SIL Tanzania - Scripture Engagement Research and Ministry

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 Tuesday 28 th March, I travelled to the Malila language area, together with Frank. We met with Majaliwa in the village of Iyunga Mapinduzi, where we had planned to hold our first meeting. The last stretch of road was rather slippery after the previous day’s rain but we arrived safely. There we met with a group of seven people, from a couple of different churches, all of whom had connected with our project in one way or another, though primarily through having attended workshops. We followed the same format that we followed during our initial field trip to the village of Jojo: we started with a Bible study on John 15 (using the Malila Scriptures, with participants taking it in turns to read the verses, and with most of the discussion taking place in Malila), then explained more about why we were visiting, asked for permission to write their stories and share them, told an example story (it’s important to have a really good one, with clear dates, people and change) and then invited...

Having completed the training week, it was time to take hold of the reins and prepare to continue what we had begun. At the end of the training week we had tentatively mapped out where we would go on our next field trip and how we could go about continuing to gather Outcome Statements. Before meeting with the team (Frank and Majaliwa), I listed out what we needed to talk about and spent some time thinking about ‘Progress Markers’:  what things would we expect to see, like to see and love to see happening in the community in relation to work that SIL Tanzania has done there. (Search online for ‘Outcome Mapping’ for more information about the idea of Progress Markers.) On Tuesday, 21 st March, I met with the team. We worked through the following: Contributions: During the training week we didn’t have time to list out the contributions to change seen in the Outcome Statements, so we wanted to work on that. We were able to make intelligent guesses about what had contributed to mo...

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...

In the morning we debriefed from the field visit, with the team reviewing what they had heard and potential outcomes. The team had taken good notes, and Phil had already started to write some draft outcomes in Google Sheets. We reviewed what we had collected and filled in details about locations and times as best we could, and removed a few which we deemed to be too vague. We also reviewed some additional draft outcomes that had come from background reading, and from the discussions from the first two days. By the end of the morning we had 37 draft outcomes which were written up into a ‘database’ on Google Sheets. Many of these were small behavioural changes, but this is considered very good for just staff recollection and one visit to a village. These were just the descriptions,  no contribution or significance was written at this stage. We printed these out and in the afternoon reviewed the significance of the outcomes. The team had expressed some uncertainty about what significa...

We left Mbeya at around 8am and travelled 1.5 hours out to the village of Jojo, where Mwangwale is a pastor. We met with a group of 8 people including pastors, literacy teachers, and other small group leaders. Katherine started by leading a short bible study on being connected to the vine and bearing fruit - which linked nicely to the rest of our work. Aside from being a good bible study, the study helped to warm up the group, built trust and unity, and encouraged participation as the group reflected on questions about the passage. We then explained our other purpose for being here - to see what fruit the SE work had been producing.   The team gave a few examples of stories of change and then invited the rest of the group to share with us. We heard many stories, and the team took notes, marking where we had heard potential outcomes. We asked for clarity about dates and places, and what had contributed to the changes where this was not clear. Most of the changes described were...

On Tuesday we started to work with some tools to review what has happened, build a systems perspective, and start surface potential outcomes. Timeline Our first exercise was to conduct a timeline of the SE work since the NT was launched in 2020. Pink notes were used for contextual issues which had affected the project (e.g. Covid!), orange notes were used for SE activities, yellow notes for NGO activities/developments, and green notes for fruit/effects of the SE work. This gave us an overall sense of the SE work that has happened over the last few years, and the general changes that the team had observed.  Actor Map We reviewed the timeline to see what actors were mentioned. We then added other actors which we felt played a role in making SE happen. We had a short time left before lunch, so we split into pairs and briefly reflected on what roles we felt these actors should be playing.  Drafting outcomes In the afternoon we introduced the idea of writing outcome statements. The...

Robert and I (Phil) arrived late on Sunday night into Mbeya and so we started our first morning with the Malila team. We took some time for introductions and to look through what we had planned for the week ahead. Overall Plan Our plan over the first couple of days is to:  Start by hearing some stories of what makes the team proud/excited about the work, getting grounded in the idea of stories of change! Make a timeline of the past 1-2 years, to get a sense of context and history, and to start surfacing some of the key changes that they have seen Make an actor map, to think about who plays a role in making SE happen and is affected by SE activities. This serves as a basis to start finding outcomes as we think about how these actors have changed, and helps us think about who we might need to talk to. Start writing up outcomes - by this point we should have enough ideas about changes that have happened that we can start writing “outcomes statements”. We’ll need to explain the “discip...