Amy Fields works with SIL International and Wycliffe Bible Translators USA on Bible-based trauma healing. She explains, “Trauma is anything that causes people fear, a sense of helplessness, or horror. This can come about as a result of things as serious as going through your civil war or rape. But it can also come about as a result of something as common as losing your health, losing your job, or perhaps a natural disaster, things like that.

“When a person is traumatized…there is actually a block that comes about between their head and their heart. It makes it to where they are literally not able to get anything out of Scripture at that point.”

(Photo courtesy of Wycliffe USA)

Around 20 years ago, SIL developed this Bible-based trauma healing program in Central Africa amidst the throes of civil war.

“The pastors came to SIL at that time and said, ‘We don’t know what’s wrong with our people. They are hearing God’s Word, but it’s like they can’t apply it to their lives.’”

The pastors asked for a program that would help people see how the Bible addresses big questions and can help deal with trauma specifically.

“The trauma healing program is a Scripture engagement tool,” Fields explains. “It’s basically a way that churches can help people to see that Scripture is practical, not just for the big crises,…and helps them to be using the Bible more effectively.”

Part of the trauma healing program uses stories — one modern-day and one biblical — to facilitate the lessons, which are followed by questions. Fields describes it as “very hands-on.”

(Photo courtesy of Wycliffe USA)

Since its inception, SIL’s Bible-based trauma healing program has spread to West Africa, parts of Asia, and even North America and South America.

“We have trained quite a few people in Puerto Rico where they had Hurricane Maria a couple of years ago. People are really taking off with that there and all the places in Central America where they’re just struggling with emotional upheaval as a result of the economic crisis and all the different problems that they have with gangs and so forth.”

Running the trauma healing program alongside Bible translation efforts is also proving effective as they reach into communities with healing.

“As the Bible is being translated, we’re always looking for ways to make it practical for people so that they can understand how to use it and so that it’s not just a book that sitting on the shelf somewhere, but it’s being used in discipleship and in churches.”

For example, they are completing a Bible translation for a language group in West Africa. The area they work in sees hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing terrorism and violence.

Fields says, “Their villages have been attacked and girls have been kidnapped. So these people really have experienced a lot of trauma and need a lot of help in dealing with that.”

(Photo courtesy of Wycliffe USA)

As they complete Bible translations and teach speakers God’s truth, the trauma healing program helps survivors find applicable hope and peace in Scripture.

Please pray for the people going through the Bible-based trauma healing program. Ask God to fill their hearts and minds with scriptural peace.

Header photo courtesy of Wycliffe USA.

There are at least 500 Bantu languages spoken by over 60 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Many Bantu languages spoken in eastern and southern Africa share linguistic features like syllable structure and tone. Translation personnel observed that leveraging these similarities would improve literacy and translation work. They established the Comparative Bantu Narrative Discourse Project, an initiative that develops tools and materials to accomplish this goal.

Part of the initiative is a manual explaining ways in which Bantu languages differ from Greek and Hebrew. It also describes the ways Bantu languages differ from each other. This would allow translators to use one Bantu language as a "source text" to translate the rest, allowing many to hear God's Word in their heart language for the first time.

The manual will be based on 15 Bantu languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Kenya.

Steve Nicolle with SIL International will be working on the first draft of the Comparative Bantu Narrative Discourse Manual. Pray that the draft will be completed before the end of the year.

Evidence shows that the use of
mother tongue in early education develops better and faster learners

For example, when a child thinks,
he naturally uses the language he grew up with. The thinking process in that language is fast
and clear. However, if the child has to
first translate the question into his mother tongue before coming up with an
answer, and then re-translate into the secondary language, the fluency delay
costs the child. If the teacher has
moved on to the next point, the lesson may be altogether lost on the child.

Additionally, if a child cannot
fully express himself, he is inhibited to ask questions and may just keep quiet
or just agree with what the teacher says, further delaying learning. 

Barbara Trudell agrees. She works with Wycliffe Bible Translators and
the SIL Institute in Sub-Saharan Africa. "When the school systems are using the language that the people
speak as the language of instruction, that
produces readers. As it is, in many
cases many schools are producing dropouts or kids who aren't learning very
much at all, and it has a lot to do with the language of instruction." 

Their job has been getting the
governments and the schools to see that such an approach is better for students. "They basically come out stronger
because they're literate in two languages instead of, well really, neither
one." Their team works as consultants to help
government schools implement the  linguistic
policy changes in the schools. 

Learners who begin in their
mother language have better cognitive development and are likely able to handle
demanding subject matter. Trudell says their
whole approach to education is with an eye cast toward the Gospel.    

Once the translations are
completed and available, churches can move forward in discipleship, while
keeping the community's identity intact, much more quickly. "If
the education system can produce readers of the Scripture," says Trudell, "that's a real boost for us in Bible
translation because we have an automatic, ready-made audience."