Life in an African Village

I am a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and I've spent the last 27 years - or most of them - living in Africa and helping a Team of Mündüs to translate the New Testament into their language. The Mündüs live along the border between Sudan and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are mostly subsistence farmers who grow what they eat and eat what they grow, with a bit of hunting to add spice (or meat) to life. They are a small group (around 25,000) and somewhat marginalised - despised and even oppressed by their more powerful neighbours. There are not very many educated people in the group - and there were even fewer 27 years ago!

In 1978 I went to live in a Mündü village called Mbala'ba, near the town of Maridi in Southern Sudan. I was not alone. Another Wycliffe member, an American called Linda, went with me. We lived in a traditional Mündü house - with mud walls and a thatched roof. It was surprisingly comfortable, but living in just one room did leave us a little short of personal space! It was really marvellous when we added another one-roomed house to our "compound", so we each had our own room. Living in one room is a bit like banging your head against the wall - it's really nice when you stop! Later we even rose to a third "house" which functioned as a kitchen/living room.

This compound of ours was really part of the larger compound belonging to Gbandi, a Mündü sub-chief, and his three wives. They looked after us very well, helped us to learn their language and taught us a lot about their customs and way of life. The Mündü language had never been written down, so we couldn't learn it from a book. We had been trained in techniques of learning an unwritten language. The first thing you learn to say is, "What is this?" closely followed by "What are you doing?" and "Where are you going?" At first we would write down what people said using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet, but eventually we were able to develop an alphabet appropriate to Mündü.

After a year or so in Mbala'ba I started to work with a Mündü pastor, Pastor Enosa, on translating Mark's Gospel. Pastor Enosa had attended a training course for translators run by Wycliffe, and he was the one who did the actual translation.

My job was to help him to understand the English Bible - and to watch out for "Translation Problems" such as figures of speech, which often cannot be translated literally. For example in Mündü when you say someone has a "hard heart" you mean that he is very brave. In Mark 16:14 was Jesus rebuking his disciples for being too brave? No! He was rebuking them for their stubbornness in unbelief. To convey the same meaning in Mündü we had to say that he rebuked them "because their heads were hard!" After Pastor Enosa had translated a chapter and we had gone over it together, I would type it up (on a manual typewriter in those days!) and read it to some of my friends in the village to see how well they could understand it.

Meanwhile Linda was working on Literacy. Once we had developed an alphabet, she used it to teach some of the village children to read. She also encouraged some Mündüs who could already read (in the neighbouring language, Zande) to write stories in their own language. And she was trying to teach Gbandi's wives to read as well, but they found it much more difficult than the kids. Gbandi himself could read and write - or so it seemed. His main role as sub-chief was to hear "court cases". He would listen to disputes between people in the village, make judgements, and fine those whom he considered to be at fault. Then he would write it all up in his big black book. I tried giving him a chapter of Mark to read, but he really struggled, and couldn't make head or tail of it. I decided that he was probably only "semi-literate". Probably he only wrote people's names in his book, and perhaps the amount of their fines.

One Christmas, when I had nothing much to do, I suddenly took a notion to produce a booklet of the Christmas story in Mündü. Pastor Enosa was away somewhere (that's why I had nothing much to do) so I couldn't get him to translate it. What I did was to get three different people to tell me the Christmas story, while I recorded it on tape. Then I put the three stories together so that nothing was left out. I typed up the result on stencils and ran off about a dozen copies on a duplicator. It was thrilling to hear the Christmas story read in Mündü in the local church on Christmas Day. And it was even more thrilling to hear one of the older men praying: "Oh God, we are very happy that we can now worship you in Mündü. It used to be that we had to pray to you in Zande, and we didn't like that, because we are not Zandes, we are Mündüs. Now your Word has come to us in Mündü and we are happy."

Later Gbandi asked for a copy of the Christmas booklet - and started to read it quite fluently! That is when I realised that it wasn't so much Gbandi's reading skills that were the problem, but our translation. I began to understand why we had been taught that a translation needs to be natural as well as clear and accurate. Gbandi had not been able to read the translation of Mark because it was unnatural - being a too literal translation of the English Bible. The Christmas booklet, because it had originally been told as a story from memory and then transcribed from the tape, was much more natural, and therefore much easier too read!

Dorothea Jeffrey - 8 June 2005

---

To next part.
To Mundu-land stories.