The Language of the Home

While I was out in the village of Bwitenge with the Ikoma translators doing a community check, I saw how important the mother tongue is to these people. I was eating lunch at the home of one of the participants (from the community testing) with the translators I work with. Now keep in mind that these translators speak Swahili fluently. We use it at work all the time, they spoke it in school growing up and use it in town all the time. However now, we were in the area that the translators called home, a place where everyone speaks Ikoma. So back to this lunch. . . While we were sitting and talking, the one translator, Muya, kept speaking Ikoma. The other translator would tell him to speak Swahili, because I couldn’t understand Ikoma. So Muya would switch to Swahili and then two minutes later, he would be back in Ikoma. This went on for a bit until he just gave up and spoke Ikoma.

At first I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for him to speak Swahili. I thought that once he switched to Swahili he would continue speaking it but he repeatedly returned to Ikoma. After a while I realized that this place was home, this is where he always spoke Ikoma and it probably felt awkward to speak Swahili, especially when everyone else spoke Ikoma. It didn’t matter how fluent he was in Swahili, there was a very strong pull to speak Ikoma in his home village.

That was when I realized how true it must be for the Scriptures too. The Swahili Bible definitely has its place but how can it enter into those homes where only Ikoma is spoken? How can it penetrate that world where only Ikoma is the lanaguage used? How can it reach people’s hearts in the privacy of their own homes? The answer is that it can’t and that’s why we are doing what we are doing. That’s why the Ikoma people we met were so thrilled to hear even two chapters of Luke in their own language. That’s why they patiently answered all our questions all day long, because the verses they heard touched a place that Swahili has never touched.

I have never fully understood what it's like to speak a language only at home, but that day I caught a glimpse. And I realized that people are most fully themselves at home. Home is where they feel relaxed, where they are open, where their passion lies and home is where the Word of God needs to enter in the language spoken there.