Visitors and Kusassi Association Update

I found myself in a bit of a pickle this weekend. We had visitors from Canada coming to stay with us for a few days, and the Kusassi Association asked me to come to a meeting in the village on Saturday. I didn’t want to leave Kathy to entertain our guests all alone for the entire weekend, yet I didn’t feel that I could stay to help her and miss the meeting in the village either. Especially since they were going to discuss the issue of whether or not the Association was going to take charge of their own language development and translation work, or whether they were going to submit to the demands of the national Bible translation organization to run the project.

So I decided on the bold move of asking our visitors to accompany me to the village! That way, Kathy would not be overloaded on her own, and our visitors could have a first-hand look at the Kusassi Association and what it was trying to do.

Well, the husband decided to accept my offer, while the wife elected to stay in Ouaga. Probably a good thing since she’s an active person and our time in the village consisted of lots of sitting and listening to other people talk in languages we didn’t always understand! But it was worth it. My visitor not only got to see the Kusassi Association and leaders in action, but he got to experience village living too. He told me that he was experiencing a lot of “firsts” on this trip, like sitting in a village compound outside under the stars and eating tô and sauce for supper.

And what did the Kusassi Association decide? Well, that was interesting. One person on the leadership team was all for allowing the national translation organization to run the whole project (I’m sure the fact that they’d already offered him the job of leader and a big salary had absolutely no influence on his perspective :) The rest of the team preferred to stick to their guns and run the project themselves. After several hours of explanation and discussion, the association members told the leaders that since they had been chosen to lead the association, it was up to them to make the final decision. The members would back whatever the leaders decided. Wow! Not at all the response I’d expected. But a wise course of action, if you ask me.