We awoke together with a start, to the sound of loud but friendly laughter outside our window. It was bright, it was sunny, it felt good to be alive. My eyes moved slowly round, taking in our little bedroom: it all seemed much less fearsome now that daylight had dispelled the shadows.
‘Mbembe kiri!’ I jumped. The words had been shouted just a few inches from my left ear.
‘Kiri mbung,’ came the distant reply. Ah yes, Ewondo morning greeting. That much we had learned in the capital Yaoundé [the capital city of Cameroon] before braving the village. Languages, as I said, are my passion. I come alive when I hear a new one. So, eager to get up and about learning Ewondo, I slipped on my shorts, tee shirt and flip-flops, and ventured forth.
But first I wanted to check up on Joy. I’d left her fast asleep in her cot the night before. As I looked in on her last thing, my torch had picked out one very large fat spider on the wall above her sponge mattress. Heart pounding, I had drawn off my sandal, taken aim in the dark, and let fly. I hit the spider, and it crumpled with an amazing lack of resistance. But out of its body scurried dozens of tiny spiders! For all of five seconds I felt bad: I had just made them all orphans!
‘Joy …?’ I called softly, opening her bedroom door. But her little bed was empty, the mosquito net pulled back. Rising panic. Oh no, had she run off?
‘Joy!’ I raced out into the bright courtyard.
‘Hi, daddy!’ I pulled up short.
And there was my little two year old daughter, sitting on the door-step of the adjoining hut, her giant Richard Scarry book propped up on her knees, happily pointing out her favourite pictures to our host Vincent’s second wife, Marie. Joy and Marie had clearly become great pals, without a word of language in common!
‘Mbembe kiri!’ the courtyard called out in chorus.
Now what was it …? Half a dozen faces were turned expectantly in my direction.
‘Kiri mbung!’ I somehow managed to reply.
Smiles all round. I had passed my first language test.
This extract comes from No Ordinary Book, Wycliffe translator Philip Saunders’ memories of working with the Kouya people of the Ivory Coast to see the New Testament translated into their language for the first time. If you want to read about what happened next, you can download No Ordinary Book for Kindle here.
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