So what is it you actually do?

Translation Specialist (2015-present)

Planning and organizing work sessions, coordinating and facilitating meetings, planning and catering meals, inventory, ordering and shipping of equipment, materials, and supplies. Planning, preparing, storing, and shipping personal meals. Reviewing translated text for accuracy and clarity.  

I have a list.

I mean, of course I have a list.

If you know me at all, you are not in the least bit surprised that there's a list.

This list is cyclical. There's no beginning and no end. I don't know where it started.

While I'm in the village, I make a list of things I'll want next time. It's a basic shopping list except I only get to go to the store once every couple of months. Coke, dog food, salt, caulk, that kind of thing.

While I'm in the village, I also make a meal plan for when I'm in town.

When I get to town, I do massive grocery shopping. I buy everything non-perishable for the meal plan and perishable items for a week of said plan. Then I turn to the shopping list for the village and the village meal plan. If anything needs to be dehydrated, I haul the dehydrator out of storage, go to the market, prep all the food, start dehydrating, start prepping the next batch to go in in 8-12 hours. Then I go pantry shopping for the village. I'm the chick who's checking out of the grocery store with two carts in a third world country.

All of that gets packed, weighed, and labeled for the bush, in such a way that I can easily cut the low priority groceries in the event that I need to cut my weight. Then I get everything on my shopping list. Unfortunately, there's no Walmart. So I go to about 6-10 different stores, many of them twice, to get everything I need. Pack, weigh, label. Then I look at my total weight and the weight allowance of the helicopter and decide if I need to figure out what else to bring out or what I need to leave behind.

Meanwhile, I need to figure out everything that we're going to be doing the next time we're in the village because it's expected that if we have any work sessions that are all day long events or any building projects, that we'll provide rice and canned tuna for the people who come. So how many sessions are there going to be, how many people are going to show up? 1kg of rice and 1 can of tuna for every four people. (Luckily, I can often get someone to carry in a couple bales of rice for me. When it comes to making sure they get fed, all hands are eager to help.)

AND, I have to get materials ready for all those sessions. Jacob prints workbooks, storybooks, word collection lists. I print copies of Scripture. Go to the store to buy exercise books (like composition notebooks but only booklets), pencils, the translators' red pens. Packed, labeled, weighed.

Then I have to get ready to leave. I pack up our house. Make a list of every personal item that needs to remain until the last minute and where that should end up at the last minute. I make a go bag, what do we need in transit and the moment we arrive, diapers, snacks, the dog's lead.

I had a to-do list with everything from making sure I have a contact person and how often we'll contact (so they don't send for emergency evacuation helicopter) to doing a final meter reading and turning it into finance.

Then we get on a helicopter and the real work can begin!

We get in and I have a list of things that get done first. ALWAYS, filter water and check/prepare the beds. Then sort the cargo and unpack. Then I have my running list of things to do. Build the bathroom counter. Install that new light. Hang up a windchime. The sort of stuff that needs to get done eventually and preferably this trip so I can stop thinking about how I really ought to get that done.

Meanwhile, I start a shopping list and a list for what to bring back into town (laptops, kindles, broken radio, borrowed rivet gun, broken invertor…) And thus my cyclical list cycles again.

Meanwhile! We're doing all the aforementioned work sessions. The translators meet on Wednesdays though they also do a two week straight work session in the middle of our stay. Presently, we're working on Acts. It isn't until after they meet and finish revisions on their draft, that I get to start advisor checking. I check the Greek, I check the rules of Mum (i.e. they don't have "because" only "and so". The reason always has to come before the result.) I check the Key Terms, and parallel passages, and the length of the section headings, and the footnotes, and the spelling for every chapter. After my accumulated questions are answered by the translation team, I go to village checking. I generate a list of rigorous questions and run through them twice, once with a group of women, once with a group of men, just to make sure that everything is clear, nothing is misconstrued, there are no inadvertent assumptions. Then the list of questions/suggestions from that goes through the translators. Finally, the back translation, a nearly word-for-word translation from Mum to the trade language so that those who don't speak Mum can know what it says, is checked against the Mum translation to make sure that it's accurate. Then the chapter is ready for consultant checking!

Not that consultant checking is the end of the road! But it's the end of the road for now. Consultants want to check the whole book, not a chapter at a time. (After the consultant checking, the book will be taken back to the village and read aloud so that anything that sounds funny can be fixed. And then a final check, which is like the advisor check but just to make sure that nothing got messed up as they were trying to fix it.)

Meanwhile, I also function as a wife and mother. So in the mornings, I try to get the kids started on an activity. Something to stimulate their little brains. I spend 11-12 prepping lunch/doing housework and 5-6 prepping dinner/washing dishes. 7 starts our bed-time routine which generally runs half an hour. Nothing productive can possibly happen after that. While occasionally the productivity bug bites me, I just rub some benedryl on it because I know those kids are going to wake up at 6 am. But between the intense UV rays we're getting all day long and the oppressive darkness that whispers lullabies in our ears, seeing 10pm is rare in the village.

And that's what I do.