Dear Friends,
We wish you the warmest Christmas greetings in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ! Our son Roger has Christmas in his bones—born on Thanksgiving day in 1995, he sees it as his family duty to usher in the Christmas season by playing Christmas music earlier than either Priscilla nor I (Doug) can tolerate. This year Priscilla and I surprised him with a Christmas tree on his birthday. After all, we live in the Black Forest part of Germany and Weihnachsbaum trees are everywhere. For many years in Africa we celebrated with a Christmas cactus that we decorated for the occasion, and so it is still a real treat to have an actual evergreen and the space to put it up in our house. This year we will be blessed to have our whole family around the tree, something we are really excited about. Henry joins us from France after his semester abroad, and Kevin was able to get a week off from his job in Michigan to be here. We give thanks to God for the gift of Jesus and for special times like these when we can celebrate the wonder of His love with our family. We pray the same for you this Christmas.
Although we have excellent Internet where we live now, we are always aware of the poor Internet access of our Bible translation teams in remote areas. This past October, the training in Dallas for Bible translation consultants went smoothly since we had no issues with the Internet, nor did we expect to. All the training materials are posted on the web and each participant follows the class materials and exercises online. We choose not to use paper because printed manuals can become obsolete in a matter of months. The web guide, however, can always be kept up to date. That is why the web so indispensable. But in many places in Africa, this approach to training hasn’t gone smoothly at all. In fact, last March there were two training workshops back-to-back in Ouagadougou at a time when the training center was having major Internet problems and I had to cancel some of the sessions.
Portable devices today, whether smartphones or tablets, are packed with more computing power inside than all of NASA had back in 1969 when it placed two astronauts on the moon. I couldn’t help but think that a pocket device could be set up to serve our training materials to a room full of laptops without an internet connection. And so, determined not to let poor Internet affect our training this year, project “Wiki Tablet” was conceived. All the training materials are stored on a wiki that runs on a tablet computer and acts as a local Internet server for the class. After the course, the contents are copied back up to the Internet where students can access them as they are able. Well, after a few months of spare time R&D, the Wiki Tablet (wikitablet.net) is ready to go for testing at workshops in January and February in Niger, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our hope is that the implementation of this training solution will enable others to set up portable training environments for language workers and Bible translators in the Internet-challenged parts of the world.
We want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who have contributed to making our work possible with Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Black Forest Academy in 2013. Each month our financial statement refocuses us on God, who is enabling this ministry to continue through you. We also don’t take for granted the time you take in prayer on our behalf as you remove obstacles to the cross of Christ, providing the unreached with access to God’s Word in their mother tongue. We warmly wish you a blessed Christmas and pray God’s peace in your lives as you rest in Him.
Partners in the Gospel, (Phil 1:5)
Doug & Priscilla Higby
Prayer & Praise
- Praise God for the wiki tablet technology and pray that field testing at workshops in Niger, Togo, and Congo will go well in the next two months.
- Please pray for safety in travel for Henry from France and Kevin from the US in the coming week of Christmas.
- Pray for the preparations for Outilingua 2014 to be held in Togo this year: training trainers in the new technology to advance Bible translation.
- As 2013 closes, we anticipate a very active first six months of 2014. Doug is traveling internationally every month. Roger has basketball season and college preparations. We covet your prayers for health and peace.
