Letter to the Editor (INH)
To the Editor:
Dear family,
I am now on the island of Semirara staying at the home of Pastor Euly, one of my disciples of old. I arrived yesterday (Thursday) and it is still difficult traveling here from province to province. One needs an S-Pass ahead of time (approval from the government that you can travel) and then again approval from the Coast Guard. Even if one has been vaccinated, one still needs an official letter from an authoritative person of the need for you to travel to their location. My buddies in the USA, be grateful that even from the beginning of this Covid thing you have been free to travel from state to state with just a driver’s license and without checkpoints at the borders.
It also took a long time to get off the boat since they allowed only about 10 at a time to disembark processing each of us, taking our temperature, asking us to show our vaccination cards and having us sign papers of where we were coming from and where we will be staying.
Nonetheless, I’m very grateful that Pastor Euly was there to meet me.
For the next few days, I’ll be meeting with the pastors here. All six of them accompanied me in walking around and evangelizing this island back in the late 70s. They all were involved in planting churches here and have been pastoring in the various towns of this island for the past 40 some years. I’m looking forward to reuniting with them all day long. I will also be giving them instructions concerning the distribution and reading program of our Caluyanun translation.
Raquel (my wife) stayed in San Jose to take care of our 25 Mangyan students/grandkids. They continue to be a joy. They all desire to study and we really don’t have any behavioral problems with any of them.
We are trying to finish off the Tawbuid Oriental and Hanunuu translations by this coming September. The students have been very supportive and willing to read through the translations one more time before we hand them over to the printer. They take turns a couple of hours a day using our four computers. Grateful for computers and our software helping us big time with these translations.
This Monday (March 28) I hope to arrive on the island of Caluya to begin working with the Kinaray translators who have asked me to be their consultant for that translation. I am very proficient in Hiligaynon and Caluyanun, and the Kinaray-a language has many similarities to those two languages, so I don’t need a back-translation into English as I check their work.
I plan to be on Caluya for a couple of weeks with the Kinaray-a translation team. I also plan to see how the distribution work is coming along for our Caluyanun translation. It’s been thee years since I’ve been back here to Semirara and Caluya.
Thanks again for your prayers. I better close for now since I want to get this to you before we leave for the day.
In His word for His Kingdom and His Word.
Kermit Titrud
Comments