Highlights Live

I was sent out by St. Andrews through Wycliffe Bible Translators to work in Cameroon, Africa, with SIL (a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide). It’s an injustice that ethnolinguistic minorities cannot yet access the same opportunities to realize their educational, economic, and social goals that speakers of national and international languages take for granted. SIL’s service with minority communities is motivated by the belief that all people are created in the image of God and that languages and cultures are part of the richness of God’s creation.

Over my Christmas break, I was privileged to join with the Omaande people of Cameroon as they celebrated the completed, printed  New Testament in their mother tongue, Nomaande. SIL’s translator has worked alongside national pastors for over twenty years, developing an alphabet, writing the phonological system,

putting together a lexicon, and publishing literacy materials, such as primers, health care booklets for mothers & children, HIV/AIDS prevention, and many more.

Wycliffe helps those with HIV/AIDS:

It was an emotional day in Bundibugyo, Uganda, as 60 Bwisi people from the DRC and Uganda graduated from an HIV/AIDS training seminar using “Kande’s Story,” now translated into 104 languages in 14 countries (97 in 12 African countries). All of the participants were HIV positive—many shared how the training had helped them see their illness in terms of God’s perspective and how best to help others avoid the disease.

The fact that the story is translated into local languages—in this case Bwisi—is tremendously important. “This Kande book is helping me to teach about AIDS,” said one Bwisi man. “It is in my mother tongue, and it is heard well by others, unlike other materials in English that many cannot understand.” One pastor said, “Meeting to read “Kande’s Story,” you can really sympathize. You can cry real tears. You learn to care. You learn to prevent AIDS. You learn to be faithful to your spouse… Let the training continue!”

Seminars designed around the story equip church and community leaders to present the facts about the disease in culturally sensitive ways and then to follow up with Bwisi Bible studies. While the seminars help prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS, they also help HIV-infected people live with the disease—to communicate more openly with their families, seek reconciliation in relationships, prepare for what’s ahead by making wills, and help their children prepare for the future.

What’s amazing is that these HIV-infected people also find hope. “This kind of seminar brings us closer to God,” said one man. Through studies in the Scriptures, the seminars offer knowledge and assurance of God’s forgiveness and eternal life. As a result, many have come into a relationship with God for the first time, including three at the seminar I visited. Along with new and renewed relationships with God, they experience repaired relationships with spouses and families; rejection and fear are replaced by acceptance and love.

And I am increasingly grateful that God has given you and me the opportunity to minister in His name—in the languages He created—to the Bwisi and others who need practical help with diseases like HIV, and who need to hear the Good News about Jesus Christ. What a privilege it is to be able to say, “Jesus cares, and so do we!”

Thanks!
Julia Baker
(excerpted from an article sent by ConnectUs, Orlando)