Update from Doug Wright on his August Congo trip

Dear Praying Team,

Thank you for praying for Doug's July translation consultant trip to work with the Logo team. We are so grateful to God for his enabling this trip. Thought you'd like to read about how God answered each of the prayers:

• No one was ill during this entire checking session: what a blessing after the March session when each translator and Doug were ill during the month.
• The box with 6 computers DID arrive, a day late but untouched. The computers are now being used by Congolese translation students at Shalom University, Bunia DRC.
• Doug, Aguma, Adara and Madrakele completed the consultant checks of 2 Peter and 2 Corinthians - 16 chapters of fairly difficult epistles genre.
• We updated the Logo translation plan. The team has now drafted 80% of the NT and we've consultant checked about 77%. We're still on schedule to finish translation at the end of FY2012 with technical checks, supplementary materials, and manuscript layout remaining after that. PRAISE GOD.
• Continued our Bible study on what it means to "live in Christ". Shared at a very deep and open level and it was very encouraging and challenging to all of us. Also resulted in some deeper insights on how to handle translation of expressions like "in Christ" in different contexts.
• Did some discourse-level studies (mostly confirming past studies) - pronominal and demonstrative systems, participant reference and clause chaining - in preparation for the Central Sudanic Discourse Workshop in October (I'll be presenting all of these topics).
• Agreed on Logo expressions for a number of frequently occurring biblical notions (e.g. "to warn somebody" is "to pull their ear" or "to poke a finger in their eye". The Logo document of Key Bibilical Terms and other frequently occurring expressions now has almost 200 entries (including first and second choices in Logo and some cultural notes).
• Had discussions with Pastor Lalima, Abbé Malitano, Debbie Hatfield, Brigitte Nédellec on progress of the Logo Project, past challenges, current obstacles and the plan.

Looking ahead... Please would you cover these in prayer?

Regarding the translation process, two of the biggest challenges are getting feedback from the Reviewers' Committee in Todro (they're now five books behind the translation team), and finding good Mother Tongue speakers for the translators to do community testing of complex passages.

My next trip will be 7 October to 7 November, consisting of two weeks of teaching and participating in the Central Sudanic Discourse Workshop in Bunia, DRC, followed by two weeks of checking with the Logo team in Isiro (first part of Romans).

And personally, please would you pray that Beth be completely healed of the recurrent sinus infections (about every 7 weeks for the last 2 years) that she has had due to allergies and upper respiratory infections. These (and really any) infections cause moderate-severe pain and they are taking longer to heal. Please pray about God's leading regarding allergy testing and desensitization injections.

Finally, we start the l-o-n-g road trip to take our daughter, Sarah, back to Wheaton/Chicago Fri to get settled for the start of her junior year. The May trip to pick her up was "eventful" with 2 mattresses flying off of an open pick-up truck on I-65, one of which bounced into the car in front of us and then into our car. God graciously protected all of the people involved, but not the mattresses! It was a harrowing experience which we'd like to never repeat again!

Thank you for continuing to pray.

Blessings in Christ,

Doug, Beth and Sarah Wright