Upon our return we have discovered that a village called Jimbale about 30 km (as the crow flies) from us has had a tribal conflict between Kombas and Mobas. It happened last week and some homes were burned and some people even killed. It was over a chieftaincy dispute.  A disagreement during market day sparked the conflict.

The military and police have come to the area and have restored peace to that village. Nothing has happened in our area of Nasuan, but we are still proceeding with caution.

Please pray for the church of both Mobas and Kombas that they would be a light in the darkness and a voice for peace and for the very real difficulty of loving your enemy. Pray for those who have lost homes and loved ones. Pray that we would be safe as we go home and God would continue to protect us – to make us as wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

We  stopped in Nalerigu (about an hour drive from Nasuan) and spent the night here on Saturday. We have talked with many people including church leaders today, who originally advised us not to go straight home. Today they have said peace is restored and we are safe to go home. They are keeping their ears to the ground and will certainly let us know if anything develops such that we might be at risk.

Please check out this recent article from the BBC on the flooding situation in northern Ghana. The big concern now is not only the current housing crisis, but future food security due to destroyed crops and the current threat of cholera and other waterborne diseases passed through contaminated water sources.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6996584.stm

Nathan is staying in Ouagadougou for these three weeks of the home school coop to help Sarah in yet another foreign country and to help with the kids. But also he is working on writing a formal paper on the phonology of Komba. Phonology is the linguistic study of the sound system of a spoken language. It involves grouping different phonetic sounds into into more general abstract groupings. For instance, did you know that the letter ‘t’ in English has at least 4 different phonetic pronunciations? Writing a formal phonology is a rather tedious adventure, but very important for the development of an orthography. Without phonology you may have more symbols in an alphabet than are necessary or perhaps not enough symbols to encode the significant sound contrasts of the language. Linguistic consultant Paul Schaefer recently told me that Komba is a phonologists playground! It has everything! ….Great. Read the rest of this entry »

Several people have asked us about Christina’s financial needs. She has raised only about 10 % of what she needs as I write this.  Contact us directly if you want more info. Click “Contact us” on the right panel of the page.

– As we are here in Ouagadougou the news is reporting that the flooding in Northern Ghana has continued. We heard on the radio that an estimated forty thousand people have been displaced. This means a lot of people are taking others into their homes. We can attest to many homes being significantly damaged in our little village of Nasuan. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear friends,

I want to tell you about Christina Riddle. She is planning to come to Ghana and help us as a volunteer homeschool teacher for Karissa and to help do some English as a Foreign Language training for Ghanaians. She is currently raising support money. As soon as she reaches her goal, she can come to Ghana. Check out her biography below.

If you would like to make a donation to help her raise funds, you can send it to the mission mobilizing coordinator at LBT. His name is Peter Slayton.

Checks should be written out to LBT with “Christina Riddle ministry” in the memo line. Send them to:

Peter Slayton
Lutheran Bible Translators
PO Box 2050
Aurora, IL 60507 [singlepic=26,320,240,,right]

Blessings,
Nathan
—
My name is Christina Riddle, and I’m moving to Ghana’s bush. I’m from the suburbs—Hilliard is a suburb of Columbus, Ohio—and I’ve always lived in the suburbs except for the twenty months I spent in Taipei, Taiwan, which was definitely a city. When I grow up (I’m 26), I think I might like to settle down in the sticks, but I have no plans to that effect at this point (especially not the grow-up-and-settle-down part).

When I was little, I wanted to be a hotel manager. The career tests I took in jr. high said I should be an actress (they, however, are suspect because they failed to include that all-important question: “Are you shy?”). That’s when I started rigging the tests so they would advise I work in counseling. I majored in psychology at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio and loved every minute of it. I graduated with a B.A. in 2003 and am now interested in being a marriage counselor when I grow up (a marriage counselor who lives in the sticks). Read the rest of this entry »

Dear friends,

Thankfully on Saturday evening we arrived in Burkina Faso taking the dirt road less traveled. We wrote in a previous letter that we were short of rains in northern Ghana and there was a drought. Well from Burkina Faso to Northern Ghana we have seen so much rain, many areas are flooded. Unfortunately,houses the clay/mud based houses are falling down. Even the Nasuan chief’s house has been rendered unsafe. Most walls have either fallen or are in danger of falling.

Well now to get to the story about the dirt road less traveled. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday August 24, the Komba language team had planned to have a large meeting of all the Komba chiefs to explain to them what our Komba language project is about and how we need their support and interest to make the project run. We also experienced our largest rain of the year beginning Thursday night in some places and very heavy on Friday morning. It finally began to let up around 11 am. I sent a message to Elisha Yajim who is our vice chairman for the Komba language project asking if we should still go or not. He sent me back a message saying some vehicles had already passed and some people had already gone.

Read the rest of this entry »