Work in Progress

A Rowbory family blog from Nigeria

NCC’s 2020 TLAs: NINs for SIMs

Updated Jan 8th – see below. Nigeria’s Communications Commission seems to be trying to tighten up registration details for mobile phone users. Already when you buy a SIM you need to register it (photo, lots of details, fingerprints) before it works but now there’s a panic about requiring everyone to submit their National/Nigerian Identity Number …

Thank you CBN – Central Bank 2020s Money Transfers to Nigeria

Money transfers to Nigeria from UK/Europe were working rather well… until mid December when the CBN changed the rules. Azimo and TransferWise and a few others are setting up to do USD or EUR transfers to domiciliary (foreign currency) accounts via SWIFT. Not everyone has such an account set up, and so fortunately WorldRemit let …

Enlarge your tent!

As our girls grow we have found they could sometimes do with a little more space for doing increasingly independent homeschool. We also like having people stay with us, and a little extra space makes hospitality that bit easier, and so the opportunity came up to revamp and extend our house in Jos before we …

Nigerian Staff Raising Support

One of the great joys over the last few years has been seeing Nigerian Christians recognise the importance of translating and using the Bible enough to dedicate themselves to this great task. With over 500 distinct cultural and linguistic groups in Nigeria it’s a world within a country, and so there’s a great opportunity for …

Opening up & shutting down – protests in Nigeria

I confess having been outside Nigeria for the last year I’ve not really kept up with all that’s been going on, but just as many of Nigeria’s states are finally re-opening schools, the country is seeing a local equivalent to the BLM/Police brutality protests. https://guardian.ng/news/nigeria/national/buhari-to-youth-i-recognise-your-right-to-peaceful-protest/ We thank God that these protests seem to have been …

Making Luke Clear & Compelling

Meanwhile most of my time has been spent trying to work with translator Arams over patchy video links from his home in Kachia, revising Luke’s gospel. I’m pleased to report we are making decent progress and have managed to tidy up really quite a lot. Three weeks ago he travelled to our office in Jos …

Rowbory news updates 9 Oct

No firm date for departure yet, but it’s coming closer David’s busy working remotely with the Ashɛ translator [extra here] We need more translators on the team We thank God for Covid calm in Nigeria while the West is in turmoil No firm date for departure yet, but it’s coming closer David’s busy working remotely …

Example of Discourse Improvements in Luke

We certainly haven’t got Luke’s gospel finished yet, but over the last few months Moses and Arams and then just Arams and I have been working through the whole of Luke’s gospel about 20 times or more looking at particular issues and tidying things up. I thought I’d give any interested people (geeks) an annotated …

Getting back to Nigeria

Good news from us is that flights to Nigeria eventually opened up for a select few airlines and we have heard of people successfully making it in, and being allowed to quarantine in their own homes for a week. That is all encouraging. While we love being around friends and family in Glasgow, we’re slightly …

Translator training: checking tools

The current translator(s) with the Ashɛ translation project had not received much training in using the translation software, so we’ve been doing that over Skype and I’ve made some videos to reinforce what we have done interactively. They’re unedited and not amazing, but if you want a taste of what we have been doing (but …