Mark & Patti September 2024 Prayer Requests

*Early the second week of September Patti hopes to catch a flight to Australia to help daughter Emily's family. Emily continues to recover from multiple fractures of her spine. In addition to praying for Emily's continued recovery, pray for Patti to have extra energy, strength, patience and love as she cares for two preschoolers, a baby, the home and meals.

*The third week of September Mark's regular checking work will be set aside as he participates in another on-line training for new translation consultants from Latin American countries. He will continue working from Ohio for that. Then, by the end of the month, he'll decide whether or not to travel to Australia and work from there.

Mark & Patti July-August 2024 Beans'talk

Download a printable copy of the August 2024 Beans'Talk.

A language tidbit

One interesting feature about the Quechua language family is how efficiently it uses its word roots. Instead of coming up with new words for different verbs, one often adds suffixes to create new words. Take the suffix -tsi for example, which means to cause or to allow (or -chi or -si in neighboring varieties.) So, if you have the verb root wanu- (to die), what do you think wanutsi means? English needs another verb: to kill.

Your turn to figure some out!

So, let’s say you’re learning a Quechua language. How would you translate the following verbs once the -tsi suffix is added to them? (See answers on page 2.)

Root     Meaning                 Add -tsi     New meaning

yacha-  to learn                  yachatsi

rika-     to see                    rikatsi

tantiya- to understand         tantiyatsi

reqi-     to know (someone)  reqitsi

kawa-   to live                     kawatsi

punu-   to sleep                   punutsi

puri-     to walk                    puritsi

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Mark & Patti July 2024 Prayer Requests

* Pray that Mark and the Panao Quechua team (one that he consults for) finish up all the back and forth on the books of Deuteronomy, Numbers and Ruth this month in anticipation of Mark's trip down to Peru in August. As he notes places that are unclear or misleading, they return with a correction that may or may not need further tweaking. Thus, the "back and forth" nature of this stage of checking.

* Pray for our daughter Emily who is in great pain in a hospital with a broken back. We praise God for the local church doing so much to help care for the family (two preschoolers and a baby.). Pray that we will trust God-being still before him and waiting patiently for him to act.

Mark & Patti May-June 2024 Beans'talk

Download a printable copy of the May-June Beans'talk with photos.

Rescheduled perfectly

Remember how I (Patti) was too feverish to make an administrative trip in February while in Peru? Well, it was SO obvious that God is the one who rearranged the schedule. When I traveled back to Peru in April, so many things fell into place. People were present who wouldn’t have been in February and events were happening that wouldn’t have been had I tried to visit in February. Praise God for his perfect timing!

Whoa!

I anticipated meeting with one or maybe two speakers of Huni Kuin (formerly Cashinahua) in a major jungle city. They are a remote language group that spills over into Brazil and are not easy to get to. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that we were eighteen people gathered together! Because of a conference that had just taken place, there were 11 Huni Kuin speakers and representatives from four other mission organizations. They told about bilingual education in their villages, their outreach to communities without the gospel, The Hope movie and accompanying Bible study they’re wrapping up and their desire to one day have the Old Testament.

Language check-up

In another part of Peru, I joined some colleagues for an interactive day with Yanesha-speaking pastors and leaders. My colleagues Ade and Rachel challenged leaders through a series of exercises to discover how they are using their New Testaments that they’ve had for 40 years and what factors need to be in place for any new translation (i.e., the Old Testament) to be well used. (You may not realize from these photos that we are meeting in the local church!)

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Mark & Patti May 2024 Prayer Requests

* Thank you for praying for Patti’s trip to Peru last month. It is obvious that the timing of this trip was orchestrated by God. No wonder I got sick in February! A conference had just taken place in a big jungle city that brought many church leaders together in one place. The language group that Patti met with had speakers from both sides of the border, Peru and Brazil. There were way more leaders from that language than she expected to find. Together we had a great conversation about their language, its use, their mission work among themselves and their desire to have all of God’s word available to them.

* Thank you for praying Mark through the check of Numbers and 2 Corinthians for two different groups. Now, he is working on a consultant check of the book of Deuteronomy. As always, prayer for careful attention to detail is always needed!

Mark & Patti Bean

Mark & Patti April 2024 Prayer Requests

• Praise for feedback from the many groups we interacted with in Wisconsin that let us know your prayers were answered: people were encouraged and challenged by our presence.

• Pray for Patti as she returns to Peru to take care of the administrative trip she had to cancel in February due to illness. She was recently asked to visit yet another part of the jungle to meet with some other people. Pray for all the logistics and safety of those travels and meetings. Pray that she will be an encouragement to those she works with.

• Praise God for meaningful work to do and the health and strength to do it. Pray for attention to detail as Mark checks Scripture. He should be finishing up Numbers for one Quechua language and checking 2 Corinthians for another.

Mark & Patti March-April 2024 Beans'talk

Download the March-April 2024 Beans'talk with photos.

Is your mouse tied up?

Ever been really hungry and not had enough to eat? In Hosea 4:10 the prophet says, “They will eat and still be hungry.” Micah 6:14 has the same warning, “You will eat but never have enough.”

In one Quechua language they imagine hunger pains as a mouse gnawing in the stomach. They have an expression that literally says: You will eat only enough to tie up your mouse. That’s how they say that you will still not be satisfied; it still won’t be enough. A very Quechua way for the prophets to speak!

New video: start and celebration

For those of you who couldn't make it to Peru in person for one of our Bible dedications, we now have a video! In August of 2019, Andy & Ruth made the trip, taking along lots of video equipment. After interviewing us on-camera recently, and with lots of help editing, here’s the result: a ten-minute video that captures the beginning of our work up to the Bible celebrations. Enjoy!

Current work

Mark is still working through the book of Numbers for one Quechua language. He also has the book of 2 Corinthians waiting for him to check in another Quechua language. Additionally, Mark is also setting up a computer program to be able to adapt scripture for four more Quechua languages. Others have submitted a proposal for the languages to be approved as a new cluster project. Mark is beginning to organize data for that.

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Mark & Patti March 2024 Prayer Requests

The first three Sundays in March we will be speaking at three different supporting churches in Wisconsin. The weeks between include lots of small groups: kids' groups, teens, community Bible studies, and prayer groups. We want to express our thanks for their continued encouragement and support as well as report on what God's doing. Additionally, pray that we might be an encouragement to some of them as well. May God reach out to others through us.

Praises:

Update re: our grandson Jeremiah. He had a lumbar puncture and biopsy Feb 15th and no cancer cells were detected. The bone marrow transplant was successful!

Update re: our newborn granddaughter. Her one functioning kidney is not in critical condition. The medical team is monitoring her regularly, giving her body a chance to grow before any surgical intervention. Yay, God!

Mark & Patti January-February 2024 Beans'talk

Download a printable version of the January-February 2024 Beans'talk.

Adeline Eden

How does a newborn have a most perfect head? Well, in our newest granddaughter’s case, on January 15th she was lifted out by C-section rather than take the squishy route most babies take. Adeline Eden is our daughter Emily’s third child; our twelfth grandchild.

We were hoping to have more news about Adeline before sending out a letter. The most recent ultra-sound (while still in utero) seemed to show that one kidney was dying and the other might need some surgical intervention. Next week the specialists will begin to assess both of Adeline’s kidneys. So, you’ll just have to wait with us as we continue to pray and see what happens.

Big news: peed diapers!

In light of what the medical team thought they saw before Adeline was born, it’s good news that this little girl is peeing. Who thought there’d be such excitement over a wet diaper? And she’s had several wet diapers! Yeah! Something must be working.

Holding down the fort

Our main job has been caring for Adeline’s two big brothers, Than and Elijah. Here they are “meeting” their new little sister. She may be coming home Friday. This family lives in Australia, so we are in the midst of summer.

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Mark & Patti November-December 2023 Beans'talk

Download a printable version of the November-December 2023 Beans'talk.

Artificial Intelligence & Bible translation

Last year, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon reached out for help for one of his PhD students. Her specialty is machine translation using large language models, with an interest in modifying the model to help Bible translation. She was looking for language data and someone who could evaluate her results. That's how Mark entered the picture.

At the end of October, after months of trying different things, Z defended her dissertation and passed. Surely the things she learned will help future translation projects. What a cool example of someone wanting to use their gifts to further the kingdom of God. Hurray for Z!

Field testing a new program

SIL, our linguistic organization that partners with Wycliffe, is working hard to develop new linguistic software. They have had their Fieldworks Language Explorer, or FLEx, out for some time. FLEx is the current computer tool for people to analyze, document, and better understand the languages they work in.

Now they’re working on FLExTrans for adapting Scripture from one related language to another. This tool has advantages over using the modified large language model approach, but it has some disadvantages, too. It also makes several improvements over the old package of programs, CARLA (Computer Assisted Related Language Adaptation), that Mark used for years while translating in Quechua. Since Mark has experience with related language adaptation, he is taking part in a field test. Helping to improve FLExTrans and understanding how much work it takes to get adequate results will help it be more useful for new teams. Mark also hopes to use it to help one of the teams he is consulting for.

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