A Letter from Cameroon
From January to July, 2002, I was invited to volunteer in Yaounde, Cameroon (Sub-Saharan Francophone West Africa) to work for the Societe de Internationale Linguistique (SIL), which is the overseas branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators, based in Dallas.
My first assignment was in the Training Department, helping to teach Cameroonians to do linguistic work. Then, because it takes one translator 20 or 30 years to translate the New Testament, and because there are 250 native languages in Cameroon, the revised goals for SIL were to find related languages and teach literacy in a language of wider communication. (The literacy rate is less than 1% in some areas.) So, my second assignment was to organize data from previous linguistic surveys into People Profile drafts of 50 related languages. This led to a problem of villages separated by impassable roads for hundreds of years insisting they couldn’t understand each other, didn’t like each other, and didn’t want to learn to read each other’s language, even though the languages were linguistically almost identical.
SIL, like Wycliffe, is multi-denominational. The first months I attended Bastos Presbyterian Church because it had services in English and was liturgical. It was also eclectic: missionary hymns, Wesleyan hymns, four choirs in uniform, drums, and palms on Palm Sunday. (Yaounde is Francophone.) I also attended Mvan Presbyterian, which was within walking distance, whose services were in French and Bulu. If the liturgical pattern is familiar enough to follow, if the Bible readings are recognizable, if the music of the hymns is identifiable, one can worship without understanding every word of a sermon. One learns to look for similarities to hang on to and flow into, leaving the differences to analyze later.
I visited the Mission de L’Eglise Evangelique Camerounaise (MEEC) with friends. A young woman directing the music looked Korean. After the service, I rushed over to her, dredged up some half-remembered phrases from my 500 hours of Korean language study in Korea during the late sixties, and said, “Hanguk seram imnika? Meguk imnida.” (Are you Korean? I’m American.) She fell into my arms, told me how difficult it was to learn French and be a missionary in a culture so different. I invited her to visit in my abri, borrowed some floor pillows and chopsticks, and we had a nice visit.
The next thing I knew, she invited me to go on furlough with her to Bafoussam, in the middle of Cameroon, to stay with Korean pastor Song and his family for a couple of weeks. The family lived above the church. We had wonderful Korean meals three times a day. No one spoke English. Although the church is located in a Muslim neighborhood, there is no contact yet.
When I was in Korea, Christians had been weakened by the Japanese occupation, World War II, and the Korean War. Now they are evangelizing in French, and MEEC even has 25 missions to the pygmies. All pastors there also speak Baka. MEEC has graduated its first 24 seminarians in Yaounde, and is building a clinic across the street from the church.
Returning from Bafoussam, a colleague told me she had discovered an Anglican church group meeting above the Protestant theological seminary in Yaounde, but it was about 15 miles away. Most of the parishioners were young Nigerian males working in Yaounde, speaking Englishes of many dialects. They sing Anglican chant, Hymns Ancient and Modern, use parts of the 1662 prayer book, the American 1928 prayer book, and a service of Churching of Women. Once I even saw the Girls’ Friendly Society recite. Twice a month there is communion with wine, and the services end with African drums and a riotous dance by all carrying the offering up to a basket on the altar. If there is a need for outreach, the procedure is repeated.
When the priest called on me, and I asked how I could help, he invited me to participate with church leaders and clergy wives in a seminar at a Catholic retreat house in Edea, to train us to teach parish women to cope with HIV/AIDS. This training was facilitated by three consultants from the Oasis counseling center in Kenya. Kenya and Uganda have had 50% success in turning around the spread of the pandemic—not with medicines, but with Christian counseling. The seminar was underwritten by the London-based Mothers’ Union. It was both intensive and interactive. A follow-up meeting with the women in Douala and Tike, however, revealed no immediate plans for sharing this intensive training, because they had no visual aids or reminders to distribute. SIL has something called “shell booklets” that have clear illustrations and different easy-to-read languages can be inserted. I was working on this when my six-month visa expired. The Bishop’s wife received the English version, at least.
Elizabeth Charette is a CSM Associate from the Albuquerque area.