Categories
Africa

Storm

I’m sitting in a meeting of Bible translation leaders from across Central Africa. The meeting is interesting – fascinating even, but it is very hard to concentrate. Outside there is a huge storm blowing and the sound of the rain on the tin roof and the wind blowing stuff around is more or less impossible […]

Categories
Africa Computing/Internet

High Speed Internet

Paul Shaddick comments on a recent trip to Africa that ‘high speed internet is definitely a relative term’. I have to say that I agree with him, though the connection we have here in Senegal is pretty impressive and fairly fast. The only problem is that it loses it’s ability to resolve internet addresses every […]

Categories
Africa Observations

Translating

One of the things which I often end up doing at international meetings is translating talks from French into English (and sometimes vice-versa). Simultaneous translation is the intellectual equivalent of adventure sports. You never know what will come next and whether you will be able to understand what is being said, much less translate it. […]

Categories
Africa Church: World

Growing churches

I have a Google news alert set for Ivory Coast, so every time it gets a mention in the news somewhere I get an email giving me the link. More often than not it is an article mentioning one of the many Ivorian footballers who play for teams in the Premiership or in Europe; sometimes […]

Categories
Africa

Senegalese Rice

One of our favourite foods when we lived in Ivory Coast was tyep or Senegalese rice. I was never sure if the Senegalese actually ate the stuff, or whether it was one of those things like French toast or English muffins which would never be recognised by the people who were supposed to have originated […]

Categories
Africa

Where Am I?

I flew out of Southampton yesterday and after a lay over in Paris (one hour longer than it should have been) I flew on to Dakar in Senegal. For the next week I’ll be in meetings of leaders of Bible translation organisations from across West Africa. Dakar is about as far was as you can […]

Categories
Africa

Carpenters in Congo

One last link from my Congo trip. This is a fascinating photo-journal about a cooperative of hearing impaired carpenters by John James of the BBC. Apparently, these guys make amazingly good furniture.  John lives on the centre where I was staying in Brazzaville. I had dinner with him one evening and it turns out that […]

Categories
Africa

The Congo River

This is some film I took today of the Congo river between Brazzaville and Kinshasa. The rapids are very impressive – even more impressive is the dugout canoe and the fisherman working amongst them.

Categories
Africa Bible Translation

Central African Republic

The group I’m working with here are involved in language work in a number of countries, including the Central African Republic. This is a place that few westerners have heard of, even though there is a fair degree of civil unrest and trouble there. This report from the BBC will help give you an idea […]

Categories
Africa

Winters in Congo

Jeff and Michelle Winters are part of the team I’m working with here in Brazzaville. Their website has some  stuff about Congo which you might find interesting. Given that I’m unlikely to get out of the city very much and won’t have much by way of photographs or video to post, the Winters photo album […]