A House Divided

After 5 weeks of intensive consultant checks, team checking, the song-writing workshop and being separated from their wives, I gave the three Gmz translators a week off to rest up before they jumped on a bus to Addis Ababa again for the next big push. I suppose I should have qualified that "rest" with the unforeseen phone calls they each received throughout the week. "Hey Worku, how's your rest? Good, I have a spelling question for you, if you don't mind…" or "Thomas! Hope I didn't disturb you, can you help me with this word?" You see, their week of rest found me deep in the task of final spell checking Luke.

One particular query from that week has stuck with me over these last two weeks. "Worku, does the command form (the root) of the verb daaab'ashiil begin with an /a/, in some places we wrote it with, and some without?" The passage was Luke 11:14-23, specifically verse 17 – "Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall."

Almost two months ago, the director of the MLE project involved in helping the education bureau develop mother-tongue curriculum for the schools came to me asking for help in improving the quality of the Gmz materials. Of course, we have a strong interest in seeing the Gmz literacy efforts succeed and so I was very open to the idea of helping. However, when he asked for 4 weeks of our time (that is, involving both me and the translation team), I struggled to commit to that much. Instead we decided to overlap those weeks with other events in my schedule – the first of which was the week of the Executive Council meeting of which I have the responsibility to chair. I figured, hey, you guys can get started without me, and then I'll be with you the whole second week for checking/revision. Well, it didn't quite work so well. The method of developing the literacy primer involved introducing one consonant at a time and writing stories with only those consonants that had thus been introduced. Imagine the difficulty of writing a story with only vowels and /m/! Yea, it wasn't easy. Add on top of that the fact that the Gmz were quite impotent when it comes to stringing together a cohesive story. Even once we had introduced 4 or 5 consonants, they were quite good at writing sentences, but relating one sentence to another so as to create a series of events, it just wasn't happening. And with the primer development method, the rest of the lesson (ie comprehension questions, etc.) could not move forward without a finalized story. And so, when the Executive Committee meeting broke at 10:30 for morning tea, others congregated outside for a much-needed mental break. I, on the other hand, quickly switched hats and tried my best to fit unrelated sentences together, without insulting those who had tried hard to produce them. Often the last to return to the Executive Council room (on average about 10 minutes late) I called the meeting to order, whispering under my breath, "Come on Travis, change gears, change gears!" Thankfully, both sides of my divided mind included understanding people who showed much-needed grace.

The weekend came just in time, but it didn't bring the afternoon nap I had craved all week thanks to a thief who entered our truck and stole my backpack. It's frustrating to lose a nice sturdy computer backpack (given to me in 2007ish by a certain RCCer named Drake), the digital camera, voice recorder, and 9-hour extra battery for the computer (thankfully the computer itself was not in there!). But more than that, some important documents, including our resident IDs, vehicle title books, bank checkbook, and insurance papers were inside the backpack as well. That which the thief cared least about, would surely bring the biggest headache to me. Monday morning, I rode to work with Miikka, the leader of the Gmz primer workshop. He and his wife were concerned to see me so busy the previous week. I broke to him the bad news, "Well, the relaxing week 2 of this workshop with you isn't going to be relaxing after all. Instead of Executive Council meetings, I now have stress-filled offices to contend with!" I myself feel like a house divided against itself, physically in one place but forever mentally engaged elsewhere and still, even more so now, desperately in need of that afternoon nap! We would all appreciate your prayers for us during this time.