Kouya Goes Kindle

On Wednesday 21 March 2012, hundreds of tee shirts proclaimed in the Kouya language that the Word of God is living and powerful. Kouya Christians and their neighbours gathered for the dedication of the Kouya New Testament which had been delayed during a decade of civil unrest and violence in the Ivory Coast.

Philip Saunders presented a copy of the Kouya New Testament to the chief of Dema village. That photo now adorns the front cover of the new edition of No Ordinary Book, the story of the Kouya New Testament.

No Ordinary Book, revised and updated to include the dedication, has just become available on Kindle

It was a privilege to live alongside the Kouya Project for 8 years in Ivory Coast.

It was a privilege to become friends with Kouya Christians including the translators.

It was a privilege to be asked to write the foreword for No Ordinary Book.

It was a privilege to have been at the dedication of the Kouya New Testament in March 2012.

It is a privilege now to recommend that you upload this great story to your Kindle!

If you want to see a few of the many photos that I took at the dedication, you can see them in my Facebook photo album

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Mixed feelings & Kouya celebration

Reading Mark’s latest post about how enthusiastic he and Laura are to have finally arrived together in Tanzania to support Bible translation, has got me thinking some more about our planned trip back to Ivory Coast in March.

Barthe & Eugenie, our Bouhitafla neighbours, reading the Kouya New Testament

We have mixed feelings about returning to Ivory Coast.

We know why we are going – to celebrate the New Testament (10 years after it arrived in the country) & the Megavoice players (solar powered MP3 players with Luke and Acts loaded).

But we have some fears, some anxieties, some uncertainties… It is almost 15 years since we left Ivory Coast in July 1997. We really want to go and visit our Kouya friends again. But will we fit in? Will they remember us? Will we recognise them?

Then there’s a big cultural divide: we’ve got used to living  in Belfast. Despite the current economic problems here, we are incredibly wealthy compared to the people we are going to visit. We’ve got comfortable, we have a nice home…

Our Kouya friends have been living through ten years of political unrest and civil war! The civil war lines passed right through their territory. How can we empathise with them? We don’t speak Kouya and our French is pretty rusty…

Is it right to spend all that money on airfares and vaccinations and visas? Surely it could be better used?

But I do think it is right to go! Just by going, by being there, we will encourage our Kouya friends. We will join in their celebration and share it with them. We will be saying that we have not forgotten them;  that our church here has not forgotten them. And they will celebrate that God did not forget them.

Kouya New Testament

Kouya elder Bai Laurent became a Christian in the late 1950s and prayed for decades that God would send someone to translate the Bible in to the Kouya language. Laurent had a confidence in God and God heard his prayers even though Laurent had to wait so long for the answer.

God did not forget the Kouya people. In the 1980s God sent Philip & Heather Saunders and Eddie & Sue Arthur to work with the Kouya Christians. The Kouyas now have their New Testament.  God has given them his Word and pointed the way to reject the fear of spirits and fetishes and ceremonial masks that were all part of their animistic past. God has adopted them as his sons and daughters in Christ!

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