I love that phrase. It's pretty descriptive of some people's personalities - those enthusiastic types that want to dive into something without considering the cost or laying the ground-work. We're not usually like that. But with getting to work in Cameroon, I feel a little like that most days.
It was really brought to light today when I met a lady from the country of Ghana in West Africa. I was asking her about where she lived in Ghana and what brought her to Lynchburg. I then shared that my family and I are preparing to move to Cameroon. She and her mother asked why we are going there. I explained quickly the concept behind complementing Bible translation by studying the local arts and encouraging artists to use their arts for their worship expressions. She said, "Oh. You need to come to Ghana." I mentioned that there are some folks with Wycliffe in nearby African countries and she again said, "Have some people come to Ghana."
Well that encouragement made me really want to get where we are going. We're not looking to change locations and go to Ghana, but it made me want to get down to business in Cameroon ASAP.
But God's timing doesn't work that way! And wise mission agencies don't throw people out onto the field without some solid training. So it popped into my mind that this might be a good time to fill people in on our timeline for getting to Cameroon. Here goes:
For the next seven months we are totally involved in our Partnership Development. There are a lot of different perceptions of what that means. But Wycliffe cultivates the attitude that in addition to raising our financial and prayer teams, we have the responsibility through our presentations to be spokespersons for the bibleless peoples of the world and their needs. In fact we did a presentation tonight for our small group and it was a ton of fun.
Our next big step comes as 2012 begins. We will be starting classes at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics located at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. GIAL is the training institution that Wycliffe uses to prepare their people that will be in language positions - linguists, scripture use specialists, literacy specialists, arts specialists and some others. Our time at GIAL will be one year. We both have to take classes in Cultural Anthropology, Second Language/Culture Acquisition, and Christianity Across Cultures. Chris has to take several more, including two basic linguistics classes, as well as Audio and Video Techniques for fieldworkers, Scripture Use Methods, Research Methods, and a few classes focusing on how to analyze non-western art forms.
The beginning of 2013 will bring another change of scenery. Language school. The national language across most of Cameroon is French (a small portion of the country officially functions in English). To live in the capital city of Yaounde, we need to speak French so that we can be functional in daily life. We will be in Europe for the language school phase. The length of language school will hopefully be short. We want to work with as much self-study material as we can between now and then to shorten our time in Europe. By the way, some of you may be thinking, "If French is the national language, why does the Bible need to be translated into the 270+ languages of Cameroon?" That's a subject for another day, but we'll cover it soon.
After we achieve a level of functional competence in French, then it's on to Cameroon.
I know two things about all of this. 1) It's going to happen faster than I think it will now. 2) The preparation will be worth it. I once heard the president of another mission agency say [paraphrased], "It's expensive to send people to the field. But it's also expensive to bring them home, so we want to have them well prepared so that they last." That sounds wise to me.
So while some days our hearts are in Cameroon, we have the two immediate jobs of building our team and informing the body of believers here at home about the bibleless peoples in the world.
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