May 2019 newsletter (pg 1)

We hope you had a wonderful Easter celebrating the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus; “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8 ESV). In Dallas, spring is in full swing after a couple of good rains. Back at the end of March, we drove south on Alan’s birthday to see the wildflowers, especially bluebonnets, that were starting to bloom. It was great to take time to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation.

Families in Transition

Do you know any missionary kids (MKs)? Because missionaries often move between countries, MKs go through a lot of transitions. My department has resources on our website to help families with those transitions because handling them well is important for keeping families on the field. We recently reviewed these resources, updating them with current terminology. Missionaries often talk about returning to their home country. But for MKs, we use passport country because that country doesn’t feel like home.

During home leave, it is normal to travel around to reconnect with family and partners. MKs see a lot of their passport country, BUT they see it more as a tourist might. And while they may meet a lot of people, they don’t normally have time to build deeper relationships or establish roots in one place to help them not feel like foreigners the next time they return.

We encourage parents to try to maintain some stability even as locations change: carrying a few sentimental items from one country to the next to make a new place feel like home; maintaining whatever routines or traditions they can; and listening to their kids express their feelings -- whether positive or negative. We have a “game” for families that provides opportunity for them to discuss the transition (see card graphics).

Thankfully some aspects of transitions are less difficult now because it’s easier to stay in touch overseas. (My mother’s grandparents didn’t see her for seven years during WWII and back then there were only infrequent letters!) Younger MKs can Skype or Facetime with grandparents so they know them when they see them again. Older MKs can stay connected to friends in their passport country through Facebook, etc.

We have several of our transition resources in Spanish, and I will be making them available on our website. We may translate them into more languages! We also have to make sure the resources are culturally appropriate.

----+----

Because of a serious security breach and the need to rebuild them, the websites for both my and Alan’s departments have been down for a couple of weeks. Since I’m working on moving the resources from our current website to a new one, the timing has been especially bad. Please pray for the restoration of these sites, for my work copying the resources over, and for peace in the process.

Last month, we updated the budget for our ministry (which covers our living expenses) to account for cost increases over the last three years. Committed giving to our ministry is now about $650/month short. While extra donations covered the shortfall of our previous budget, they don’t cover our new budget. Please pray with us for more ministry partners. We are very grateful for all those who support this work through prayer, giving, advocacy, and encouragement. “Thank you!”

PDF

May 2019 newsletter (pg 2)

The work of Alan’s department was recently featured in Mission Frontiers magazine, and we thought you might enjoy these excerpts.

Wow, Who Knew? Fonts are Needed for Bible Translation
Such was the reaction of an American pastor upon hearing that font development was the ministry focus of Annie Olsen, a type designer for SIL International [and one of Alan’s team mates]. It’s not an uncommon reaction, either, at least among people who speak English (written with just 26 unaccented letters of the Latin script) as their native language. A fully developed digital font — a set of letters and symbols, plus underlying instructions — enables a computer or other device to print a script properly on a page or display it on a screen.

Then what, exactly, is a script?

A script in this context is a system of symbols used for writing. The more than 7,000 living languages of the world use over 140 different scripts today. You’re reading here the English language written using Latin (or Roman) script. Latin script is also used for thousands of other languages, though often with some modifications such as diacritics (accents or other marks) or slightly different letter shapes. You may also be familiar with other scripts such as Chinese, Hebrew, Greek or Arabic, recognizing their appearance even if you can’t read them.

In our modern age, computers — and thus, fonts — play a crucial role in enabling people from every people group and nation to have access to God’s Word in the language and script they know best. SIL International’s Non-Roman Script Initiative (NRSI)* team was formed to address the technical challenges encountered when using different languages and scripts on computers.

NRSI was established to find solutions for challenging scripts like Arabic. However, there are also complexities in some languages that use Latin script. The first is simply having all the necessary letters and symbols. Even a single missing letter makes it difficult, if not impossible, to write a language correctly. All of SIL’s Latin fonts — Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium, Andika — have comprehensive support for not only Latin script, but also Cyrillic letters and their many variants. Gentium also includes complete coverage for the Greek script.

Some lesser-known scripts have a long history but few, if any, font options. For example, the Tai Viet script has been used for 500 years to write several different languages spoken in southeast Asia. In this complex script, vowels may be placed before, after, above or below consonants depending on the syllable. Consonants also indicate tone by a variation in shape. The letter shapes are not combined; rather a person writing this script learns to avoid collisions by careful placement. A computer font, however, needs those rules to be explicitly coded and added to the font.

*NRSI has been renamed to WSTech (Writing Systems Technology).
Excerpted from http://bit.ly/WhoKnewFonts.

PDF