We are so grateful for your prayers and support. As mentioned earlier, our visit to Stanford University Medical Center did not bring the news we had hoped for since the surgeon there said that there is no surgery he can perform to help Matthew regain movement in his shoulder and upper arm. During that same trip, we also had an MRN (neurogram) done at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and we are still waiting to hear the results of that test.
On May 5-6, we plan to drive to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical Center so that Matthew can be seen by another surgeon. Please pray that this would lead to a treatment that would help restore some movement for Matthew.
Sometime around mid-May, the shipping company will be sending a truck to our home in Slavonski Brod, Croatia, to load up the belongings that we are sending back to Kansas City by sea. Please pray for Pamala as she works toward that deadline to get everything packed.
She will then have until around May 25th to wrap up all the loose ends of visiting friends, coworkers, and translators to say goodbye, giving away the things we are not shipping to the States, closing down our phones, Internet, and utilities, making arrangements for our car, etc. And then the glorious day we have been waiting for: Pam and the kids will fly from Croatia back to Kansas City around May 25th. That will mark over four months since Todd left Croatia and over three months since we have seen each other! It will be so lovely to be together again.
We have decided to push our Bible translation deadline goals back six months. Because of my time in the States for Matthew’s accident, plus the lockdowns because of COVID-19, we canceled the February and May Bible translation consultant workshops, which we had planned, which pushes our progress back quite a bit.
Having said that, we continue to make progress with the Bible translations. We have added another translator, Alen, for the Arli language. We are also praying about adding two more translation consultants to the projects. I (Todd) have been wearing many hats on the translation projects, including handling finances, training the Bible translators, evaluating and editing the translations, meeting with the translators to check each verse of their drafts, helping the translators use their translations with others in the language community to test the understandability of the drafts, recording the audio of the translations, etc.
Although the translations are turning out well, the progress is going too slowly for us to expect to finish in a reasonable time, and this is because the work is bottle necking with me since I am trying to fill too many roles. The goal now, for which I ask you to pray, is that I will be able to delegate a number of these roles and be able to focus on preparing the translations to be checked by the consultants. If I could spend more of my time on that task and if others could pick up the slack in other areas, we will be able to get more of the Bible translated more quickly in these five languages.
Thank you for your love and support for us as a family, especially for Matthew at this hard time, and for the work of Bible translation for Roma speaking these five languages.
Gratefully,
Todd