Scripture App Builder

One of the challenges of teaching literacy in our context is the lack of good resources in the local languages. We have shell books, and whatever Scripture has been translated, but since the people live out in the bush, it can be difficult to get physical copies of these items into their hands.

Not only that, but in a tropical environment paper does not always last. Whether the weather, rats, bugs, or whatever, paper has a limited shelf life in the jungle. Enter Scripture App Builder.

Even in the jungle people take good care of their cell phones. While not everyone here has a cell phone, many do, and out of those some have smart phones. And with the ever decreasing cost of technology that number will only grow! Our friends over at SIL decided to take advantage of that fact by putting the Bible, and other resources, onto smart phones. But since they don't know every language in the world, they also released Scripture App Builder, a program to allow others to do the same.

I would love to say that I was the first one in my branch who did anything with this, but our IT guy beat me to the punch. Even so, I'm super excited by what I've seen so far. If you've been keeping up with us you will know that we are planning on taking a short village trip in August to the Akukem people group. While the main purpose of the trip is to test a change in the orthography, it just so happens that they already have the book of Mark both translated and recorded in their language. So, using Scripture App Builder I have made a Book of Mark app that will allow them to read it themselves, or will read to them while highlighting the words it is reading! Pretty fancy, and an awesome way to help people learn more about the Bible and about reading. I can't wait to see it in the hands of an Akukem National!

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What I've Been Up To

My wife is absolutely wonderful about keeping everyone up to date with what we as a family have been doing, and also with keeping you up to date on what she's personally been working on with PBT. I am not. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working! I suppose it's time to update y'all a bit on what exactly it is that I've been doing recently.

Since we aren't yet working with a specific people group, I've been looking into ways that we can help all of our projects on the literacy side of things. Mostly that means taking little ideas that might pan out and exploring them until something happens. With that in mind I have a few separate little projects that I've been rotating through. Because of my interests and general trends in literacy lately, most of these are technology based.

1. Books on Phones - Not very revolutionary for the English speaking crowd, but still a great idea. I've been looking at transferring over some of our shell books from Publisher to epub format so that people can read them on their phones. It's more time consuming than difficult, and currently only works with people who have smart phones in the bush, which is a small, but growing, number. I've also started looking into options for getting them onto feature phones as well. With the huge number of phones out in the bush this would allow people to have access to a large number of texts without having to worry about keeping the paper dry, and would be sustainable (hopefully) since the phones are already there. There still isn't a guarantee they would be used, but I think it's worth a shot!

2. Audio ebooks on Phones - One of the cool features of the Epub3 format of ebook is the ability to put an audio recording in the book so that your device can read to you. As it reads it can highlight the portion being read so that you can read along. For people just starting to read this can be a huge help in developing their ability, and for those who can't read being able to hear what's in the book without having to find someone to read it to them is great! This would need an app capable of dealing with epub3, though, so probably smart phones and computers only for this one.




3. Scripture App Builder - Not really one of my projects per se, but something cool nonetheless. Scripture App Builder is a program designed by SIL to take translated Scripture and package it in an Android app. Other smart people are looking at leveraging this for our translations, but in the future we may also use it to package up literacy materials into an app as well. In the meantime, I'm playing around with this a little to see what it can do.


4. Video Literacy Lessons - Again, probably not the most original of ideas. In fact, it isn't even mine! Another Literacy Specialist working with our branch is interested in making videos similar to ones that she had seen elsewhere, and I got copied on the email. That was enough to set me off figuring out how to make it work for us, and while I don't have a specific lesson plan yet, I'm working on making a short proof of concept video to get us started off! Eventually we may have some of our  teachers record lessons in their own language so that people in other villages can benefit from their training! We'll see.



5. Modified Keyboard - This is really just a side project for when I have some down time. I'm trying to figure out how to change the assignments of the numpad number keys so that they can type special characters like ñ, or ɨ without complicated work arounds or changing from the English keyboard. The system we have in place does typically work fine, which is why this is such a low priority, but I think it might be easier for our translators to have a dedicated button for all the letters they need whether they're typing in English, Tok Pisin, or their own vernacular. So. Side project.


Of course each of these projects have their own snags and learning curves which I'll have to work through to get them functioning, especially since I don't have a background in coding, but they eventually may be great resources for our Literacy teachers in the village so it is totally worth it. (side note: If you have experience with any of these things and have words of wisdom to impart, I'd love to hear from you)

 My job will look different once we choose an allocation, but for now I'm keeping busy!

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Learning to Sew Morota

One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with in the village was the simple fact that I don't have any trade skills. I am a sub-par carpenter, a mediocre mechanic, and there weren't all that many computers out there for me to tinker with. Not only that, but another student had come to the village years before me and, inevitably, I was compared to him. He was a pilot. And a mechanic. And a fat man the size of an elephant. (Being fat is a good thing here. It means you eat well and are strong because of it.)

Unfortunately this was a source of stress for me while I was in the village, mostly because I felt like I didn't have any of the skill sets that were respected in this culture, and the skills I do have, such as teaching literacy, take a long time to implement. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I learned. One of the things I had seen men in the village making before was a roofing material called morota.

Morota is somewhere between a thatched roof and a roofing shingle. It is made from the leaves of a sago palm sewn together around a long thin piece of wood. This wood comes from the inside of a buai, which is another kind of palm. They use a small vine called kanda as both the needle and the rope.

Since the workday was happening next door to the house we were living in, I was one of the first people to arrive. I asked my wasbrata (watch-brother. Essentially we were adopted into a family, and they looked out for us) to teach me how to make morota, and he quickly explained the three materials we would be using. He grabbed a stick, a vine, and a pile of the sago leaves and began. In Papuan culture, most teaching is down by demonstration and repetition, and so rather than explaining the steps, he simply began, saying, "Like this."

It was easy enough to pick up, and soon I was sewing morota on my own, though my leaves often looked uneven when compared to the ones made by the other men. When I had finished my 2, in roughly the same time it took Peter to make 4, we stacked them in a pile with some others to let them dry, and went home.

 Another day, I got to help Peter adjust the morota on the roof of our kitchen. There was a leak in one of the leaves, and so we had to lift some others up to give that area greater coverage. Each of the leaves is tied to a wooden rafter below it using more of the Kanda vine that was used to sew the leaves together.

 It was great getting to learn one of the ways that these people have used the resources available to them in nature to make the things they need to survive!

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Bargam Worship Songs

One of the wonderful people we've had the opportunity to meet in our time here is a man named Lazarus. Lazarus was one if the translators who worked on the Bargam New Testament while the SIL missionary lived here, and he is still a strong man of God in this area. One of Lazarus' passions is singing worship songs in his own native language, which is something that I whole heartedly encourage. One day, I asked him if we could listen to and record one of the songs they've written in Bargam. He excitedly agreed, and told me we could come over to his house later to hear one. Later became tomorrow and tomorrow became next week, but eventually we found ourselves at Lazarus' house with recorder in hand. He proudly decades they had picked out just a few songs to sing for us. Only 17 for us to record. Then he picked up his bush knife and began to tune his bamboo pipes. (This means cutting each pipe to a specific length so that it makes the correct note when he thwacks it with a flip flop.) Eventually a large group of assembled to play, including two guitars, the aforementioned bamboo tubes, local drums, a tambourine and a triangle. All in all, it was a pretty impressive set up. Lazarus called for silence. I turned on my microphone. And they began. I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to listen to men and women of God lifting up their voices in worship in their own heart language. It was truly a thing of beauty. Ideally, once I get to my computer, I will be able to edit my recordings a little bit and compile them into a format they can easily play and share in their village using radios and phones. They have these songs in their language, but we don't hear them in their Church. Only in their homes. My hope is that if they can more easily listen to and learn the songs for themselves, they might be more willing to incorporate them into their worship services. I don't know if it will with out not, but wouldn't it be cool?

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5 Great Apps for Baby-Rearing

One of the weirder things about me wanting to live out in the middle of the jungle for a goodly portion of my life is that I unabashedly enjoy technology. Not only do I enjoy it, but it plays at least some role in most parts of my life. It just makes things easier. Since October, and the birth of my son, there have been five apps in particular that have been making my life easier, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to share them with you, in hopes that they might make your life easier, too.

In no particular order, here they are:

Baby Connect: - Available pretty much everywhere. This app is used for tracking information that might be pertinent to your kid. It can be used for tracking everything from how many dirty diapers the kid has had in a day, and when, to weight changes over time, to which immunizations he has had. As long as you are willing to put in the time to input the data, it will keep it organized and accessible for you no matter what device you are using, and can be synced between multiple devices.

Simply Noise: - Available on the web, iOS and Android devices. We use white noise to help our kid to sleep better at night, though it can be used anytime you want to drown out other noises so you can focus in on a task. I used it while studying in grad school, as well. The web version is free, but requires a computer with an internet connection to use. You can also buy the app on Android or iOS to make it available in a more mobile friendly fashion, or download it to a computer for a choose your own price to make it available offline. While there are plenty of white noise options out there, this one is hands down my favorite.

Night Light: - Available on Android only. While I'm sure there are plenty of other night light options out there, this one works well for me since I keep my phone plugged in overnight anyways. Basically it just lets you adjust your screen brightness in order to give you a light for those times when you need to get up to take care of the kid. A simple touch will change the screen from black to white, and the brightness is adjustable from there. It also has the time showing on the screen, which can be helpful in its own way. Again, it is super simple, but it works for me.

Skype: - Available pretty much everywhere. Skype isn't necessarily a "baby-rearing" app per se, but it is most definitely useful. We use it for keeping in contact with the grandmothers so they can see their grandson while we are traveling. Skype is, of course, free for Skype to Skype calls, and it works well whether on the computer or on a mobile device. You can use it for other things, like calling a cell phone from your computer, but that costs a little bit. All in all, Skype is one of my favorite communication apps out there.

Baby Monitor: Available on Windows Phone only. Though my wife wanted me to point out that they are working on a PC to PC version. This app connects your Windows Phone to a PC's camera and microphone, essentially converting it into a video baby monitor. We have regular baby monitors, so this isn't our primary method, but it does work when we need something in a pinch and have a spare lap top to use it with. Again, you might be able to find something that works just as well or better, but this is what we've used. Shop around.

Runners up -
All the systems apps on my phone. It's amazing how useful a simple alarm can be, and my phone camera has been used to take more pictures since our son was born than the rest of the time I've owned it together. But since you're probably already using these apps, I figured I'd share the others.


So what great apps do you know of that makes the life of a new (or old) parent easier? Let me know in the comments below!

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Inept

I'm a Dad! Wow.

One of the things I feel in this new stage in my life is a sense of complete ineptitude. I've never been a dad before. I don't know what I'm doing. I tried to put the diaper on backwards, until Elizabeth stopped me. (Thank God for wives, without them kids wouldn't be possible) But here I am, with a kid, and a need to take care of him. A burning desire, actually.

I can't look at him without feeling overwhelmed. Not in the sense of, I can't do this, but in the sense of I am doing this, even though I don't know how. There's nothing as amazing as picking up my crying son and having him stop almost immediately. There's nothing as heart wrenching as him crying in his car seat in the back and me not being able to pick him up, or comfort him. That cry of his can break my heart.

It has been stressful, and wonderful, and a whole host of other-fuls, and I'm excited for more.

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Our Road Trip to Pennsylvania

It was a bright and sunny day... That's pretty much how most horror stories start out, right? No? Well, even so our weekend road trip to PA ended up being a little on the rough side. It really did start out looking like a great day to take a trip. Elizabeth and I both have spent our fair share of being on the road, from our families taking trips to grandmother's house, all the way up to our more recent journeys across the country as we travel for partnership development. We really didn't expect this trip to be any different, but it was. Possibly it was our expectation that it would be an easy trip that made it so bad for us, but either way, it was bad.


To start off the trip, we sat outside a restaurant for an hour, waiting to meet with someone from a church in that area only to find out that we had somehow missed him. Always a great start to a trip. From there it was a slog of a drive north over highways that are..... somewhat different from the highways we are accustomed to. Elizabeth later said that she experienced more culture shock from driving on the roads of Pennsylvania than from anything we did in Papua New Guinea. For one thing, the highways are composed of narrower roads, weaving through hills instead of long, straight, wide highways. Add to that an overwhelming amount of construction on these narrow, hilly roads, and a sprinkling of bad drivers, and we had a recipe for stress.


But what really brought it to the next level was our trip home. First, our air conditioning went out. Lovely. Then, a short time into the trip, we began to smell a faint sulfur smell, that grew less faint as time went on. Finally, Elizabeth pulled off the road and into a gas station so we could get some fresh air. I took the opportunity to look up what would cause such a stench. Turns out my alternator had gone bad and begun overcharging my battery. It was the boiling sulfuric acid from the battery that we were smelling.


All that got fixed of course. We replaced the alternator, and the battery, and got a new tire as well. I refilled the freon, and we were set to get back home. However, our quick trip up north ended up taking a lot longer than we would have liked. The road got long.


It seemed like it ended up being one of the longest road trips of my life. It was definitely one of the more stressful ones. Yet even so, while we were there, in Pennsylvania, we got to spend time with Legacy Church, and meet some great people. We also got to spend an afternoon with some of our good friends from Dallas, who had moved up north after graduating. Even on what we perceived as being a bad trip, there were a number of good things that happened.


Life sometimes offers up to us "long trips". Even when our journey looks straightforward and simple, sometimes stumbling blocks appear. Missions has been that sort of journey for me. I decided to become a missionary back in 2005, and while we are now so close to getting to the field (May 20015), it took quite a bit longer than I had hoped to get to that point. Even so, there have been so many good things that have happened to me during the journey. If the journey had been simple, and short, I would not have met my beautiful wife. I would likely never have joined up with PBT, and I would be doing something completely different from my current role. There have been ups and there have been downs, but that's just part of life, and like our trip to Pennsylvania, you have to take the bad with the good. Even so, I'm ready for the next part of our journey!

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