spell checker, which is the next necessary step. And then after that, the missions,
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I think I'm fifth or we're fifth on the list of people to be helped. So right now the mission is saying that more than likely they wouldn't be able to help us until sometime next year.
42:39
So I'm really hoping that we will be able to get it off later this year somehow.
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I don't really know how. That we might be able to run it through all those checks and make the decisions about design and layout and formatting and get it sent off to a printer.
42:57
Often translations are sent to South Korea or to China to be printed, and then they're shipped over from there.
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Vern and I are sort of trying to look into if there are some other options. We know that to carry them in suitcases would be crazy expensive, too, on top of the cost of printing.
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So there are a lot of unknowns. I guess all that to say there is still a lot of unknowns at this point.
43:24
We can't find any missionary that will give us an actual price. People ask us, how much is it going to cost? We can't even get that information yet.
43:32
It's just an article. Yeah. Yeah, so definitely pray for us in this final phase before.
43:39
We'd love to have a Bible dedication maybe next May before Christy and Josh leave to come home on home assignment because they've been such a part of the
43:48
Palico work. We'd love for them to be able to have a part in that. And, again, just to get in there while the door is still open because you never know when it's going to close.
43:59
Do pray. Strategically, if that's something our church can help with, can we take that back?
44:07
Well, thank you so much. We'll definitely stay in touch with you guys. I'm not an elder, so I defer to my elders.
44:16
Yeah. Well, no, thank you. We'll definitely be staying in touch with you, and the Lord has provided a good chunk to get things going.
44:24
So, yeah, we're thankful for that. Any other questions?
44:32
Jerry? Tell them about the Old Testament and how long it'll take you to get it done. Oh, okay.
44:38
Yeah, so Jerry's asking about the Old Testament. So because I didn't even start learning about translation and how to do it until I was 50, so that was like 13 years ago,
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I didn't start until I was 50. I never thought about doing the Old Testament. I just thought, no.
44:53
Like, if we can finish the New Testament, I'll be plenty happy. But we finished the New Testament, and we ran through these checks, and then the guys that are on our translation team looked at me, and they said,
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Mama, aren't we going to do the Old Testament? And I said, well, well, well.
45:16
I said, did you see how long the Old Testament is? I said, so we've done the new, and it's like this compared to the old.
45:24
And they said, but isn't it important? I'm like, wow. Yeah, well, of course it's important.
45:31
It's God's Word. And they said, well, now we know what we're doing. We've been trained. And I'm like, oh, wow.
45:40
So, anyhow, that's another story up until, I don't know if I should tell about, like, funding for the
45:46
New Testament. Like, God had this incredible plan for, I'll just tell it real quick, can
45:52
I? Okay, so I don't know how many years ago now, right as I was starting into translation, somebody who had gone to school with Vern back in the late 70s called us out of the blue.
46:07
We hadn't heard from this guy. I didn't even know him, obviously. I hadn't heard from him.
46:12
And he said, I've come into some money, actually had become a millionaire. And he said, so I have this, like, six -figure number
46:19
I want to give you guys. Like, could you use that? Who gets a phone call like that?
46:26
Well, like, Vern and I were stumbling around because we weren't used to having extra money to even think or plan ahead.
46:34
Or, like, we were just sort of hanging on, you know, like. So they, this husband and wife have been able to pay for the salaries for the entire translation team all these years that we've been working together and pay to feed them and pay for gas in their motorcycle.
46:53
So we're sort of coming to the end of that money. So moving into the Old Testament now, we're just saying, okay,
47:00
God, didn't seem to be a problem for you before. We'll see what you're going to do. And so the guys on the translation team, like Vern said, they don't have more than a sixth -grade education.
47:10
But everything I would learn about translation, I would pass on to them. And so we were really growing up together and learning together.
47:18
And they've really grabbed onto it. In fact, by the end of the first week, they said, when we go home at the end of our workday, don't go changing things behind us, okay, in the text.
47:27
Because, like, we're a team. I'm like, okay. So now we've been working together all these years.
47:34
And now they just completed all the passages in Genesis, and they're well into Exodus.
47:40
So the thing with working with national helpers is they don't have the resources to study the meaning.
47:49
And so they can do more of, like, a word -for -word or very literal at best translation.
47:56
So my part in it is I do have the resources. I can study the meaning. So that's sort of what
48:01
I bring to it. So all the work that they've been doing since we came home in May, they send it to me every day.
48:08
I get up in the morning. They say, good morning, Mama. We're here, and we're working. And this is how I keep track of their hours.
48:14
And then at noon, they work half days. And then at noon, they'll write, and they'll say, okay, Mama, see you tomorrow.
48:20
We're going home. This is what we did today. And they send their work to me so that I can sort of supervise it at a distance.
48:26
So we're into the Old Testament, which I never thought I would do. But I love translation like I never thought
48:33
I would. And so we'll see. I think that it will be left to them, and I'll be in Jesus' hands probably by the time that gets finished.
48:41
But we'll see. We'll see. One of the things that happened, we thought that we would complete everything ready for French, and we'd come back.
48:48
And when we saw we weren't going to make it, we were able to get a couple computers for them.
48:53
And in the last two weeks, we're just, here's how you use e -mail. Here's how you use the Internet. Well, don't use the Internet for other things.
48:59
Just for, you know. Google Meet Wednesday morning with Mama. So that's how she gets together with them on Wednesdays, on Wednesday mornings, and they talk.
49:09
And now the program she's talking about, Paratext, actually allows you to have them working on one computer out there in Africa and her working here, they'll make corrections.
49:19
And the program takes it like, they send it to the server, and now she can pick up, find out what their changes are, and back and forth it goes this way.
49:28
So this is all brand new to them is how to use these computers. So that's, yeah, that's just where we're at right now.
49:33
So it's, when she says they're already however far, that's since we left in May. Yeah, they've really been faithful.
49:41
Jerry was asking about the pace that we can do translation at. So when I first started doing translation,
49:47
I asked some other translators, like, about how many verses per day could I count on?
49:52
And they said, well, it depends on what genre it's going to be. So if you're in the epistles, the average would maybe be you could translate 10 verses a day.
50:01
If it's a narrative, doing the stories, maybe 20 verses a day. And I thought, okay,
50:06
I'm not going to shoot for more than average. I'm still a baby translator. And so at that time, doing the
50:13
New Testament, I just counted how many verses there were, and I divided it up on my calendar, 10 verses every day,
50:20
Monday through Saturday. And I would just trust the Lord to meet those goals. And if I got behind, I'd get up earlier in the morning, and I just always tried to stay up to that schedule.
50:31
So you can imagine with the Old Testament, I don't know if there's anybody who knows how many verses are in the
50:36
Old Testament, but a lot, a lot. There are a lot. So I'm thinking
50:42
I might be home with Jesus when it's finished, but we'll see. Any other questions?
50:49
She set her goal to have it done by the time Bobby graduated from college. The New Testament, yeah. The New Testament.
50:57
By God's grace. Okay, I think Vern wants to. No. Oh, the prayer requests?
51:03
No. I put those prayer requests up, so if you wanted to, I was trusting that you might be reading them. Yes, we want to know how we can pray for you.
51:12
Yes. And I see there's two on there, one about establishing a true church. Well, you know, we don't have a whole lot of churches that support us.
51:27
But when we think about Sunnyside, we consider you to be our praying church. That was one thing that you're bringing up the missionaries all the time.
51:40
The church that we belong to in Camdenton is real strong behind the Southern Baptist Convention, and so you don't understand.
51:48
It's not a comment. I'm not trying to criticize, but they leave it to the convention to take care of the missionaries.
51:58
That's what we really appreciate about you. When we say mature church, what do you mean?
52:05
Are you guys mature? You know, one of the things that when we're going through the training with the mission is here's what we're looking for in a mature church.