Sep 2018 newsletter (pg 1)

1,000 New Testaments translated!
Last month the Keliko people of South Sudan celebrated a momentous milestone: After 20 years of perseverance through the hardships of civil war and displacement, the Keliko translation team completed their translation of the New Testament!

Wycliffe celebrated a milestone of its own: The Keliko translation is the 1,000th New Testament completed with the engagement of Wycliffe USA and SIL! Please rejoice with us and give thanks to God! And know you are a part of this work too!!! More of the story is on the back of this newsletter.

Alan’s Weekly Work
Lynée described a week in her life in our last newsletter, but I’m not creative enough to do that with my week and make it interesting. :-) I will say my typical week includes a mix of administration, font engineering, and technical support. I usually have five meetings on the first three days of the week. Since the last two days are often meeting free, I try to focus on engineering projects then. I also provide our team, especially in Dallas, with technical support as needed.

I feel I’m using my God-given talents best when learning new computer technology, helping our team use it, and then solving problems that arise. I also thrive on using my skills and training as an engineer and programmer to analyze problems, design solutions, and get things working by writing code. Font development is an amazing mix of artistic work and engineering. The engineering side is much like software development but with interesting twists. I also enjoy doing some typical software development to produce programs needed to create fonts.

I’m glad I can lead our Font Tech team by staying aware of technical issues we need to consider, facilitating  discussions to build consensus among our font engineers and designers, and recording our decisions and tasks.

Since there are other software development groups we interact with and that use the technology we develop, someone has to keep track of all the things my team is doing and report on them. That someone is me.

I am blessed to work with a team that has been together many years. I joined this group in 1998, but a couple of us started working together a decade before that.

The last "tea time" for Alan's local team
in their location of 20 years

My team’s goal is to make it as easy to use a computer for alphabet X as it is for English (assuming you know the language), where X can be any alphabet in the world. Our purpose is to prepare the way for Bible translation and to benefit minority people groups with literacy and access to computer technology in their own spoken language.

Finance Update and Upcoming Trip
Please thank the Lord with us that giving to our ministry over the last 12 months has met our budget! We plan to be in Georgia October 14-28 (including three Sundays) and are looking forward to visiting with many of you. Since regular committed giving to our ministry budget is about $500/month low, we are praying for new partners and would welcome opportunities to share this work with others. “Thank you” for giving, praying, encouraging, and helping to make this work possible!

PDF

Sep 2018 newsletter (pg 2)

Rev. David's grandson, Bishop Seme,
visits a Keliko congregation

1,000th New Testament
Yes, this year we celebrate the 1,000th New Testament completed with SIL* engagement! The Keliko of South Sudan welcomed the arrival of their New Testament on August 11, 2018. Keliko church leaders initiated the project in 1983 and requested SIL’s help shortly after. The Keliko team has persevered through tragic setbacks of war and exile from their home lands. Please join us in celebrating with the Keliko!

The Keliko story is not an easy one.
It began with pastors reading Scripture in their own languages at a Christian conference — but one pastor, Rev. David Gale, could not. Not because he couldn’t read, but because not one word of Scripture had yet been put into Keliko, the language of his people of South Sudan. Overcome with sorrow, Pastor David asked for prayer and clung to Matthew 7:7 “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.”

Upon returning home, Rev. David shared his passion with other Keliko believers. Together they started raising funds for a translation project. After two years, they contacted SIL asking for linguists to help develop a writing system. Shortly after, a story, a song and a few Scriptures were published in a pamphlet.

Then war broke out. Most Keliko fled to Congo and northern Uganda. SIL staff were evacuated. Progress  on the Keliko translation halted.

Keliko New Testament
typeset with Charis font by Alan's team

But the story does not stop here!
Ten years later, in 1998, Rev. David’s grandson, Bishop Seme, encountered an SIL couple during his studies in northern Uganda and shared about the stalled Keliko translation. Work resumed as SIL specialists helped  finalize the writing system and provided training for Keliko translators. Genesis was published in 2004. SIL provided consultants and mentors for translation and aided with literacy efforts so that numbers of Keliko learned to read and write their language.

As momentum increased and the Keliko translation team was doing the final checking of their long-awaited New Testament, the Keliko homeland was ravaged again by violence. The translation team fled, most to northern Uganda, but this time they continued their work.

Despite the traumas of war and migration, the Keliko translation team has pressed on to see God’s message  of hope available to their people. And that persistence is bearing fruit. The Keliko New Testament was recently welcomed with great joy at a celebration in northern Uganda.

* SIL is a major strategic partner organization with Wycliffe USA

For more details and photos, see bit.ly/1000thNT and wycliffe.ch/1000th-new-testament

PDF