SIL Tanzania - Scripture Engagement Research and Ministry

The Vwanji research report is now ready to read! The research in the Vwanji language area was conducted primarily through interviews, so the analysis and findings are framed differently to the report written regarding research in the Malila and Nyakyusa language areas,  which was conducted using Outcome Harvesting  (see previous blog post).  The primary researcher was my colleague, Juhudi Konga, who was able to apply his recently acquired research skills gained from his iDelta training. I then supported him by analysing the data and writing the report, with his input. Again I would like to thank  Jeff Robinson, SIL Tanzania’s Language Programs Director, for his feedback and advice on the report, as well as his encouragement to do this research in the first place.  If you don't have time to read the whole report, then I would encourage you to read the Executive summary, Section 4 (Observations and Implications) and Section 6 (Conclusions and Recommendations). Th...

After many weeks of going over the data and our observations and thinking how best to present the information to share with others, a report of our outcome harvesting research in the Malila and Nyakyusa language areas of Tanzania is now ready to read! I would particularly like to thank Phil Smith, of the SIL Learning Towards Transformation team, and Jeff Robinson, SIL Tanzania’s Language Programs Director, for their feedback and advice, after sending them my sixty-plus pages draft report. Yes, sixty-plus pages – it’s a long report! If you are anything like me, you’ll read the Executive Summary at the beginning and then jump to the Conclusions and Recommendations at the end. However, if you have the time, I’d encourage you to look through the other sections as well to learn what led to those conclusions and to read some of the many outcomes that we harvested. The report can be found here: Looking for fruit from Bible translation projects A colleague has also done some research in th...

On the 1 st – 2 nd June, Frank and I met with some key members of the Nyakyusa community for the purpose of our research. These were former SIL staff (two Bible translators and two literacy/SE workers), the Chair and another member of the CBO, and two members of the Malawian committee (as Nyakyusa is a cross-border language). Four of them lived close enough to return home each evening, but the others had come some distance (we had picked up two en-route) so they stayed overnight in local guest houses (we covered everyone’s travel, accommodation and food expenses). Despite planning to start at 10am, and most of us being there by then, we weren’t able to get started until over an hour and a half later as it was important to wait for the Chair of the CBO (adhering to protocol and hierarchy is essential here) and we needed to find a suitable room to meet in. The meeting was conducted primarily in Swahili, but with some Nyakyusa and English to help one of the Malawians. Here is rough ou...

On Thursday, 25 th May, the Malila Outcome Harvesting team (Katherine, Frank and Mwangwale) met with the Malila NGO to discuss findings (Mwangwale is also a member of the NGO). About half of the NGO were able to attend. The NGO is made up of men and women, church leaders and lay people, from different denominations. Many of them were part of the ‘Language Committee’ when the New Testament translation was ongoing and shared our vision for Bible translation. They engaged well in the discussions, though it was harder to draw the women out into sharing their thoughts. Brief outline of what we covered in the meeting Welcome & introductions Short devotional , based on 1 Corinthians 3:6-15 (about someone planting seeds, someone else watering, but God making it grow) What is our goal (as a NGO, but also as SIL)? Wanting to see people know God better through His Word, as well as to preserve and promote local language and culture. The research was directed towards the first part of this ...

This week, I met with Frank and Majaliwa again to continue sense-making and to plan for how to do further sense-making with the Malila community. I thought it was time to share a few of our initial observations, rather than just describe what we are doing. So here is a snapshot of what has emerged. --- Having the complete New Testament (NT) makes a difference: people (including church leaders) are more motivated to use the Malila Scriptures now that they have the complete NT. We also heard multiple testimonies of how much easier it is to understand the Malila Scriptures than the Swahili Scriptures. A variety of materials are being engaged with: there were multiple stories relating to not just print Scriptures, but also audio Scriptures, songs, the Jesus film and literacy materials such as story books. However, deep and consistent engagement was less obvious and distribution may need strengthening. This was particularly noticeable in relation to audio Scriptures; although people ob...

It’s challenging working across two languages! I am constantly having to switch back and forth. Anything processed with my colleagues in Swahili I need to put into English for further analysis and sharing. Anything I have worked on myself I have to put into Swahili in order to discuss further with my colleagues. Google Translate provides a good starting point, but what it produces inevitably needs a significant amount of correcting. So, after the trip to the language area, I began to work on the data, firstly tidying up the Outcome Statements in both languages, so that I could begin to work with them. Then I continued to fill in the spreadsheet, identifying the following points in order to begin some analysis: Main actors: this refers to the person who demonstrated some kind of change of behaviour, whether that be starting to use Malila Scriptures, or demonstrating a change of attitude to using the Malila language, or starting to teach people to read Malila, or becoming a Christian...

On the last day we started to dive a bit deeper into the analysis of the outcomes and sense-making we started on Thursday afternoon.   Sense-making Frank mentioned the previous day that he started to feel like he could see some patterns and connections in the data, so we started off by sharing any insights we had so far. We were careful to explain that these are just initial insights, as we have only been to one village and hope to collect more data from other villages and actors. However, it is helpful to do analysis iteratively, so see what patterns are emerging in the data and might be worth exploring further, and what gaps present themselves in the data (these might be gaps, or a lack of outcomes). We continued by doing some simple categorisation by actor: Pastors (10) Community people (13) - of which 5 were about elderly, and 4 about women NGO (5) Choir leaders (3) Churches (3) (church members acting together) Sunday school teachers (1) literacy teachers (1) Pre-scho...