AFTER 15 years living among the Buem people in Ghana, in 1996 Andy Ring’s work was finally complete.
With help from villagers, his wife, Kate, and a team in the US, the Daytona Beach native successfully created an alphabet for the Lelemi language and translated the Bible’s New Testament into Lelemi – the first book ever written in that West African language. All that was left was a celebration for the book’s dedication.
“The first person to meet me outside the doors as they ushered us out the back, singing and dancing in celebration, was a man from over the mountain. … He said, ‘The chief of (my) people has asked me to come and ask you, what about our language?’” Ring recalled.
“In fact, there were three men there, all from different languages, who had been sent by their communities to say, ‘What about writing our language?’”
So the Rings stayed in Africa for 15 more years.
Back in America now, the Rings are still involved in Bible translations through Wycliffe Bible Translators. On March 31, Andy Ring was a guest speaker during a Wycliffe banquet at Sunset Harbor Yacht Club in Daytona Beach.
Every year, Wycliffe offers free banquets throughout the country where translators share their experiences, according to Don Skekel, who serves with Wycliffe Associates. He called Andy Ring ‘one of the top half a dozen speakers that we use’ because of his communication skills and field experience.
“He has translated one New Testament, he and Kate, and has since trained four other language groups to do their own translation work. And that is completed, and now he is working with a group of about 10 or 12 languages in Nigeria to do the same,” Skekel said.
“He loves to talk about what he does and share his ministry.”
For Ring, coming to Daytona Beach is more than making another speaking appearance. It’s returning to the city where he grew up – and where he and Kate met and fell in love at Seabreeze High School.
“I was a lowly 10th-grader at the time and he was president of the senior class, but I saw him walking down the hall one day, and that made me decide to find out who he was,” Kate said, “and I was a little bit discouraged when I found out.”
Lowly 10th-grader or not, she caught his attention, too. They married in 1971, just before her high school graduation. Afterward, they set out on one adventure after another – camping their way through Hawaii and Colorado before moving back to Florida after two years.
By the time they returned to Daytona Beach, a baby in tow, Kate said the young couple was in trouble.
“Our marriage was totally on the rocks, so I think if God hadn’t intervened in our lives, we really would not have been able to stick together.”
Becoming involved in an organic gardening community run by Maranatha House, a church in Daytona Beach, the Rings noticed their new friends enjoyed a sense of peace that was missing from their own lives. When the Rings embraced the Christian faith their friends professed, they said their lives changed immediately.
“We grew up at that church,” Andy explained.
“Then somebody invited us to a Wycliffe Associates banquet … and that was the first place Kate and I heard that there were people in the world without a word of scripture in a language they could understand. And I thought to myself, ‘Hey, we’ve been living in a teepee, we’ve been bathing in irrigation ditches – that sounds like something for us, out in the bush, in a challenging environment, learning new cultures.’”
To prepare, the Rings completed three years of training. In 1979, the family – by then comprised of the two parents and four small boys – moved across the Atlantic. Although there were plenty of challenges, including scary bouts with malaria, Kate loved adapting to the Buem lifestyle.
“We learned how to cook a stew so that you could sort of re-boil it evening and morning and keep it going for some days,” she said.
“We learned how to pound fufu, which is a main staple in Ghana. You boil either a tuber or a cooking banana, a plantain, when it’s green … and then you pound it in a mortar, a large one, like a tree hollowed out with a pestle, a wooden pestle, and add water and it makes a very nice soft ball and you put it in a bowl and pour hot soup over it and eat it with your fingers, and it’s very delicious.”
Although their home base is now in Pennsylvania, the Rings continue eating many of the dishes they made in Ghana. They fell in love with the hospitable culture and they endeared themselves to their neighbors, who particularly treasure children, Andy Ring said.
“(In Ghana) we had our fifth child, and it was another son, and I kind of grew another notch in the eyes of my friends. … Within two years, we had another son. We fit right in with the African people – in fact, they said they thought white people could only have two children. They were happy to see us living with them, learning their language, eating their food, loving to be with them, and it was a great thing,” he said.
The Rings did more than live among the Buem people. By turning an oral language into a written language for the first time, they helped empower an entire people group in a country where nearly half of the population is illiterate, according to a 2008 UNESCO study.
But the Rings’ goal wasn’t to change Buem culture, Andy Ring stressed. They just wanted to bring something new to them that had enriched their own lives, Kate said.
“Because the Bible had become so very important to us and life changing for us, we wanted to participate in that task of translation.” Courtesy: The Daytona Beach News Journal
