Little did Marilyn Escher know when she felt the tug of God on her heart for overseas ministry at age 12 all that would follow. Answering the call would involve spending over half of her life among the Wolof people group in Africa. Born in California and raised in Virginia, Marilyn moved with her family in 1960 to Hawaii, where she gained a unique experience in relating to people cross-culturally. Though she did not expect to use this experience in Africa, the fact that several million Wolof people in Senegal didn’t have a Bible in their language answered the “where?” of that earlier tug on her heart. While French is the official language of Senegal, schools are not available to everyone, and Wolof is the commercial language.
After learning French, Marilyn arrived in Senegal in 1972 to join the Wolof Bible translation project. The project was begun in1963 by Eric Church, a Brethren worker from England. When Eric retired in 1990, Marilyn took over as coordinator of the project. The team consists mostly of nationals — translator, typist, revisers and testers from all Wolof dialects — and a proofreader from another mission. In 2006, WorldVenture appointed another couple to help with the translation. Marilyn lost the first Old Testament translator after his premature death in 2000, but says now, “God’s putting the team back together. This gives me the assurance that the project is not my idea, but his.”
The New Testament was published in 1987 (10,000 copies) and the second edition in 2004 (20,000 copies). Two-thirds of the Old Testament is first drafted, and 20 percent of the Old Testament is published in printed or electronic form. Two dozen organizations are putting these Scriptures into use in various media for an audience that consists largely of those who learn by listening: radio, the Jesus film, audio cassettes, digital audio players, and a series of stories on the prophets. Computer generated transcription into Arabic script makes the translation available to those who studied the Koran and are literate in Arabic. The New Testament is accessible on the Internet on a couple of sites, including www.biblewolof.us. While the Wolof church is still small, it is growing.
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