PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOURSELVES AND YOUR MINISTRY IN CAMEROON.
Stacey Hare: I’m Stacey and this is Dave. We are Bible translators with World Team in West Africa, in a country called Cameroon. We’re in the eastern region of the country.
Dave Hare: In 2004, we graduated from The Master’s University and went to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Both Stacey and I graduated from there in 2009. We then went to the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL) to learn linguistics. Then we headed overseas. We first studied French, since Cameroon has French as its national language. Then we lived with the Bakoum for two full years, just learning their language. It’s a hard ministry. It’s not easy. It’s not like studying Greek and Hebrew in seminary. It’s not like going to Starbucks
We live among the Bakoum people in a village setting. There’s about 10,000 people in this ethnic group. They don’t have a written language at all. So, our task has been to learn their spoken language. And right now, we’re back on furlough and studying at GIAL. We’re working towards producing a written language so that we can begin Bible translation when we go back to Cameroon in August.
It’s a hard ministry. It’s not easy. It’s not like studying Greek and Hebrew in seminary. It’s not like going to Starbucks. But when we see the many struggles the Bakoum have, we realize that their biggest problem is that they are distant from God and they don’t know Christ. So, our goal is to be there with them, and to serve them as we translate the Bible together.
Usually it takes fifteen to twenty years to translate the New Testament into a language such as theirs. We’d like to do the Old Testament as well, so we have quite long-term goals with the Bakoum people. We’re Bible translators, but we see the goal as having self-sustaining churches in Cameroon.
To read the rest, follow the link below…
It’s Not Like Going to Starbucks: A Conversation with Dave and Stacey Hare
