Photos: Dusty's speech, using the Swahili Bible. The kids outside the church who were chanting "wazungu" (white people) when we drove up. The inside of the church where the celebration was held.
The Orthography II workshop ended on Friday with a celebration of everyone's hard work. Several of the leaders gave speeches. All the wazungu were amazed when the guest of honor gave a lengthy comparison of the participants to breasts full of nourishing milk! Everyone else just nodded their heads in serious agreement. The point he was making was that the participants had done great work to lay the foundation for Scripture the same way that breast milk is essential for a child to grow. In this culture, breasts are just a very normal every-day part of life - but, gosh, that sure is different in the Western culture, isn't it?
Dusty gave a strong speech in Swahili, and a participant from each of the languages read a story. Each language group wrote a story for the first time in their mother tongue, which is pretty amazing for everyone. It was a privelege to hear them read the stories even though we couldn't understand them till they retold them in Swahili. They were clearly proud of their achievement and looking forward to sharing the stories with others upon their return home. We're thankful we get to be a part of this ground-breaking work, and it's always exciting to have a small part of the project completed.
