Now We Have Our Ngbaka Bible --we can feed ourselves.

Now we have our own Ngbaka Bible. We can feed ourselves and our people.

Together my baby and I work the fields each day – she asleep on my back, wrapped in the folds of my dress, and I digging, digging, digging. It is time to plant, and our day, like so many others, begins at dawn.

Together, we build the fire – she, unaware of little but warmth and her hunger, and I, busy making corn porridge for my sons and husband. Together, we walk to our fields.

We have learned, in our classes, to plant more than just corn. Sometimes it’s peanuts, sometimes it’s squash, sometimes beans. By planting that way, we have bigger harvests – and spend less time in the fields!

In class, I also learn to prepare foods to make my family healthy and strong. I learn how to treat the mosquito sickness that killed my other babies. I learn about a God who speaks Ngbaka and who hears me when I pray.

I feel my girl child stir in her sleep, warm against my back. When I was small, my parents would not send me to school because I was a girl. Then for a long time, there were no schools at all. Now I am very glad to be learning to read and write. Now I am educated! I can read and write in Ngbaka. I can read and understand God’s Word, and now we have the entire Bible in our language! I can teach my child – she, with so much ahead, and I, with much behind. Together we have a future!

The Ngbaka Bibles have arrived! Thousands of adults have learned to read and are excited about having God’s Word in their language. They are eager for their children to learn to read, too – especially the Bible – in Ngbaka. Education authorities recently asked the Ngbaka adult literacy team to help with primary education for the next generation.

A crowd gathers on the roots of a shade tree when the village pastor reads from the new Ngbaka Bible. The first full Bible completed in Africa with Wycliffe involvement, it speaks to them like no other translation can.

Members of the Ngbaka translation team couldn’t be happier, particularly consultants Margaret Hill and Elaine Thomas - and Maurice Ndalagba, director of the Ngbaka literacy program, who travels from village to village equipping and encouraging more than 2,000 teachers who have volunteered their time.

With the start of the Ngbaka Bible translation came the demand for literacy classes. Today, thousands of Ngbaka men and women are able to read the Bible for themselves. As Maurice says, “The teachers have great joy when they see people move from illiteracy to being able to read and write.”