This is the next instalment of my long series interacting with Onesimus’ post When Missions Becomes Toxic; or, Um, They Don’t Need Us Anymore. Onesimus gives three reasons why he believes that it is time to draw Western missionary involvement in Africa to a close. This post looks at the first of these and starts off with a […]
My friend John Macaulay shared this brilliant story on Facebook and gave me permission to share it here… The following comes from Sally Dechert and the Malila translators, Lukas Mwahalende, and Juma Mwampamba. I tell you, it made this translation consultant dance inside. A few weeks ago, the Malila translators returned from a village where […]
In 1974, my brother Phil gave me a Bible. It was the first Bible I’d ever owned and having just become a Christian, I was thrilled with it. Forty years ago, Bibles were real Bibles, this was a large, dark-blue, hardback, King James Version with cross references and the words of Jesus in red. Looking […]
Yesterday I arrived home from a visit to Ivory Coast to attend the dedication of the New Testament in Kouya. It took place in the village of Dema, which is where we first lived when we moved to the Kouya area almost 25 years ago. In a number of ways this wasn’t a typical dedication. […]
I remember a university lecturer in Abidjan telling me that when left the city of Abidjan, he felt as though he was leaving Côte d’Ivoire all together. For him, the cosmopolitan city with its sky scrapers and supermarkets, not the rural majority, was the real Ivory Coast. For my translator colleagues and I, the opposite […]
This remarkable, twenty four minute film is from Channel Four in the UK. It is harrowing to watch, but it gives a picture of how things were through the fighting for Abidjan. Incredibly sad. Click on the image to watch the video.
Today, the ever interesting Phil Ritchie blogged on the issue of international aid. As many people will know, the current British Government have promised to maintain the level of overseas aid at a fixed amount (0.7% of gross national income) until 2013. Today however, it leaked out that the minister of defence, Liam Fox, would […]
I could quite get into this “round-up of the week’s best posts” thing. It is certainly easier than coming up with something creative myself. Here are a few more blog posts that say things that I wish I had said, but which say them better than I would have done. To me, Three Cups of […]
In a BBC article entitled ‘Viewpoint: Ivory Coast’s lesson to Nigeria’, Nigerian-born novelist and journalist Kingsley Kobo reflects on the situation in Ivory Coast and takes a look at what Nigerians can learn from it for their own Presidential Elections. Kobo is well-placed to comment as he has spent the last 16 years living in […]