The very first literacy class for the Kovol people of Papua New Guinea has now been running for three full weeks. Nearly all the students are making steady progress. The literacy class runs from 1:30 to 4pm most days.
Steve Stanley’s afternoons are now busy with literacy teaching, but he hasn’t found that too troublesome. His regular translation helpers are in the literacy class and now spend their mornings at home doing their other tasks, so he hasn’t been seeing them around as much. However, it has turned out to be a great time to develop new translation helpers, and he had a little something extra to get things started. He loaded a laptop up with touch-typing software and invited people from the village to do computer work with him.
In the mornings Steve is spending a lot of time in his office under the house. The idea was to have men sit alongside him touch-typing while he worked on whatever he was doing. The result has been better than expected. Two of the men are so set on improving their touch-typing that they been attending every single working day.
Initially, the men feared pressing the wrong buttons and breaking the computer. As the days have gone by, they have grown in confidence. The long-term goal is for these men to learn to type, become literate and then be taught in word processing. Steve is looking forward to the day when he can give the checking of the material created in the Kovol language over to the people to make any changes they want to make.
He has found that he is still able to focus on his own work crammed in his corner with sometimes up to eight men on the benches alongside him.
Last week Steve was translating the first of the Bible lessons into Kovol. Whenever he finished a paragraph, he was able to read it out loud and check it straight away.
The two men who have been attending daily have turned out to be very helpful translation helpers and have been the main mother tongue translators for Genesis 4, 6 and 7.
Continue to pray for the missionary team in Kovol, for the literacy classes and for ongoing language learning and translation.