After returning to Papua New Guinea, flying back into Kovol has been postponed for Steve and Gerdine Stanley and family.
Unfortunately, during a tree climbing session Oscar fell and broke his wrist! Praise God they were close to the clinic, and he could get an x-ray and a cast on.
It’s now looking like a three-to-five-week delay in their return to Kovol. Oscar is doing well with his injury and is not in much pain at all. However, it would not be wise to fly in when he has follow up
appointments to get the cast changed and to check on the healing.
Plans were coming together for Kovol literacy to start in April, but this will be pushed back a few weeks. They have started gathering classroom supplies: exercise books, pencils, lap boards, and a blackboard. Once they return to the village they will have to talk to the community about building a classroom.
The team has three tasks immediately in front of them.
1. Literacy
Finish final checks on the programme, build a classroom, pick students and start the first literacy class.
2. Bible translation
Translate the verses that will be needed for the evangelistic Bible teaching.
3. Lesson development
Prepare the evangelistic Bible teaching lessons which go from Genesis to Revelation with the aim of laying a firm foundation for faith. This is called phase 1 and phases 2 to 4 will follow. (A review of phase 1, Acts and then Epistles make up phases 2-4).
Bible translation starts of the process with an exegetical draft. It’s a huge task. Steve is building up a stack of drafts. He has worked on Genesis chapters 1-9 so far and these are all waiting for him to sit with Kovol language speakers to work through them with him.
Translating an entire Old and New testament is the work of decades. They don’t want to be waiting that long before presenting the Gospel to the Kovol people, so they will initially be picking the portions they need to trace the main story and themes of the Bible. A great advantage of being out in Goroka is access to experienced missionaries to pick their brains. Ideally they need to have all those verses translated and ready to be read in and alongside the lessons.
The Hansen family will be due a home assignment in approximately two years time. Both families will need to be in Kovol to teach phase 1 as it would be too much for a single family to shoulder the teaching responsibility. The Kovol people have been waiting to hear God’s Word for the last fifteen years. There is an urgency to teach the phase 1 course as soon as possible.
The next benefit is in the creation of reading material for readers to practice reading. Readers need material to read to strengthen their reading skills and what better than God’s Word!