Terri and I have served Christ together since our marriage in 1986. In July 2019, after serving 20 years at Tri-City Baptist Church, we were sent out as missionaries to join Bibles International (BI) in its mission to provide a Bible in every language. What had begun on April 8th of that year as a lunch conversation with BI's Projects Manager culminated four months later into what has been called my “second career.”
While I would love to relate everything we’ve learned through God’s call to this new career and to share the blessings and challenges we've experienced along the way, I want to focus on God's work among the Waala people in Ghana. Just as He has faithfully led us, He has also blessed and directed the BI revision of the Waalii Bible.
The vision for a Waalii translation began in 1950 with a small group of Baptist Mid-Missions missionaries led by Gust Pearson. Only 3% of the Waala people professed Christianity, so they labored to produce a New Testament in their language. Since no standardized orthography existed, they devised an alphabetic system to represent the Waalii sounds and words. When the New Testament was printed in 1984, it was the only piece of literature published in the Waalii language. In 1994 they began the Old Testament, which was then completed in 2009.
Now, fifteen years later, circumstances have changed. The Ghana Education Service has adopted its own official orthography, and only those books printed with it are utilized in education. Additionally, some grammatical constructions, word meanings, and spellings have changed. Although an excellent dictionary exists, it uses the old orthography and is indexed as an English-to-Waalii volume. These factors necessitate revising the Waalii Bible if it is to remain relevant or even survive.
On my first visit to the city of Wa in November 2021, I met with the national project leaders to discuss their vision for the update. The orthography was their primary concern. They believed one or two years were required to retype the text. Specialists who knew Waalii agreed. Then, providentially, I stumbled across a book by an original member of the BMM team explaining Waalii’s vowel system. This inspired some ideas for a script to convert the text. I returned to Wa in June 2022 with some theories, which I examined with Waalii experts. They confirmed these assumptions.
I had already discussed the possibilities of a computerized conversion with Matt Postiff, a full-time pastor in Michigan who volunteers with BI as adjunct digital text coordinator. That night, he worked online with me for about three hours, writing and testing each line of the code. After I went to bed at midnight in Ghana, Matt and his group of volunteer programmers in Michigan, the “Fellowship of the Code,” accomplished the conversion of the entire Bible to the new orthography by morning. What would have taken two years of painstaking work by hand was completed by them overnight! God had answered our prayers in an amazing way!
As I finish writing this, I am in Wa rejoicing in God’s goodness. The conversion is complete. Translator Hamidu recently finished updating the grammar and vocabulary. Readers are busy evaluating the text for clarity and naturalness. We praise God that He has blessed us with this incredible privilege of serving Christ and His people. And it all began with a simple conversation with Joe over pizza. God is good!
-R.W.