We’re waiting…
For now, that’s all we can say when people ask us about the Palawano New Testament. The files for the translation have been at PBS (the Philippine Bible Society) for two months already. PBS will assign the NT to a print shop in Manila. We’re waiting for the printer to send us a mock-up copy of the printed NT so we can check for any errors in set-up and page orientation, etc. Once that mock-up gets here, we will have several weeks of full-time, intensive proofreading and checking to do. In the meantime, we wait.

While we wait…
One of the projects Bill has been working on in this interim is to prepare several sessions to present at the ICLL (International Congress on Language Learning) in Colorado Springs in early October.

The ICLL happens every three years. It’s an important conference for those who help missionaries learn language. Missionary consultants, language coaches, teachers, program directors and others from all over the world come to ICLL network, to be encouraged, to learn, to share ideas, and to return home better able to turn new missionaries into skilled communicators who can effectively disciple and plant churches cross-culturally.

Bill has been serving on the steering committee of the ICLL since 2001, and he has enjoyed and appreciated the many like-minded language learning facilitators he has met and worked with. After his first ICLL in 2001, he and others working in Asia started a recurring conference for helping language learners in Asia.

Right now we are checking into travel options for the ICLL. It seems like it might be cheaper to fly there than to drive at today’s gasoline prices, not to mention saving time and eliminating four hotel overnights going and coming while on the road. Whether we fly or travel by land, we’re asking God to provide what we need for travel and registration expenses for the conference.

We appreciate each one of you who partner with us in prayer, and we’ll keep you updated during this time of waiting for the New Testament to be printed. Once we have an approximate date for printing, we can being preliminary planning for dedication services and distribution teams on Palawan.

Pray with us…
– that we would would quickly receive the mock-up of the Palawano New Testament
        so that we can review it and initiate actual printing as soon as possible.
– that there would be minimal errors (or none!)
– for God’s provision of the travel and registration costs for the ICLL.
– that we would be a blessing to those around us.

Reaching Palawanos—and the world—together with you,

-Bill and Donna

…WE FINISHED!!
Praise and thanks to the Lord for how he answered all who prayed. He gave strength and endurance, and the final days of the Palawano New Testament recording project went smoothly, beyond our wildest imagination!

Luke still has some technical editing to do, and he needs to save each chapter as a separate file so they can be loaded on the players.

But we are done with recording, listening and re-recording!

PICKING UP SPEED
We put in some long days of proof listening Monday through Wednesday and made great progress. Thursday morning, we re-recording about 20 mistakes found in Matthew through Acts 10.

Then…

HOME STRETCH…ed
We’re about to begin the final week of recording the audio version of the Palawano New Testament and we really need your prayers.

Yes, it’s the Home Stretch, and we are being stretched, as well!

The whole NT has been recorded from Matthew to Revelation and the initial checking and corrections (rerecording short passages) has been completed. Praise the Lord for this! We’re thankful for this milestone, good progress, and the great team God has sent to help with this project.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME?
Now we are doing the final edit which involves listening to the entire NT once again, checking for any errors that may have slipped through, deleting unnatural pauses, etc.

The challenge we face is that it takes about 2 hours to do the final edit on each hour of recorded material, and there don’t seem to be enough hours in the week to get it done.

The Palawano New Testament is significantly longer than the normal 18-hour New Testaments Luke and Kristen have been recording in Africa. In hindsight, we see that we should have budgeted a few extra weeks to get the Palawano project done, but we didn’t realize this until it was too late.

So we have about 50 hours of listening and checking to get done… all in the next 5 days, plus rerecording any errors we might find.

Also, narrative discourse adds what is called head-tail links like this:

Those connections seem repetitious and unnecessary to us, but they are how Palawano tracks people and events throughout a story. Without them, the reader or listener would be lost. And you can imagine how those extra sentences would add up, time-wise, as Susing reads all the gospels and Acts!

SO PLEASE KEEP PRAYING
So as we enter this final week, we ask you to pray with us that the project can be completed–done, and done well!

Please pray:

• for stamina as we listen through long hours of checking
• for any remaining mistakes to be found
• that we can finish within the time remaining before we all fly back to the USA on March 24.

Thank you for your part in this ministry!

Reaching Palawanos together with you,

-Bill and Donna

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THE RECORDING BEGINS… ALMOST
Today we were shopping around in Puerto to find what we needed to build our “sound booth” for recording the Palawano New Testament audio version.

While jet-lagged and busy with all that, we were hit with two situations that remind us we are in a battle. Our enemy does NOT want the Palawanos to have the Word of God in their language in any format. At the same time, we are reminded that God is sovereign and nothing takes him by surprise or presents any difficulty to him!

DISTRACTING HEARTACHE
First, as soon as our Palawano helpers arrived in the city, they received a text informing them that their nephew’s wife had committed suicide. On top of the heartbreaking sadness of this situation, we know it will be weighing on their hearts and and could be a distraction as we work on the recording.

UNSETTLING CHANGES
Not long after learning about the suicide, we went to the hotel where we had booked rooms to do the recording and were faced with some potential concerns. The friendly manager who had given us such a good deal on the rooms and was bending over backwards to accommodate us in the recording venture is no longer with the hotel. So we will be dealing with the owners whom we have not met. Some loud music was playing throughout the hotel (which would be picked up by our microphones) and so we needed to ask them to please turn it down (for the next 6 weeks), and we also wanted to ask for extra foam mattresses to soundproof the room, and we weren’t sure how cooperative the owners might be.

GOD IS FAITHFUL
After leaving the hotel, we were able to find some foam mattresses that would do the job, and before we even finished typing this update, we learned that the a staff member at the hotel (who is a believer!) had come up with some additional mattresses for us. Just what we needed to finish the job!

Please pray that:

• the relationship with the hotel owners and staff will continue to be smooth
• we will be able to  have a relatively soundproof recording situation
• that God will comfort the family in the loss of the suicide
• our helpers here will not be adversely affected by the whole situation

Thank you for your part in this ministry!

Reaching Palawanos together with you,

-Bill and Donna

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…A BIBLE!

Maybe you thought this would say, “like Christmas.” Well, it IS “Christmas” in the Philippines as soon at September 1 comes around. But we’re talking about the Palawano New Testament formatting, here.

We’re in the city of Davao on the island of Mindanao, working with the typesetters. And it’s been thrilling to see the Palawano New Testament slowly begin to look like… well, a Bible! Two columns. Subtitles and footnotes. Pictures and maps. The works.

It’s funny how it’s still called “typesetting,” but everything is being done on computers with sophisticated publishing software.

Here’s some of what we’ve been doing…

• Checking for consistent formatting in the text.
• Adding and formatting footnotes (to provide extra help on meaning, pointing readers to the glossary, etc.)
• Formatting cross references (which point to O.T. passages cited, parallel passages in the Gospels, etc.)
• Proofreading (yes, still doing this; not finding many more errors, but some still remain.)
• Translating the text for maps (This has been fun! Jerusalem, the temple, Paul’s journeys, etc.)
• Finishing up the glossary (which explains words like “lion, bear, donkey” and clarifies meanings; did you know that there are FOUR men named “Herod” in the New Testament?)
• Writing book introductions.

ANOTHER FUN MISTAKE
This one might just take the cake.

For the want of a single letter ‘a’, Matthew 27:40 no longer read, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself and come down from the cross.” With that letter ‘a’ left out, the text read: “If you are the Son of God, your body is a cat!” (How did that happen? Well, puasa in Palawano means “save,” and pusa is “cat” in Tagalog.)

Yikes. We’re glad to find all these crazy goofs now.

FULL OF THANKSGIVING!
We are very thankful for Dennis and Meriam, the two people with SIL (Wycliffe Bible Translators) who are working with us full-time for this whole month to get our typesetting done. They are very skilled at this. Meriam has been doing it for over 30 years!

PLEASE PRAY WITH US NOW AND LOOKING AHEAD:

1. All the details related to completing this typesetting
2. Health and energy in these final weeks
3. Finding all mistakes and getting them fixed
4. Everything involved in packing up here and setting up in the USA
5. A car for our Home Assignment (beginning Nov 5)

Reaching Palawanos together with you,

-Bill and Donna

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