Mom, Me, Anna, Timmy, and Dave at the Creation Museum near Cincinnati.

Update from Dan Duke, Wycliffe Missionary

October 2013 — Work on the Gyele language in Cameroon. 

Now Dan is visiting in the USA.                              Vol. 20 no. 2

Visiting the USA until early spring 2014!

It has been a very busy 14 months in Cameroon researching the Gyele language. Now I’m back in Indiana for some time with family and friends. I’m also writing my dissertation here. I hope to visit churches, friends, and supporters as well. Please contact me to arrange a visit.

Dan’s cell phone number is: 
(317) 544-8234.

             Praise God with me for:                                            

Health: overall I’m well, but controlling the blood sugar has become more a problem, along with a chronic
cough over several months. I’m having these issues and other looked at now that I’m in the USA.

Research: Success in attaining all of our goals for recording and transcribing texts in the Bagyele language.

The Volkswagen Bakola project is now completed!

Vehicle: New motor for my vehicle, which is now almost fully repaired.

Language learning: I’m beginning to understand Bagyele finally!

Witness: Good opportunities to witness to the Bagyele language workers! Over the last year I had some visiting Bagyele living and working with me in Yaounde. We accomplished a lot of language work, and
we also had many prayer times and devotionals. It seemed like some truth was getting through.

Europe visit: I had a good visit to Europe in August, including a chance to sing at a wedding in Germany and work for a month in Leiden with my dissertation supervisor.

            Please join me in prayer for:

Health: I am getting much need health check-ups now. I need wisdom in health issues, such as weight
loss and managing diabetes.

Dissertation: now I have all of the data I need to write a description of Gyele and finish my PhD dissertation
for Leiden University. After several years of working on this, the pressure in on to finish it up.

Financial issues: My co-workers who were helping me research the Bagyele language, and who were showing some interest in the Bible Studies and prayer times, may have had other motives for working with me. Over a period of several months, about 3 thousand dollars was stolen from my office and house. This has left me in some financial difficulty, but worse I feel betrayed by those I considered friends and potential new believers.

Discouragement: The above situation, and others on the mission field, have left me discouraged and in need
of times of refreshment from the Lord.

The Bagyele people: They need a touch from the Holy Spirit if they are to be reached.

Febuary 2013

Dan Duke, Wycliffe Missionary

February 2013 — A window into the Bagyele world!!!

Greetings from Cameroon!

          I’ve been here since July 6, 2012. After nine months in the USA, I had a lot of catching up to do when I arrived. I’ve been working with a team from Leiden University to collect recordings and study the Bagyele language. These recordings and the dictionary we are making will be the basis for my PhD dissertation in African Linguistics from Leiden.

         In this issue of the Dan Chronicles, I would like to share some extracts of the hours of Bagyele recordings we’ve been working on. Soon all of the over 40 hours of recordings will be available on a website for everyone to see or hear. For now, I will give you a little preview. Enjoy!

Song : We are leaving!

“My people, come, we are leaving! Let’s go! Where are we going, my God? 

What will do I?  Where will I sleep? Let it go. Let’s just leave.”

Comments: In many sad songs the Bagyele call out either to “mother” or to “ zambe” (the Creator). Here they express one of their main strategies for survival: keep moving. These days, however, there is often no place for them to move on to.

Folktale: Who stole the honey?

“Nzambe went to collect honey from one of his trees. When he climbed up to the

bee’s nest, the honey was already gone! All the forest animals were gathered to be

questioned about the theft. All denied taking the honey, but Wa’a the chimpanzee

kept swatting at bees who were attracted to him. Watch the gestures!”

          Comments: This is one of many stories told to encourage us to always be generous and bring a lot of groceries and money whenever we come to visit them at camp. “Watching the gestures” means “understanding the social situation and knowing how to treat people.” We usually bring a lot of gifts, but from their point of view, we never bring enough.

Song: If I stay where I am, I will die

“If I stay where I am sitting, I will die. Oh my people, if I stay here I risk dying. Oh my mother!”

Song : Who will carry Mba?

“Mba (a personal name), who will carry him? The early morning light has come.

The day has arrived. Oh my mother, let us go.”

           Comments: When someone is sick in the settlement or in the camp, or when someone is bitten by a snake, getting them to where they can be treated is a big problem. Recently a young woman from Kwambo camp nearly died from a snake bite which could have been treated in a hospital only 10 miles away. In her case, she did survive, thank God. Many do not.

Praise God and join me in prayer for:

Continued health, although I do need to lower my blood sugar more.

Success in attaining all of our goals for recording and transcribing texts in the Bagyele language.

New motor for my vehicle, almost fully repaired now.

I’m beginning to understand Bagyele finally!

Good opportunities to witness to the Bagyele language workers

Getting Back in Touch

Getting back in touch

I thank God for you all, and for the prayers, encouragement and support which many have given over the years. It is those prayers which God uses to advance his work here in Africa.

I'm still in Cameroon, working on Bible translations among rural communities. I currently work with two languages in the forest near the coastal part of Cameroon. One group is called the Kwasio, who are traditional farmers and fishermen living in villages near the forest. Another group is called the Bakola--they are Pygmy hunter-gatherers who are kind of the former "slaves" of the Kwasio people. Each group needs the Bible, but they are very different.

New Local leadership for the Kwasio The Kwasio have had missionaries coming to them since 1890 (120 years ago!), and today they are mostly church-goers. The early Kwasio believers really wanted to worship God in their own language, so to do that they separated from the missionaries and started their own church in 1933. Over the years the Kwasio people made

many efforts to write their language and translate hymns and parts of the Bible. Even so, today, nearly all of those efforts remain only as hand-written manuscripts, and there is not even a standard alphabet!

We hope that this will change soon, since we have been working on studying the language and

collecting and typing up the manuscripts. Recently I’ve had to distance myself a bit from the

Kwasio. At the end of 2009 I had many problems with some of the people in the village of Lolodorf, where I had lived since 2004. There was a land dispute involving the house I had been renting, and eventually I had to completely leave the village as things got very unpleasant.

In spite of these difficult events, God is working! He has raised up some Kwasio people themselves who are now taking over the work. I'm working to prepare a dictionary, grammar, alphabet, and style guide for the new local team.

The Kwasio local translators

Dan with three newly trained Kwasio revisers are almost finished with their training and will soon be ready to start working. They are not starting from nothing: one elderly Kwasio Catholic priest has already produced a hand-written rough draft of the entire Bible, and we have that mostly typed up and ready for the long process of editing and revision.

The Bakola

The other group with whom I work are the Bakola, who are forest hunter-gatherers. As some of

you will remember, I've worked with other tribes of Pygmies before: the Bayaka of Central

African Republic and the Baka of Cameroon. I am very excited to work now with the Bakola,

who are widely scattered in small settlements or camps, often accessible only by hiking. The

Bakola have had very little exposure to the gospel, and very few if any are believers. They live

in a forest which has been hunted-out and over-exploited by the logging companies. It is hard

for them to live off of what they can hunt and gather. Many have started farming, which helps

them. Bakola is a language which is very similar to the Kwasio language, since the Bakola

were for a long time something like servants to the Kwasio. I am trying to do a comparison of Kwasio and Bakola, working to find their exact differences and similarities. This will make it possible, Lord willing, to quickly adapt the Kwasio Bible into Bakola using computers.

The Academic world

I'm also now ministering in a very new and exciting field: the academic world. God has brought some famous linguists as well as student linguists from Europe to come and work with me. They

Abbe Bouh finished the rough draft of the entire Bible in January 2010, a Bakola explains to Dan about making traps. Kwasio! The Leiden Bakola research team: Raimund, Maarten, Emmanuel,

Nadine, and Dan are not missionaries but instead are interested in the science of language.

I am now working on a doctoral dissertation at Leiden University in the Netherlands. The dissertation is a grammar comparing Kwasio and Bakola, which is needed for the translation work! Leiden University has put together a team of student researchers from Europe and Cameroon to help me record and study the Bakola language!

This past summer (2010) I was able to spend a few months in Leiden getting input into writing the rough draft of the dissertation. It was a real time of refreshment, which I thank God for.

What’s next For now, I'm living in the capital city of Yaounde and trying to write my dissertation and organize my research on the Kwasio and Bakola. I hope to get my car running again soon (it broke down last June), and then I hope to make trips out to visit the Kwasio and the Bakola.

Another blessing is that someone in Indianapolis built me a three-wheeled vehicle which he calls a "BUV" or "Basic Utility Vehicle." It goes slowly, has no gears or reverse, but should slog well

through the mud. I'm currently without transportation, but Lord willing I'll soon have both a SUV and a BUV! God knows our needs and takes care of us.

Taken personally

For most of my years here, I have been living in rural Africa. Now I'm in a big city. I'm enjoying the fellowship of the missionary community and also a good African church. I am finding opportunities to preach and lead music sometimes. I hope to soon get involved in

some children's ministry, as I often have done in the past. I used to get a little lonely in the remote villages where there was little or no real Christian fellowship. Sometimes people were not very welcoming or cooperative. I believe that God understood that, and He is giving

me some times of refreshing to gain strength before I live out there in isolation again.

Thanks so much for your continued prayers and support. It means so much to me, and also to the people here who are being helped. Many here are finding God in their lives and slowly the Scriptures are working their way into these communities.

Praise God with me for: Please join me in prayer for:

�� Many friends from the academic world have become involved in the Bakola work. They are a real encouragement to me!

�� Miraculous protection during many dangerous situations, including car break-downs, road accidents, and a kitchen explosion.

�� Good progress on the dissertation during the summer of 2010 at Leiden, Netherlands.

�� Good health since March 2010.

��The Kwasio and Bakola peoples

��Continued strength and wisdom for the dissertation

��Continued protection and safety in travel

��Transportation: arrival of the new “BUV” and repairs of the old “SUV”

��Severin’s father who is very ill right now.

What are your christmas plans?

To my Dear Young friends:
Well, Christmas kind of snuck up on me this year. People have been asking: "What are your Christmas plans?" But I was just living day to day, in the midst of a move and a serious conflict with threats to my life. In my new little temporary apartment I put up a Christmas tree and a little nativity scene. The lights on the little tree did their best to cheer me up, but I knew it would be a hard holiday season. In fact, those lights just seemed to be a mockery, reminding me of much more joyful Christmases, long ago and far away. So here it is today, Christmas Eve, and it finds me the only one the 100 missionaries who work in this compound, coming in to work in my office. Strange feeling, to see it empty like this, and all of my coworkers and friends celebrating, but I'm here, working, or trying to. In fact today's job is to organize my storage area (a little cubicle I rent on the compound), and to put many things which I need to store there, things from my move which have been piled in the office. A task I've been putting off for several days now. Somehow it seems so daunting to face the accumulated clutter, which seems like debris from a shipwreck: old equipment no longer functioning (why I am keeping it?), obsolete things, old broken car parts, and the like. Broken, tired, worn out . . . like me? As I came in this morning, I noticed at the gate of the compound a Cameroonian guy named Patrick. He washes the cars for the missionaries, and gets a little money that way for his family and four kids. He doesn't do all that good of a job, but I often have him wash my car anyway, and have for years. You see, Patrick is blind, and he is as poor as they come, with a wife and four kids in a little rented room somewhere nearby. There aren't enough missionaries who have cars to give him a good living by washing cars, but that is all he has. Now I was surprised to see Patrick, because there are no missionaries coming in to work today, and there are no cars in the parking lot, other than my own now that I had arrived. And I asked him why he came. He said that it was Christmas Eve, and he needed to get some gifts for his children. "Every year they see the other kids in the neighborhood with little toys, and they've never gotten any, and so they've really been upset this year." Now the toys Patrick was talking about were the very inexpensive Chinese toys, the kind sold in dollar stores perhaps. And most kids in the city get one or two, with maybe a soft drink or candy. No much, but I'm sure it seems important if all the other kids have something, and you don't. So I offered to let Patrick wash my car, and when he was done, I paid him extra. But then, as I was cleaning out my storage, I found a whole box of little toys which had been sent me over a year ago. We gave out many of these toys last Christmas, but we kept some to use as prizes for the kids' club in the village. But they weren't all used up, here was a box of them, used toys of all kinds from America! With a lot of love, the people in a small country church had gathered all the toys they could and sent them to me for me to give out as I do children's evangelism. I had forgotten about this box, so I called Patrick over and gave him the box. It was a big box, and heavy, with gifts for perhaps two or three Christmases to come for his four kids. How surprised Patrick was, and he said: "This will be a Christmas for the kids to remember, and we'll save some for next year and beyond! The kids won't be ashamed this time when the see the other kids in the neighborhood!" So, I guess this is not such a bad Christmas after all. So many, like myself sometimes, think that we have nothing to give that could be appreciated. But, we forget that God is still at work, and in that pile of broken and obsolete things there may still be a box of toys for kids who have never had a toy on Christmas. Well, I've got to go, but Merry Christmas everyone! My thoughts and love go out to you today and on the new year! Emmanuel means "God is with us." and so we really have something to celebrate, whatever our situation. Merry Christmas, and God bless you, --Dan

In the village, feeling better.

J short note as I head back to the village, after a few days' visit to the capital city of Yaounde. I'm doing well, although my illness came back, with an even worse kidney infection than before. Now, I've been on a better treatment, and I am mostly cured, thank God. However, I have to keep coming in to the clinic for regular evaluation for a while, so I'll only be back in the village for a week.

God is doing a lot of great things here. Two weeks ago, some of the local volunteers for the Kwasio language work discovered two different collections of hand-written hymn texts. We have been hoping to find old hymns in Kwasio which could really express some of the lost zeal which the first Kwasio Christians experienced back in the 1910's to the 1930's. We have been working to find these old hymns for the last two years, and He had collected about a dozen of them. Now we have found about 5,000 of them! So that is a great blessing.

Thanks for your prayers. I hope to write more soon. God bless you, --Dan