A poignant domestic tragedy befell us this month. It is difficult to imagine, I know, but Kibandou trod on the head of one of the kittens. It went into major intensive care for five days. I fed it droplets of milk several times a day, and it was making good progress. Then on the fifth day it opened it eyes, saw who was feeding him, made a feeble attempt to ward me off, had a massive heart attack and died. Ho hum.
This week a light bulb went on. Of course! Why didn’t I ever notice that before…! One small word, yɔ, is pronounced in two different ways. If you say it with a high tone, it marks a relative clause (“the man who…”). If you say it with a mid tone it marks a conditional clause (“If the man…”). But these two meanings are currently spelled the same way. No wonder people are find it difficult to read if Kabiye spelling is littered with small pitfalls like this.
Along with Emmanuel and Noel, my assistants, our job is to study the way Kabiye is written, and find ways of improving it. This leaves the translation team free to plod on with the Old Testament.
And remember, not all clauses are linguistic ones. The cat, for example, is called Embedded Clause.
This morning Faustin climbed down into the compound well with a long stick to measure the depth of the water. You need to be incredibly athletic to do this, because there is no ladder. He just had to push his feet and hands against the vertical sides of the well. To our astonishment, the water is still 3.5 metres deep : as deep as the height of the house. He also rescued five toads.
I spent the New Year at the Cistercian Monastery of Notre Dame du Kokoubou. It was only once I got there that I realised how exhausted I was. What with a ridiculously heavy work schedule leading up to Christmas and several weeks of not feeling well, it took me two days to wind down completely. During that time I had the wise words of an old friend ringing in my ears : “Don’t even think about coming to the Daily Office for the first day : just let yourself be carried by the community.”
Once I felt better, I spent time meditating on the lives of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine (Algeria) who were kidnapped and beheaded by extremists in 1996. The prior, Christian de Chergy, had been involved in a positive experience of Muslim-Christian dialogue over many years.