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We’re Steve and Johanna Pillinger, and we work with Wycliffe Bible Translators in the United Kingdom. Wycliffe is a Christian charity that aims to make the Bible available in every language in the world, so that people can read it in their own heart-language. Steve manages the Wycliffe UK Typesetting Services Department, preparing computer texts brought back from overseas for printing as Bibles and New Testaments. Johanna works with Wycliffe as a partnership development consultant, helping people find the funds they need for their ministry. For more info, see the About Us page. Meanwhile… enjoy!
The desktop machines all died during the Big Virus Infection of December–January (though not all for that reason). My work laptop, which has served me well since 2006, had to be set up again from scratch after the BVI, and has done double duty as a work and home machine for most of this year. It did a good job during the Chumburung typesetting while I was laid up at home with a bad back. Then in the last two weeks of August it slowed down drastically, threatening the end-of-August deadline. PTL, some extra gifts enabled me to buy a new home laptop. I put all my work data and programs on that while still working on the Chumburung, and was just able to meet the deadline. Then as I was preparing to typeset the Mbuko New Testament (see separate post), my new home laptop started behaving erratically. A visit to a local IT repair shop brought the verdict that there was a hardware problem they couldn’t fix, as it was still under guarantee. So, three dead desktops, one glacially-slow laptop, and one unreliable laptop—and the Mbuko starting in a few days! What was I to do? Answer: A new work laptop! The new machine arrived promptly, and the Wycliffe IT Dept. fired it up… only to find a large area of dead pixels on the screen! So that went back for replacement, and I started work on the Mbuko still limping along with my home laptop. (To my delight I found that Richard Gravina, the translator I’m working with, has an IT background. So I help him with the typesetting, and he helps me with the laptop!) The replacement for the new work machine arrived last week, and during the weekend I started installing programs and transferring data (surrounded by three laptops!). I was also preparing material on it for a presentation at one of our supporting churches on Sunday. But … (wait for it!) … Late on Saturday night it developed a major problem! I inserted a USB stick to copy the presentation files… and the computer didn’t recognise it! Trying out other things, I found it also didn’t recognise my external hard drive. For a while it looked as though we’d lost the presentation files, but after some urgent prayer I was able to copy them to Johanna’s laptop over our local home network… (whew!). So on Sunday we did have our pictures and video to show in the church; but we also made a heartfelt appeal for prayer for the computers. It was a great encouragement to have our friends clustering round us—with the latest dud laptop sitting in the midst on the lectern!—asking God to protect these vital pieces of equipment, without which I would be unable to prepare His Word for publication in languages that have never had it before. Today I took the new work laptop to the Wycliffe IT department, and there was a collective groan as they received it back! Please pray that it can be repaired quickly, as my home laptop is becoming more and more erratic. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12, NIV). Those forces will do all they can to prevent people from receiving the printed Word of God, as we’ve found time and again. They are not mediaeval myths, they are a reality here and now—and if technology is our weakest point, that’s where they’ll strike. Thank you for standing with us in the struggle!
The Mbuko New Testament (Cameroon)
Richard and his wife Sue have been working for many years among the Mbuko of northern Cameroon in Central Africa. Here’s how he describes the Mbuko people:
“The leaders are learning how to apply Christian teaching to the Mbuko culture. Without the Bible to refer to, this is very difficult. The Mbuko are in the wonderful position of needing God’s Word, wanting God’s Word, and being about to receive God’s Word. It will be exciting to see the impact it has when the Mbuko have the New Testament in their hands and in their language!” Please pray with us that that great day won’t be delayed by any further hold-ups in the typesetting process — health-wise, computer-wise, or any other-wise! *For information about the language, including a map, click on the word Mbuko.
It was a short, sharp episode, and meant that the start of my next typesetting project had to be delayed for a week. But PTL, I’m now back in harness, and making good progress with Richard Gravina on the Mbuko New Testament (see separate post). A very heartfelt thank you to everyone who prayed and sent encouraging messages. My apologies that I wasn’t able to reply personally to them all. Since returning to work life has been rather hectic—see other recent posts!
Rejoice with us! And with Keir and Gillian Hansford, whose many years of hard work overseeing this translation in northern Ghana have finally reached completion. On Friday I uploaded the whole Chumburung Bible via the Internet to Wycliffe’s Global Publishing Services in Dallas. (Isn’t technology fantastic? In the bad old days it would have been a huge stack of paper, taking at least a week by overseas parcel post!) In Dallas the entire computer text will be subjected to a final, rigorous page-by-page check before being sent off for printing by the Korean Bible Society.
The last page is interesting: I told the Hansfords there would be ten blank pages at the end of the book. Such blank pages are often unavoidable, as the Bibles are printed on large sheets with 16 pages on each side — i.e., 32 pages at a time. So if the total number of pages is not a multiple of 32, you get ‘empty’ pages at the end. Translation teams have done various things to fill these pages: extra last-minute material, like a Topical Index (not enough time usually!); or having them lined like an exercise book for sermon notes… etc., etc. The Hansfords didn’t like any of those ideas, so they came up with a novel one of their own: to turn these pages into an informal family record of births, marriages and deaths! Just like many English family Bibles in generations past. In rural, semi-literate Chumburung society, important family events like these are often not officially registered. Problems therefore arise when people apply for jobs, or need a passport. But now the crucial dates can all be recorded in the back of the family Bible. These are the instructions on the last printed page (English translation below): Your Own Genealogy Book Write your own name and your parents’ names and your date of birth here. If you marry, write the name of your spouse and his/her parents and the date of the marriage here. If you give birth to a child, write his/her name and your spouse’s name and the date of birth here. If one of your relatives dies, write his/her name and date of death here.
Thank you again for your encouragement and support over the past six months!
For the last couple of weeks you’ve been biting your nails, wondering what brought Steve and Johanna together after Johanna turned him down like a bedspread. We will now put you out of your misery. As we said last time, the idea was first mooted (in Steve’s mind) while we were both doing our training at the UK Wycliffe Centre. The courses ended, and we went our separate ways — Johanna to Bible college, Steve to Kenya and the Rendille translation project. (Aaah!) But among the Rendille Steve found that, as a single man beyond the normal marrying age, he was, um, how shall we put it? Regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. Not enjoying this, he finally decided there was only one solution. So completely out of the blue he wrote to Johanna. (Yay!) Meanwhile Johanna had enjoyed Bible college, but gradually realised that partnering with another single girl (fairly common at that time), was not for her. So she drew up a list of requirements for a husband: among other things — yes, you guessed! — ‘tall, dark and handsome’. (Aaah!)  The fateful letter! But then God, with His wonderful sense of humour, turned her thoughts towards Steve. Even though he was short, furry and funny. She actually risked praying that he would write to her. The fateful envelope arrived. A letter from Kenya! Who did she know in Kenya? Oh. … No. … It couldn’t be… She turned the envelope over and saw the address label. It was. (Yay!!) Well, that led to our courtship by correspondence. Steve wrote carefully with a fountain pen (no computers then) about neutral things, like his Rendille experiences. Johanna noticed that the letters were perfect: no corrections or crossings-out. They had clearly gone through several drafts. Hmmm. Interesting. Interesting, too, that Johanna’s best friends at Bible college were from northern Kenya, and actually spoke Rendille! Anyway, Johanna replied, sympathising with Steve’s situation, and saying that he must find it difficult not being married [xxx]. The [xxx] was a small word, crossed out. Steve cunningly looked on the other side of the thin airmail paper, and discovered that the crossed-out word was ‘yet’!  Rendille bride Anyway, to cut a long story short, Steve invited Johanna out to Kenya to help with food distribution among the drought-stricken Rendille. This was officially sanctioned by the local Wycliffe leadership, with a gleam in the eye and a tongue in the cheek. To everyone’s satisfaction (including our own) we got engaged on the slopes of Mount Kenya on the way back to Nairobi after a good stint of food distribution. And we were married the next year (1985) in Colchester, UK. It was a multi-cultural wedding, with the Dutch bride wearing a Rendille bukhúrcha — a necklace of palm fibres decorated with red beads, the trademark of a married woman. And the rest, as they say, is history (to be continued in our next instalment) …
See the Newsletters page.
This is a presentation made in Steve’s early days among the Rendille people of northern Kenya. It’s slightly dated (umm… 1984!), but still gives a good impression of the traditional Rendille way of life, which has changed little in recent decades. It also illustrates some of the stages involved in reducing a spoken language to writing, and beginning to understand a very different culture. Enjoy! Click here to watchThis video lasts about 15 mins. Yes, folks, I’m delighted to say that I’m entering the last lap with the Chumburung typesetting. This has been quite a marathon! My back has been behaving itself, PTL, and I managed to complete the work I needed to do with Keir and Gillian Hansford by the end of July. We finished the last of the pictures on Wednesday 29th, just before Gillian left to return to their home in Southampton. Keir stayed on until Friday 1st, and we did a final complete check of the whole text. With some fear and trembling Keir then officially ’signed off’: i.e., he signed a declaration that the text was now ready for typesetting and no further changes would be made. Translators never find this easy! It’s like letting go of a child they have brought up over many years, and entrusting it to strangers. Of whom I am the first! My job in this final stage is to distil the raw text into computer files that will produce an attractive, well-laid out book that people will be proud to own. A book they can read easily, with no errors or blemishes to distract from its life-giving message. After me will come others who will turn my files into a print-ready package, complete with coloured pictures and all the smells and bells; and still others will print and bind the book from those files. But before any of that can happen, I need to complete the detailed typesetting and layout of the whole Bible — by the end of this month! I’ve done some essential preliminaries this week, but Genesis-to-Revelation plus Glossary, Preface, Table of Contents, Picture List, etc., etc., still need to be done. Please pray for me as I “press on toward the goal” during the next three weeks! God bless, and thank you your support and prayers through the marathon so far.
If you’re one of those (including ourselves) who have tried to print out pages from our website, only to get a jumble of pictures and text that looks like nothing on earth… fear not! Help is at hand! Several folk have emailed us saying that either they get a mess, or they can’t print it at all. At best all the pictures are separate, not surrounded by text. To me (Steve) as a typesetter, this has been a real pain in the… um, eye! However — after several hours of searching online over the past few weeks, I have finally found a pretty good solution: HP Smart Web Printing. This is a really excellent piece of FREE software that allows you (a) to select exactly what area of the page you want to print (so you can leave out unnecessary headings, sidebars, adverts, etc.); and (b) prints or saves it in a form that’s pretty close to what you see on the screen. (This is genuine, we haven’t had a penny from HP!) So if you’d like to print out any of our pages, I’ve now made PDFs using the HP software for all our major posts and pages: you’ll find a Print button at the bottom. Or you can download the software for yourself — I’m sure you’ll find it very useful for printing other web pages as well. The only drawback is that it does not yet work with Firefox 3.x (which I happen to use). But if you have Internet Explorer you’ll be fine. See the buttons below, and enjoy!
Dr Pillinger and his colleagues at the translation organisation regard his recovery as an answer to prayer—not only their own, but also those of many Christian supporters and friends. Be that as it may, there now seems to be a good prospect that the Chumburung Bible will be completed by the end-of-August deadline.
Seriously: A heartfelt thank-you to everyone who has prayed for Steve during this difficult time. It’s a tremendous relief and joy to be back in the office again! |
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