Sunday, 30 October 2011, was Bible Day for the Mara Cluster Language Project. Kelly and I and our kids, along with fellow translators Kitende and Murondoro, drove 20kms out of town to a Kwaya village called Kihemba. There, we were given the opportunity to talk about Bible Translation, and to read some of our translation of the Gospel of Luke in the Kwaya language. I also got to preach, which was a little daunting since I hadn’t done anything like that since language school in 2007, and Tanzanian sermons aren’t those quaint 15 minute things that we like so we can get home and watch the footy. Typically they’re an hour. Or three, depending on the church. But I was given an hour, and I managed to fill it… probably because I was speaking in Swahili and it takes me four times as long to say anything meaningful.

Anyway, during the church service the choir, who had already performed a few songs in Swahili, got up and sang a song in Kwaya. I thought that that was nice. It showed that they valued their own language like they value the national language of Swahili. I even captured it on video, since it’s not often you hear a Kwaya choir singing in Kwaya.

Today, back in the office, I was showing the video to Kitende, and I asked him what they were singing about. He replied, “That’s why Murondoro has worked so hard, so that the Kwaya may know God.” I was like sure, ok… we all put in effort for this, but what does the song say? Eventually it clicked that he was translating the song. He explained to me that they had written this song during the week, and the song was about us! They had even sung about me and Kelly, and given us Kwaya names (for me, Masatu, which means Tilapia (type of fish) and for Kelly, Wegesa, which means Harvest). So we translated the rest of it, and here it is:

Kwaya, the time has come for us to know God
That’s why Kitende has worked so hard, so that the Kwaya may know God
That’s why Murondoro has worked so hard, so that the Kwaya may know God

Kwaya, the time has come for us to know God
You’ve come here, Kitende and Murondoro, Masatu (Michael) and Wegesa (Kelly)
You want the Kwaya to know God

How cool is that?!

Kitende, Murondoro, and myself, on a community testing trip in a Kwaya village.

There is a certain allure to the idea of taking the Good News to places it’s never been before. Realistically, though, in our ever-shrinking world, there are few places where the news about the Messiah has never reached. In Tanzania, we are quite comfortable with the fact that we weren’t the first here – the first missionaries who came to Tanzania probably did so on a sailing ship or a horse. There has been a Swahili Bible for over a hundred years, and you can’t go far into the countryside without encountering a church.

But today, as the Kwaya translators and I were working on a ‘Gospel tract’, I came to realise that we’re not as far from Romans 15:20 as I first thought. We had just finished checking our translation of a ‘salvation prayer’, in which readers are invited to pray to God, confess their sins, and ask Jesus to come into their heart and change their life. One of the translators, Kitende, said to me, “If we take this to Kwaya-land, this will be a completely new message.” I asked him what he meant, and he and his colleague, Murondoro, went on to explain that the missionaries who came to their area a long time ago taught people to believe in God, believe in the Bible, believe in Mary, and that with some sprinkling of water their sins would be forgiven. What we were writing in our tract was something that had never been taught before – that Jesus wants to come into our life, help tear us away from our sins, and change us from the inside out.

I was a little shocked at first, and then the gravity of what we’re doing set in. I felt simultaneously sad and excited – sad that, amongst the Kwaya people, the true message about a personal relationship with Jesus has been missed for so long, and excited that God may have chosen us to be the first ones to bring them the Good News.

A PDF file is also available here (2MB).

A PowerPoint file is also available here (5.9MB).

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British Airways – Everyone’s language is important.

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