The Higby Family

Dear Friends,

Suppose that English was a spoken language only. Hard to imagine, especially since you are reading this letter, huh? But if it were, can you imagine being given the task of writing down all the English words that you know? How long do you think it would take you? How would you go about it? Well, typically the collecting of words for dictionaries in minority languages has been an extremely long and drawn out process. But now there is a new method called the Dictionary Development Process (DDP) for the rapid collection of dictionary words according to topics or domains. It advocates working with a group of mother tongue speakers and giving them a sheet of paper with one topic at a time. The topic might be "food preparation". Then the group will sit and think of all the words that have to do with food preparation and writes them down. When they run out of words, they go on to the next paper and topic. This past May, I (Doug) taught the DDP method to several language teams in Senegal. Over the summer, one of those teams applied what they learned and organized a word collection workshop. At the end of two weeks they collected 26,207 words! I'm sure this breaks a record of some sort. The resulting database of words will help produce a dictionary in the language, giving translators a tremendous resource at their disposal. Isn't it amazing how a little bit of innovation can speed along the work of Bible translation?

We are back in Burkina Faso after a very full summer in the US. Henry worked in Michigan and stayed with friends, while Kevin and Roger stayed with their grandparents. P.J. and I spent three weeks in New York state visiting supporting churches and sharing about our work. We were even able to participate by teaching at the Daily Vacation Bible School at our home church in East Palmyra. We met many new people and were truly blessed by their kindness and hospitality. We even checked out a few colleges in Michigan for Henry (two years away now!). At the end, in our scramble to collect the family back together and fly out from Detroit, we came close to leaving Roger behind! Late Sunday evening, three days before our departure, I realized I had left Roger's passport behind in New Jersey. Although we panicked, I figured overnight express would easily get it to us the day before our flight. So on Tuesday we all sat and waited for the passport to arrive... and waited... and waited.... Finally I called the agency only to discover it had been miss-sent to CALIFORNIA! All out panic ensued as we tried to figure out what to do, and we had a number of people praying. But God is good, and Roger's passport made it to us on the morning of our flight. Needless to say, we are thankful to be back on our regular school/work routine here in Ouagadougou.

P.J. is finding that her second year as secretary at the school is going a lot more smoothly than the first, with fewer surprises. The new school director is a pleasure to work with. The boys are enjoying school and youth group again. For myself, I am preparing for several talks and workshops that I will be giving at Wycliffe's worldwide Computer Technical Convention in October. I'd like to see the success of our training program here in Africa be modeled in other parts of the world where Wycliffe works. The more people that are trained to use computer tools to simplify linguistic and Bible translation work, the more effective we become as an organization.

In a month, we look forward to receiving the Fulfulde translation team from Benin in order to help them run final checks on their New Testament in preparation for publishing. This translation is a "child" of the one we were involved in, since their texts were adapted from the Maasina (Malian) dialect of Fulfulde. Along with the joy of completion, the team just suffered a terrible blow as Daniel Gueti, one of the two main translators, passed away suddenly on August 21. He was destined to be the main translator for the Old Testament project, leaving the team at a loss for how to proceed. Please keep the Benin Fulfulde translation project in your prayers at this critical point, as well as for Daniel's wife and young children.

Partners in the Gospel,

Doug & P.J. Higby

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Prayer & Praise