mmm-BELLY-may Days

Can we have some cheese with that?

Don't you hate it when the talk on Sunday was written especially for you and then sticks in your head the rest of the week?  Ok, maybe I don't hate it, but this sermon was pretty uncomfortable for me to listen to, and keeps coming to mind.

Like yesterday.  Facebook chatting with a friend of mine who lives in Bamako, which is the hottest place I've ever been, I caught myself about to complain to her about the wet and cold day.  Duh. 

A few hours later I was whining in my head about how early it gets dark here these days.  Like it does all year round in mmmBELLYmay land, except there they only have electricity for a few hours a night.  And we're grateful for that, since a few years ago there was no electricity at all.

I should stick to speaking only mmmBELLYmay, since I complain a lot less when I'm not speaking my mother tongue.  Hmmmm. 

Dear Isaac

Hi Isaac!  Thanks for your letter.  It was so long ago that you wrote it, I'll bet you forgot all about it!  I suspect other people might wonder about the same things, so I'm going to answer even though it's late, ok?

I already talked about snow in mmmBELLYmay land here, do you think we'll get any before Christmas here in Illinois?

I get my food in a few different places.  Some of it I grow myself.  Actually, it was just an accident that a tomato plant grew out of my compost pile, but the tomatoes were so good, I'm going to plant all sorts of seeds in January.  I also have some fruit trees.  This is the first papaya that I picked!

I also buy veggies, eggs and other food from the open air market in the village where I live.   I get rice, flour, canned green beans, tuna fish, Nutella and Laughing Cow cheese from a little shop in a town about an hour away from where I live.  It's kind of like Olson's General Store in Little House on the Prairie.  Have you ever watched that show?  There's a store that has all sorts of useful things and food, all behind a counter.  I wait my turn, and then tell the man working there what I need, and he gets it down for me.

For lunch every day I get my goat and corn meal mush from a little restaurant right near my house.  This isn't the one, but it looks a lot like it.  I like my lunch!  There are days where I'd rather a Big Mac, but goat is good eating!  And, my usual lunch costs me about 75 cents.

Does that answer your food question, Isaac?  Next post I'll talk about how muddy the roads get when it rains!

Thanks for writing, and thanks even more for praying for the Bible translation into mmmBELLYmay!

Love,

Miss Nora

EthnoLinks

I just found out about a nifty new website, EthnoLinks.  (HT David Ker.)  This is actually really exciting, a great place to connect with people and resources about all the languages in the world, even mmmBELLYmay. Not much up there yet, but I guess that's where I come in!

I am so thankful for people who have a knack for this kind of thing that help those of us who don't!

Hurray for Gordon!

 A few months ago WIndows ate my inbox, and I thought that it was a symptom of a dying hard drive.  Yesterday my new hero, Gordon, took a look at my poor old laptop.  Today I got the call-the hard drive didn't need to be replaced!  I just had a bad case of junky registry!  Which he fixed!

I know, a lot of exclamation points, but come on, that's exciting news.

Gordon taught me how to stop this from happening again and gave me some good tips.  The best one was that airport x-rays fragment hard drives, so after flying I should defrag and check the disk. Good to know.

I wrote the instructions down below, if you have a possibly junky registry.

Of course, none of this would be necessary with a Mac.

Registry dejunkifiation

Step 1 Right click on your hard drive

Step 2 Under properties, click on the tools tab

Step 3 Click the check now button, and put a check mark in both boxes, then click start.

Step 4 When it asks you if you want to schedule the check for later, then click yes, and restart your computer.  The first time you do this the check could take several hours, but it should be done every 3-6 months after that, and will go faster.   Now, when I got the light blue screen of death, Windows told me it was checking the disk, and it did, but it only did a 3 step check, not the 5 step check that Gordon did.  The registry gets dejunked in step 4, and that's what my computer needed. 

Did I get all that right, Gordon?

Southfield Students!

Here's a link to the episodes we've told so far this season.  Great job guys!

What he said

 

The most disadvantaged students of the Bible are presented, through economic necessity or lack of other options, with the worst Bible resources. God bless you. Go in peace. Be warmed and be filled. We send away those hungriest for God’s Word with empty promises called mission statements and then dump bounty on the already gorged through yet one more specialty Bible publication for those able to pay the price. I’m tired of seeing the hungry chewing on gristle while a sated few get to feast on God’s Word packaged and repackaged in ever more tantalizing formats.

David Ker says this better than I could. He's right.  It's shocking.

Read all of his post here.

Fumes

When you put hot glue on tinsel it sizzles and melts and emits toxic fumes.  That's all I have to say.

Details, details

When crafting biblically accurate stories, the rule of thumb is to let the crafters pick which details to include.  If it's not my culture, I don't know what details will resonate, so the choice shouldn't be mine.  What clicks for me might be a yawn for them, and vice versa.

The classic example of this is from my idol (idol in a nice role modely way, not in a creepy stalkery way) Jo Shetler's book.  Here's how I remember the story going, my copy of the book is in mmmBELLYmay land, so I can't look it up.

Jo had been in the Philippines for a while, but one of her friends village was never really interested in hearing about this guy Jesus.  She kept on translating away, even the boring part at the beginning of the book by Matthew.  Have I blasphemed by saying that there's a part that's boring to me?  Come on, this is just not gripping reading to me.

But when her friend saw the boring part,  Jesus' family tree, it totally gripped him.  He could list his ancestors back for generations, that was huge in their culture.  Seeing Jesus' lineage was proof for him that Jesus was who he said he was. They copied the genealogy onto big pieces of paper and he went around showing it to people.  People were so fascinated by it that they wore the paper out, and had to recopy it over and over again.

Last week I helped with a storying group of American junior high students.  The episode that week was the first time people disobeyed God.  The storyteller and I talked about leaving this part out: "And God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife."  It just kind of hangs there toward the end of the story, not connected to anything else.  I had a lovely theological reason to leave it in, but I told the storyteller that I knew the kids wouldn't make that connection. 

We left it in anyway.

In the discussion, one of the students said, "God does nice things for us even when we're bad.  He made clothes for them even though they didn't listen to him."

I've blogged about the power of this detail in mmmBELLYmay land here, my most read post.  I really didn't expect a similar response in the States, though.  Huh.  Goes to show how much I know.

Seriously?

So I'm watching television and I see a commercial for an important new drug that helps a previously underserved population-those without thick eyelashes. 

Ok, I get it.  If I had no eyelashes at all I would want some, but that's not how this stuff was marketed.  The spokesperson was Brooke Shields, apparently in need of eyelashes to go with the brows.  (This is not a Brooke Shields slam, or a heavy eyebrow slam.  In the 80s my grandmother told me that I had Brooke Shields eyebrows, and I still do.)

Back to my rant point.  Could we not do a little something more about malaria before putting money into studying and marketing an EYELASH drug?

What is MALARIA?

• Malaria is a preventable and treatable disease.

• It is a public health problem today in more than 100 countries inhabited by some 2,400 million people -- 40 percent of the world's population.

 

• Malaria is estimated to cause 300- 500 million clinical cases and over one million deaths each year.

 

• Every 30 seconds, a child somewhere dies of malaria. In any given year, nearly ten percent of the global population will suffer a case of malaria.

 

• Most survive after an illness of 10-20 days.

 

• Children are especially vulnerable to malaria. In Africa, where 80% of malaria cases are treated at home, the disease kills one child in twenty before the age of five.

 

• Pregnant women are also at high risk. They have an increase risk of disease and death, as well as adverse impacts for their developing babies- including low birth weight, growth retardation, still births and death.

 

• In African countries, up to 60% of hospital admissions may be for malaria; that's 6 out of 10 admissions!

 

Look Ma, no emails!

My inbox is empty!  Sadly, that's because Thunderbird or Windows or something ate them.  I turned on my computer and got the light blue screen of near death.  I was informed that the disk needed to be checked, so Windows thoughtfully did that for me, and then deleted a bunch of corrupt files.  Which seem to have been the pile of unanswered emails in my inbox.  Happily Sadly, my backup is from about a month ago, so a month's worth of emails are lost forever.

My next computer is going to be a Mac.

Except the budget does not really stretch to a Mac these days, so I think I'm going to go for a netbook.  Two of the people at this training course I was just at had them, and they looked great- small, cheap, and light.  Not that I was shopping for them online during some of the lectures or anything.  Not me.