Delivering good news in West Africa

Jesus was born so He could grow, suffer, die, and save all who believe in Him. For 2,000 years Christians have undergone hardship to deliver that good news of salvation to those who would otherwise die in their sins.

Stuart and Cathie Showalter have spent a quarter-century in the West African country of Burkina Faso, 450 miles south of Timbuktu, Mali, translating the Bible under Wycliffe Bible Translators auspices into the Kaansa language. They have lived through malaria, poisonous snakes, scorpions, 110-degree temperatures, and recent Ebola threats. According to a Washington Times profile, the Showalters had to master a language with “four tones, nine vowels that work in sets based on the position of the back of the tongue, seven noun classes, four grammatical genders and verb forms. …”

See “Perseverance of the saints: A tribute to missionary translators” for more background. We’re pleased to have Stuart’s permission to post most of their December newsletter to supporters. —Marvin Olasky

Typesetting the Kaansa New Testament

By the time you read this, the Kaansa translation team will have finished typesetting the Kaansa New Testament. We’ve checked the spelling of all 13,000 word forms and checked all the punctuation and footnote references. We’ve chosen some 40 black-and-white illustrations to place in the text, plus 16 color plates of biblical scenes, and we’ve defined numerous key terms and historical persons in a glossary.

Janet and her husband Andrew flew in from Nairobi on Nov. 19 to guide us through this process. At times we feared they wouldn’t be able to come at all. The story begins back in August, when the Ebola epidemic in West Africa finally caught people’s attention in the United States.

Ebola in West Africa

At that time, the news seemed more dire every day, with headlines like “Ebola’s accelerating spread across West Africa.” Of course, when they mentioned “West Africa,” they really meant Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. They did not mean Burkina Faso, or any of the six countries adjacent to Burkina Faso that have acted as a buffer zone around us.

Still, we were concerned. Ebola had jumped from Liberia to Nigeria, all the way across the entire span of West Africa, in one passenger on a commercial flight. Nigeria did an amazing job of containing the virus within a few weeks and eventually snuffed it out completely, but we wondered, couldn’t something similar happen to any country in West Africa? We thought it prudent to be prepared in case it happened to Burkina Faso while we were there. We knew how poorly equipped were the local health clinics in the area around Obiré, the Kaan village where we work, so Cathie got on the World Health Organization website and Amazon.com and ordered several full sets of personal protective gear for treating Ebola. We filled a whole footlocker with it to give to the local dispensary when we arrived.

By the time we got to Burkina Faso in mid-September, the number of cases of Ebola was doubling every three weeks in the affected countries, but had spread nowhere else in West Africa. Meanwhile, out in Obiré, Cathie kept up with news of the disease through biweekly emails from ProMed while we began working with our village team on the glossary to the New Testament.

October came and Ebola continued to grow and spread. We thought, “Any day now it could show up in Burkina Faso.” Local village friends were also concerned, given the fact that many had relatives who work in the coffee and cocoa fields in the Ivory Coast, near the border with Liberia and Guinea. November is the time when many of those workers regularly return to their home areas in Burkina to visit family. Would they bring Ebola with them? We started to lay the groundwork for Plan B, helping our village team members get passports in case we had to do the typesetting outside of the country.

Help from Nairobi

We had been corresponding with Janet, a friend from several years ago who is now a typesetter for Wycliffe in Nairobi. She had agreed to come to Burkina to typeset with our team, sparing our whole team the much greater cost of going to Nairobi. Janet had spent several years in Burkina Faso as a short-term missionary, so she was excited to come back and see old friends. In the intervening years, she has gotten married and had just announced that she is expecting a child. Yet she was still eager to come while her travel window was open during her second trimester.

As Ebola continued unabated, we began to have doubts about the advisability of her visit. Were we asking her to risk too much? We shared our concerns with her in emails, but she remained hopeful and optimistic, so we kept planning for her visit in November, while also developing plans B and C. We wondered, “If we have to leave Burkina and go there because of Ebola, would it still be possible to typeset while in quarantine?”

Esther arrives and the president leaves

Meanwhile, our daughter Esther made good on her plans to come over to Burkina to spend two months with us, starting mid-October, to research ways to make cell phones send text messages in Kaansa. The week before she left the States, we called and discussed whether she should delay or cancel her trip out of caution. She, being an intrepid soul and also quite determined, came as planned.

On Oct. 20, the village team began the final read-through of the Kaansa New Testament, our last chance to tweak the text to make it as perfect as we could get it. We optimistically thought it would take three weeks, but this was not to be.

As the last week of October started, we began to realize that Ebola might not be the greatest danger to finishing this work. On Oct. 27, mass protests started in Ouagadougou against the country’s president, who had been in power for 27 years. He was trying to push through the National Assembly a bill that would change the constitution to allow him effectively to be president for life.

The upright people of Burkina Faso (the name means “land of people of integrity”) had had enough and were thirsting for real democracy. They took to the streets massively for two days to stop the vote on changing the constitution. When the peaceful demonstrations did not stop the president from going ahead with the vote, masses of people returned to the streets early the next day to make sure that didn’t happen.

On Thursday, Oct. 30, they burned the National Assembly to stop the vote, then marched toward the presidential palace to oust the president. We learned later that the army had been given the order to shoot the protesters, but military top brass decided instead to support the people, not the president. In a tense stand off Thursday and Friday, the president finally ceded and left the country with his family members.

Down in our quiet village, eight hours away from all the action, we kept working throughout that week, reading through Acts and Romans, about riots in Ephesus and about God’s judgment and His grace. At mid-morning breaks we called our friends and colleagues in Ouagadougou to find out what was happening. Schools across the country were closed. Rumors flew. Would there be a bloodbath? Would there be civil war? Would the country descend into a chaos of looting and vengeance? How could we expect Janet to come and work with us in these political conditions? What would come after the uprising? We started to formulate plans D, E, and F.

Le balai citoyen—the civic broom

On Saturday, Nov. 1, after the president had gone and there was no functioning government, the Burkinabè people showed the quality of their hearts: They responded massively to a call from opposition leaders and filled the streets of Ouagadougou once again … to clean up. Yes there had been some looting and property destruction, almost all directed against leaders of the president’s political party and his cronies in business. But on Saturday the army filled the capital, and so did the people, and with hand-held grass brooms, they swept the streets. Friends who were in Ouaga said the change was amazing to behold.

What had been the scene of bloody confrontations, destructive fires, tear gas and water canons, got straightened and swept and put back in order over the weekend. Trash and debris was piled up and hauled away, and on Monday morning, Nov. 3, people went back to work, kids went back to school, and the government workers went back to their offices, now under a military leader who vowed to form a civilian transitional government in the coming weeks.

Many in the political opposition and military leadership, and many in the new transitional government, are Christians with a genuine faith. In the weeks since the popular uprising they have shown themselves to be men and women of integrity who so far have kept their promises and created a transitional charter for governing unlike anything ever seen in Africa before. They need our prayers for a very difficult task ahead.

In Nairobi, Janet went to see her doctor for a regular checkup. He told her she was doing fine, so she asked, “So, is it OK for me to go to Burkina Faso then?” He looked at her with a puzzled expression and said, “Well, uh, wait, isn’t that … NO!” In emails, we had been telling Janet that the country was amazingly back to “normal”, except that the former president was gone. But the uncertainty of the transitional government made it wise to delay her coming for a week. So, we set a new date for her, Nov. 19, on the condition that the new government was formed by then and the return to normalcy continued … and of course, that Ebola didn’t show up.

We were actually glad to have the extra week, because our final read-through was going more slowly than expected. Occasionally we stopped reading to discuss sections of the text that still felt awkward, and sometimes those discussions took longer than we would have liked. We drove up to Ouagadougou from the village on Nov. 8, as previously scheduled—amazingly we were still on Plan A—and used the extra time in the city to keep reading aloud the Kaansa New Testament. To finish in time we had to read each evening for up to two hours, in addition to full eight-hour days. Even so, we had to push to finish by the time Janet was scheduled to show up.

Ebola creeps closer

Meanwhile, Ebola had shown up next door in Bamako, the capital of Mali, Burkina’s northern neighbor. While there is no direct traffic between Burkina Faso and any of the three countries most affected by the disease, there is daily traffic between Burkina and Bamako. This was too close for comfort. The cases were few, and the Malian and international health authorities were scrambling to contain them, at one point contacting more than 600 people to track the disease.

My heart was heavy that week from many things, in addition to the fatigue of the extra hours we were putting in. Could we in good conscience allow Janet and her husband to come to Ouaga if Ebola was just across the border in Bamako? Still no cases in Burkina, but how long would that last? And if Janet didn’t come to Ouaga, could we still get our team to Nairobi on short notice? They hadn’t even gotten passports yet. How long would that take under the transitional government?

After wrestling with this for a few days through prayer and sleepless nights, I wrote to Janet to tell her that, while Ouaga was calm and the country was still Ebola-free, if she felt she was taking on too much risk by coming to Ouaga, we would start looking for a different way to do typesetting. Back to plans B and C (I think). But Janet wrote back saying, “Don’t worry, we’re coming tomorrow as planned.”

So, she arrived, with her husband Andrew, on Wednesday, Nov. 19. The military ruler of Burkina Faso had just signed the charter for the transitional government the Sunday before and a new interim president had been named. Cases of Ebola were still being treated in Bamako, but amid the uncertainty, we began typesetting with Janet two days later. I think we were still following Plan A, more or less. Still no Ebola in Burkina. Thus far the Lord has helped us.

After we send the text off to the printers, we will begin laying the groundwork to record the New Testament and distribute it on memory cards that can be inserted into cell phones for playback. We will also begin seriously planning a dedication ceremony in Obiré, which will probably take place toward the end of 2015 or early in 2016. We also plan to finish work on the Kaansa-French dictionary and publish a draft version before the end of next year, along with an online version on a new website that Esther is working on.

We are full of gratitude as we head to the end of our stay here in Burkina Faso.