In a previous post, I introduced you to Roman.
Well, in July, we got married!
We thought that, with getting married, it would be good to start a new blog together.
Therefore, if you’d like to keep up with news about our life and work, please head over to romanrebekahmeszaros.wordpress.com
This blog will stay here, so that the old posts can still be read, but I won’t be updating it any more.
Thank you for being interested in Wycliffe, and please keep in touch!
Those of you who support and encourage me in my work with Wycliffe, will have read in my newsletter that I recently got engaged to Roman Mészároš.
We work together in Musoma, Tanzania, and he’s currently studying in England, but I thought it would be good for you to get to know him a little better in his own words.
So, Roman, where are you from? What are some of your favourite things to do?
I come from Slovakia. I love cycling, board games and I like languages.
What do you do for your job?
I work as an exegetical advisor. I work with a team of translators, who all come from a specific language group. I read their translation and discuss potential translation issues with them and together we try to bring the Word of God to their language group in a way that they understand it the best.
What is your favourite thing about living and working in Tanzania?
Firstly, I really enjoy Tanzanian weather, which is very predictable and is often very warm. There are also some things you start taking for granted when you live somewhere and you might not notice them anymore. For example, Tanzanians are very hospitable and to make you welcome they would give you almost everything they have. The other thing is that they are very generous with sharing whatever they have with people around them.
What are you doing now?
Right now I am continuing my study of linguistics and translation in England, which will help me in my work in Tanzania. After this I should be more capable and independent in my work overseas.
Have you always been a Christian?
I grew up in catholic Slovakia. Ever since I remember, I’ve believed that God exists, that Jesus is the Son of God and that I can’t live according to God’s standard. I’ve always believed that Jesus died on the cross, but only when I was 19 I finally understood what it meant for my life. That was when I met people who lived with Christ every day. These people were members of a free evangelical church. They told me, that when Jesus died on the cross he fulfilled God’s standard for me and I only needed to accept it. I saw the joy and love for Christ that they had, which I really desired for myself after I saw it in their lives. And that’s what I have now as I’m looking forward to be with Jesus one day in his Kingdom.
What is the thing that is most important or amazing to you about God at the moment?
As I’m currently studying about languages and cultures, I find it fascinating how God can talk to each one of us in a unique way. I myself wonder what is the appropriate form in which the Word of God should be handed to people around us wherever we are. I’m also wondering about the person and work of the Holy Spirit, who enables us to trust God and who we often know so little about.
Well, there you go – a brief introduction to Roman. I would also add that he loves cake and chocolate, and he smiles and laughs a lot! (The photo below illustrates all of these; I was laughing too much to stand up straight …)
Please get in touch if you’d like to introduce yourself to Roman in your own words. Also, we’ll be in the UK and Slovakia over the Summer and early Autumn, so let us know if you’d like to get together!
If you’d like to look back on past editions of Roman’s own newsletters, you can access them here: https://goo.gl/3DVnGT (look for files ending _en for English, unless you fancy the challenge of Slovak!).
We can get milk here, and we can also then make yoghurt. But there are rather a lot of steps in the whole process.
1) Fetch the milk from the ferry.
There is a ferry that comes to the jetty in town at 9am and 12noon most days. The ferry comes across from a neighbouring peninsula on the lake. You can go there with your containers, and buy fresh milk for 1000 shillings/litre (34p).
2) Bring your container home.
No, this is not washing-up liquid, but the 5 litre containers are perfect for collecting milk (after a thorough rinse out of course!).
3) Pasturise your milk.
The milk has not been pasturised yet, so this is a very important step. I wasn’t totally sure how to do this, there are so many methods out there. I used to bring it to the boil and then simmer for 5-10 minutes. But a colleague told me that all that is required is to bring the milk to 72C for 15 seconds, so now I just bring it to boiling point and then leave it to cool.
4) Skim off the cream.
Here, when we say we drink “skimmed” milk, we mean literally that: that we have skimmed the cream off the top. None of this 1% fat nonsense you get in the UK! 🙂
I save my cream in a container in the freezer, and then use it in cooking when I have enough.
5) Strain the milk.
When the milk has cooled enough you can pour it into your desired containers to go into the fridge or freezer. However, straining through a sieve is strongly recommended… ants seem to be fans of a creamy death of drowning in boiled milk…
6) Mix in the yoghurt starter.
If you’re making yoghurt from your milk, you let it cool to blood temperature (until you can hold your finger in it for 10 seconds without it hurting!). Then you stir into it some yoghurt from your previous batch; I use about a tablespoon for a litre. Then you wrap up your containers and leave them for at least 24 hours.
7) Make your cats happy.
My cats like milk day – lots of yummy licking afterwards!
8) Enjoy!
Yoghurt, fruit and oats is my standard breakfast.
Tuesday is my milk day. From getting home at 7pm and starting boiling the milk, I usually finish the cleaning up around 9pm.
Whenever I’m in the UK I like to treat myself to some of the different flavours of yoghurt available at the supermarkets, but sometimes the choice available is a bit overwhelming!
Slogans are very popular here. Shops, buses, bajajis (like tuk-tuks) and motor-cycle mud guards all have their own personalised slogans.
I recently noticed that a lot of our plastic containers around the house also have their fair share of slogans, motivational sayings, poetry, and sometimes just plain nonsense:
“Always give without remembering and receive without forgetting”
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow … Beautiful”
“Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies. I hold you here, root and all, in my hand. Little flower, but if I could understand, what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.” Alfred Lord Tennyson
And my all time favourite … :
“have a nice day … Butterfly love flowers …”
“good luck along … Flowers … integrated once milk …”
Yes, you read that right, “integrated once milk”. I bet you never had a plastic box with that on it before!
These pots make me smile every time I use them, as well as being quite useful!
I’ve mentioned previously that we have to use water filters here in order to make the tap water safe to drink.
Recently we noticed that our water filter was processing water really, really slooooooowly. We had also noticed that the water coming out of the tap was on the dirty side. So we thought perhaps the filter could do with a bit of a clean …
Oh boy, did it need a clean!
This is what the filter “candles” looked like when we took them out of the filter bucket:
You can see our hand prints from taking them out … they were really slimy …
Then I simply rinsed them under the tap, gently using an old sponge. Here’s the result:
1 out of 3 done – what a difference!
Now that’s the colour it’s meant to be!!
Then we fitted them back into the bucket and filled it up.
The filter is now running a lot quicker … note to self, clean filter much more regularly.
This certainly makes me thankful that we have the filter, and that it does such a good job.
I returned to Tanzania just a week ago, and I’ve been amused by the variety of things that I didn’t realise I had forgotten:
1. The habit of not drinking from taps.
Here it is important not to drink straight from the tap; water needs to be filtered before it is safe to drink. Before returning to the UK this was perfectly normal to me, and in fact it took quite a while for it not to feel wrong to drink from taps in the UK or to brush my teeth with tap water! However, it seems that I now have to re-learn that habit!
Not safe …
Safe!
2. Quite how noisy the birds are.
It’s wonderful how the birds here never seem to stop twittering and tweeting, whooping and chirping – it’s never silent! I remember now that I found it strange how quiet the birds were in England, but over the last year it became normal. Also, here we don’t have sealed panes of glass in the windows, so you can hear the birds throughout the house.
3. How loud the rain is on a tin roof.
It can be deafening! Well, perhaps not literally, but it can make it difficult to hold a conversation! But, it being rainy season does mean that there is luscious green growth everywhere.
Such wonderful green grass!
4. The words for ‘sickness’ and ‘to swim’.
My Swahili is returning bit by bit, and generally I’m doing fine in everyday conversations. However, I keep stumbling in the middle of a sentence, realising I’ve forgotten a basic word.
When talking to a taxi driver in Dar es Salaam about life in Musoma, I was telling him the lake is beautiful, but if you swim in it then you’re in danger of catching the bilharzia sickness. However, I couldn’t think of the word ‘sickness’! The nearest I could get was ‘pain’. I also realised later that I’d said ‘to shower in the lake’ instead of ‘to swim’ … whoops! He seemed to understand me though.
5. How good fresh mangoes and passion fruit taste.
Mmmm… delicious!
It is now ten years since God first started speaking to me about Wycliffe Bible Translators (well, ten years since I started actually listening properly to him talking to me about it at least!).
My first reaction to that is, “What?! How can it be ten years already?” I still look almost exactly the same as I did then: some more freckles and scars, a few more creases around the eyes, a little older, a little (no, more than a little) wiser.
However, internally, in my character, in my faith, in my thinking and planning and praying, sometimes I think I’m barely recognisable from who I was ten years ago. And that is definitely a good thing.
So, what has the last decade held?
Phew, I think that’s quite enough!
But now I wonder, what the next ten years will hold? In the near future, I hope finishing a Masters dissertation and returning for another few years to Tanzania. But after that?
Praise God that he knows and, for now, I don’t and I don’t need to!
“…with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient …” (2 Peter 3:8-9)
“I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me.
I make known the end from the beginning,
from ancient times, what is still to come. …
What I have said, that I will bring about;
what I have planned, that I will do.”
(Isaiah 46:9-11)
This month I’ve been back in Musoma, doing some research to help me complete my Masters dissertation. (The research is also really helpful for developing the writing system of Simbiti, so it’s great to have this chance to dig into some things in more detail.)
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with Simbiti speakers, recording many hundreds of words and phrases, and then listening carefully to them afterwards.
Recording in the sound studio.
When I listen to the words later, I write them down, paying careful attention to the length of vowels and tone patterns.
However, some of the letters and symbols I need to type are not on an normal English keyboard. I use the IPA – International Phonetic Alphabet (not India Pale Ale!). And I have some settings on my computer that enable me to switch keyboards, and use various key shortcuts to type the different symbols.
For example:
The Simbiti have 7 vowels: i, e, a, o, u … but also ɛ and ɔ. The shortcuts for these are just <e and <o.
They also have a β sound, which is sort of between an English ‘b’ and a ‘w’ (a voiced bilabial fricative if you care to know!), and this is typed with =b.
I try to write high tone where I hear it, which I do with @3 … giving á.
One of my current spreadsheets that I’m using to analyse words.
However, sometimes I forget to switch keyboards before I start typing, or the keyboard gets switched back when I change programme or sleep my computer.
This means that I end up typing long strings of nonsense!
I meant to type:
βɑɾɑɣɑ́mbɑ íʃɔ jɑitéɣeːreːje βúːjɑ (‘They say that yesterday he listened well’)
But instead, what came out was:
=b=a>r=a@3=g=amb=a i@3=s<o j=aite@3=ge=:re=:je =bu@3=:j=a
It’s a bit frustrating if it takes me a while to notice, because I just have to delete it and type it all again! Whoops!
During my course in Gloucester, we covered a course called “Discourse Analysis”. This was essentially a study of how languages say what they mean, and how different languages can say the same thing different ways (and sometimes mean different things from the same thing!).
Let me explain with some examples …
One of my teachers has worked in Mexico.
In one of the languages she works with, there isn’t a separate word for village and city. So to describe Jerusalem, they thought they’d try a phrase “big village Jerusalem”, to emphasise that Jerusalem wasn’t a small village.
However, when looking at the translation with mother-tongue translators, the translators genuinely wanted to know, “Oh, where’s the small village Jerusalem?”.
In their language, if you say there is a “big Jerusalem”, then that necessitates that there is also a “small Jerusalem”!!
In English, adjectives can be used either to describe, or to differentiate:
If you say, “Oh, I like those red shoes”, it does not necessarily mean that you don’t like the other not red shoes. You could just be giving more descriptive detail to the shoes.
But, if you say, “The blue bin gets collected today”, you might mean that today it is the blue bin, and not the black bin, that gets collected.
Back to the language in Mexico:
This discovery had huge implications for Bible Translation!
Consider the following phrases, which in English we might read without thinking:
‘The Good News about Jesus’ – this would mean there was also bad news about Jesus!
‘This is my son, whom I love’ – this would mean God also had a son whom he didn’t love!
‘The one true God’ – is there also a not true God?!
‘He is the God who saves’ – i.e. as opposed to the God who doesn’t save …!
Wow! I was completely amazed at all the examples we were discussing, and the implications if this hadn’t been discovered!
It turned out that the translators had misunderstood parts of the Spanish Bible they had read, because they were not aware that Spanish (like English) could use adjectives and relative clauses just to describe.
I don’t think this is the case for the languages I work with in Tanzania … but it goes to show how careful we need to be to check things are understood in the correct way.
Just one more reason why Linguistics is an essential part of Bible Translation!
Living back in the UK, I do many of the same things as I did in Tanzania, but it’s also very different.
I sleep in a bed, but with multiple blankets rather than a mosquito net.
I get my water from a tap, but I don’t have to filter it before drinking it.
I eat beans, but most often from a tin, and I don’t have to sort and clean them.
I eat fruit, but apples and pears, rather than guava and passion fruit.
I enjoy flowers when I walk through town, but crocuses, snowdrops and daffodils, rather than bougainvillea.
I use money, but take a lot fewer notes out of the cash-point.
I have windows, but no mesh or bars.
I still walk to get around town, but I have had to get used to very different footwear.
Even if everything else is different, at least I still worship and serve the same God, no matter where I am!
25 In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
and they will be discarded.
27 But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.
(Psalm 102)
The Bible: the story everyone needs 