9/7 email

1. Young Sten Healey who fell out of a tree here on new year’s day and has spent the last months having cracks and leaks fixed is all back together and the family returns to Vila on Saturday. It’s been a hoe of a long row for the family, moving from house to graciously provided house in Sydney, and living under the uncertainty of a number failed attempts to get Sten back together, but now have smiles on their faces! They probably won’t be able to return to their island translation location because Sten needs to be guarded from head bangs for the next 9 months, but at least they’ll be back to stability and proximity to work and Maskelyne language speaking people. Thanks for praying!
   
2. Occasionally you come across a person you can truly call nature’s (or God’s!) gentleman… I had to sack one such guy this last month - a humble, fine Christian ni-Vanuatu fellow who loves God with all his heart and wants to do all he can to serve him. Unfortunately he lacked the mechanical aptitude to do the work we had assigned him. We in the office farewelled him the other night with a bit of a party. He’s taking his young family back to his island (Tanna) where he has his work cut out for him defending the faith - his village area is in the midst of the John Frum cargo cult and the pressures to toe the line are heavy. Please pray for David to go with cheer and expectation, and a compliant wife who’ll realise the wisdom of escaping town (and mother!) to serve God in a needy place.
   
3. We’re up to draft “J” in our proof reading of the revised Irumu (PNG) New Testament and OT portions. This has been a bit of a long and frustrating experience but we think we see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. We’d really like this next couple of days to reveal the end of a long string of iterative errors that have plagued the formatting of the Book. Thank God for the patience of the lady running the typesetting computer over in South Australia and for Lyndal’s sharp eyes (which are threatening to blunten real soon now!)

25/6 email

• We are still trying to get to the final copy of our revision of Irumu Scripture and it’s getting harder to keep the motivation up to keep correcting it! We think it’s right and then something in the formatting changes etc. - we’d be happy if you could pray we’d work out the bugs and get this project completed.
  
• Ross had a successful short trip to Uripiv island to set things up for a family to start helping the people to record the New Testament in their language (published in 2005). You could pray for Brad and Amber and their two little girls as they live and work with the Uripiv people for the next few weeks.
  
• We just leant that we have funding to run a training course for ni-Vanuatu translators next year. It will be focusing on learning skills to learn from the Bible - that is exegetical type skills, reading with comprehension, thinking through a text etc. So now we have to design the course! Pray we’ll discover what materials already exist that will be useful and that we’ll have wisdom in knowing just what would be the most useful things to teach.

News from Ross & Lyndal	June 2010

Dear friends,

As ever, we are reminded of your friendship and count it as our privilege for sure to have you at least somewhat interested in what’s been going on in our corner of the world. We know your lives are full so thanks for being part of all the goings on through your prayers and the money you keep us alive with.

After anxiously waiting to see our new little grandson, Ezra we weren’t disappointed (as if!) and we enjoyed his first smiles. As you’d expect Grandpa was best at getting those out of him! Our brief time with Paul and Beth and Christopher and Karen - well… it’s always too brief but it was great, as were the visits to a few of our faithful church families.

Spending a week at Sydney Missionary and Bible college was refreshing - not sure we ‘won’ too many Bible translators from the time but it was wonderful to see so many young people keen to spend their life serving God in one area or another - if only they could work out which one!!

We returned to a bit of a juggling act, with Ross supervising the training of a new translation consultant and then checking the translation of the Gospel of Matthew in a language of Tanna island, and me proof reading the

Irumu Scriptures and back to Ross sending off corrections to the typesetter, answering her questions, and on and on it went with a few other things thrown into the mix. We are thankful to God that the 1,071 verses of Matthew

(translators deal in such statistics) are hopefully now in better shape for their audience, as we trust are the many thousands of verses of Irumu Scripture. The latter project isn’t quite finished so we continue to press on with the last details before sending the book to the printers.

Right after I finished ploughing through the Irumu text I went to Epi island with Serah, our ni-Vanuatu Secretary. I could write a book on my experiences of that week but probably wouldn’t have too many readers so I’ll spare you all the details! But the crab and lobster did taste very nice. We worked in two language groups, at their invitation, helping them to think through again the worth of God’s Word, and whether it is important that people really understand its content.

I then assumed they agreed with my positive answers to such questions and proceeded to teach them lots of ways to practise reading in their own language, using Scripture portions which have already been translated. A bit of practise showed great results, ah, but then we left!

The New Testaments in these languages are still in progress (some 25 years after their start) so it’s good to pray now that the things we touched on during the week on Epi will bear some fruit - a greater desire to really know God through His Word, a greater support for the work of translation in their communities and a sooner rather than later completion of the New Testaments. It was an honour to have a small part in the work there and refreshing to be in a beautiful sea side location.

Lots of love,

Ross and Lyndal

3/6 email

• I was thankful for good weather - that trek to the toilet Ross mentioned would not have been much fun in the rain!
• Thankful for good sleeps at night - there was plenty of energy needed in the day time.
• And thankful for a good time with the people - what a privilege to move into their community for a week and enjoy their hospitality!

28/5 email

• Lyndal is on another island for the next 7 days running some literacy workshops in a couple of language communities that will, God willing, be getting their New Testaments in the next year or so. The idea is to get their reading skills up in preparation, and to build a little anticipation. She reports that yesterday reading skills in language improved dramatically over the course of just one day (these aren’t non-literates!), and gave a lot of hope. One lady said, we speak our language but don’t think much about it. This course is helping to open our eyes in readiness for the language Bible.” Thin mattress and the toilet a mile away notwithstanding, she’d appreciate your prayers.
  
• Meanwhile the fort, being held down capably by me(!) is a picture of serenity … and boredom. Not that there’s not ample to fill in the days, but cooking rice after hours was never my favourite activity.
  
• Well, that make prayer material pretty boring too, eh?
  

7/5 email

• We praise God for a great time with our family over these last 2 weeks and for the joy of meeting grandbabyboy Ezra.
• We were thankful for the chance to be at SMBC and talk with many students - may God guide these students in their desires to serve Him.
• We got back to Vila this week and straight back to work with a bang - meetings and preparation for translation checking
• I (Ross) will be supervising a trainee translation consultant as we check the Gospel of Matthew for one of the language teams - the following week I’ll be doing the rest of Matthew - for that I have been preparing this week (and probably after hours next!)
• We have much Irumu (PNG) Old and New Testament ‘printout’ to check over before we give it the OK to go to the publishers as soon as possible. There is probably another two weeks of work in this for Lyndal as she fits it around other things. Pray for keen eyes - amazing the typos we find on text that has been around for 12 years now. Maybe we introduce a new mistake every so often as we correct others, just to assure the future of proof readers!

Email from 27/3

Dear real Friends,

We’d really appreciate it if you could help us in prayer with a couple of
matters…

One big one for us still is for all that’s involved in the type-setting of
the Irumu New Testament and Old Testament portions. We are waiting on the
next round of computer layout to come our way so that we can begin closer
proof reading. Ross, thanks to God, was able to solve a lot of the layout
cum computer problems we were having so we are hoping that things will now
be in better order.

We thank God for a good course at Talua Bible college - we wouldn’t like it
to be wasted so you could pray that the students would make use of what they
learnt.

Last weekend was the board meeting of Vanuatu Bible Translation. The current
chairman was re-elected - a good Christian man. We thank God for that as it
was looking like someone less fitting for the job (in our eyes) might be
elected.  You could pray for Pastor Peter, that he and the other board
members would carry through with the decisions made at the meeting and that
they will all keep growing in their love for God and His Word and so
influence the other mother tongue translators in a great way.

Ross and I praise God for the birth of Ezra Dameng to Christopher and Karen
(Webb!!). They are all doing well and we are looking forward to going to see
them in April.
At the same time we will be speaking several times at SMBC (Sydney
Missionary and Bible college) so we’d appreciate prayer for two things; our
preparation before hand (time feels short!) and that we might cause the
students to consider more seriously the work of Bible Translation in the
world.

Bill and Grace for whom many of you prayed for when we mentioned them at
other times have decided to not continue their work in Vanuatu - that’s a
blow!!

Love,
Lyndal & Ross

BIG News from Ross & Lyndal

March 2009

Dear friends,

Thanks for your prayers and support in other ways over these last few months. January was super busy; people everywhere being trained to be ‘translation consultants’, cups of coffee everywhere as they were kept to the task, and ink everywhere when the ink feed tubes on the digital duplicator sprung a serious leak. But the results were good; 6 translators who after a bit more ‘practice’ will be able to check the translation of their colleagues, over 2,000 verses of  Scripture checked and approved, and over 200,000 pages of the Words of Life printed on the Risograph printer after Ross used every bit of his ingenuity and stopped it spewing ink! A good month.

February was busy too as we met with all the translation teams before they returned to their respective villages to discuss their plans for the year. Other meetings and ‘normal’ things filled the days with a bit of Irumu work on the side. Our friend, Denise came and did some audio editing for us – she edited out all the rough ‘takes’ and now the finer editing is up to us. She won – we are still catching up! The revision of the Irumu Old Testament  portions and New Testament came off the type-setting press – well, computer drafts anyway – only to show us that the transition from one lay-out program to another (you’d expect a change after a 13 year gap) introduced more problems than we’d initially thought. I guess February was a good month!

And March – well here we are and Ross started the month by doing his annual stint at Talua Ministry Training College teaching the Introduction to Translation course.  He’s still there and I am in Vila still ploughing my way through Irumu text. That we were in two different places made it hard as I wanted to celebrate together when the highlight of the month/year happened (I know it can’t get any better even though there are 3 weeks of the month left);

Karen and Christopher gave birth to Ezra Dameng Webb
on 9^th March.

Now that makes for a great month

The photos and stories suggest Ezra is a beauty and we don’t doubt it, given the stock. We do look forward to seeing for ourselves next month when we will go to Sydney to take part in a Missionary in Residence programme at Sydney Missionary and Bible College which just happens to be a few minutes away from where Christopher and Karen and Ezra live! Paul and Beth, now at Parramatta, studying at Moore college won’t be far away either so we are looking forward to checking out all the new things for our family. I think it’ll be a busy 2 weeks!

If you see Ezra before we do, do something nice to him for us.

Lots of love,

Lyndal and Ross

News from Ross & Lyndal

Dear friends, I might as well redeem the time. Imprisoned on a small island, cool breeze blowing, waves lapping the coconut lined sure, tummy full of a nice local meal, I’ve got nowhere to go… Well, not exactly imprisoned. We’ve just finished a week ofVBT Nasonal Konfrens where a couple of translators from each of the translation projects running from one end of the country to the other have come together for a time of fellowship, renewing friendships, sharing experiences, hearing from God’s Word, and learning a few new things that might help with their mammoth task. Lyndal and I have had the privilege of fellowshipping with them, and at this conference for the first time another expatriate couple from another organisation that is about to start translation in the country was invited to join: Vanuatu Bible Translation is expanding its vision from being a partner with us (SIL) in the country to a role of coordinating efforts of different organisations so that we don’t tread on each other’s toes! Great that others are coming to join us in the task! And even greater for us all (you included!) is that ni-Vanuatu are willing to share the heavy Bible translation load with us outsiders. As Pastor Peter, the VBT chairman, exhorted in one of his addresses, “Let’s work together, joining our experience and ability to make this wonderful work advance. Don’t think poorly of yourself because you have no degree. No, God has taken you and given you involvement.” Pastor Peter took the Bible teaching sessions every morning under the general heading of “A work with eternal significance”. It’s so good to see the level of “ownership” for the huge translation task rising. We’ve squeezed a few other things into this end of the year too. We had a great 3 weeks with old good friends from PNG days who we invited to come to clarify their picture of Bible translation in our small corner. They have been recruiters for translation personnel in the US for the last 7 years, and reckoned they could do with a bit of a fresh look. We reckoned they could do with a particular look at Vanuatu too - not that we’d want them to give new recruits a biased picture now… Morris spent two of his weeks doing some translation consulting for us, first on Tanna island, and then back in town. He did the first check for a brand new translation project that started this year. Wendy filled her days with useful things including keeping up a blog of her experiences that you can read here (clue: start at the bottom!) Life on an island isn’t always the breeze you’d like it to be. This past couple of months a number of our teams have had sickness that’s not been very helpful. One of our mothers in fact, had to take her young son back to the US to get a problem checked out lest it have long term ramifications. Another has had on-going kidney stone problems wreaking havoc with best laid plans. So when you pray for us, you could expand your purview to our teams. Ill winds aren’t always blowing, and all show amazing endurance, but they’d be happy to know that you are praying for them! As in other years, we were invited by the country’s mainministerial training college to teach a two week introductory translation course in October.  We hope that we helped the students to get a better view of what it means and takes to be effective communicators of the Magnificent Message we are privy to. And this week we will send off a Strategy document for the translation work in Vanuatu that we’ve been working on for some time. It tries to give a bit of a picture of the situation here, the helps and hindrances in the job, and a few ideas how we might keep going forward. With that finished we can almost look forward to the Christmas break coming up. After spending a week with the MegaVoice technical mob, I’ll join Lyndal in Sydney for a couple of weeks seeing (among others!) the boys (and to check out how Karen is growing!). Both Paul and Beth and Christopher and Karen have just completed well a year at respective Bible colleges. Still some years to go, but I think they all agree it was a year well spent. It’ll be good to spend a few days together to get the full story! Thanks for your fellowship one way or another over the past year. We truly appreciate it. If there’s any way we can include you better, don’t hesitate to tell. God give you happy times together over the Christmas period, and hopefully some time too to ponder afresh God becoming one of us. I’d like to feel something like the shepherds felt when the angels from on high shone their glory all around! Lots of love, Ross and Lyndal