Aghem Cameroon

Crawley Baptist Church is linked with the Aghem  Bible Translation Project in NW Cameroon through Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT).

On February 4th 2007, in a formal service of commitment, the church agreed to adopt the Aghem people group in the English speaking part of the country, which has a population of c50,000.  The local people are mostly subsistence farmers and live in a group of villages.

There is a team of people supported jointly with WBT who are working on translating the scriptures into the Aghem language and also setting up a literacy programme.  The project has been given a piece of land on the edge of the village and this year we raised and sent out £220 to buy trees to mark out the area.  They have just planted approximately 236 trees, and with local contributions managed to buy some pineapple plants to generate funds for the project.  Fortunately the rains have come to water these in!

We are beginning to learn what we can about the culture and people, having had visits from Cameroonian contacts in the UK.  Translation work will be a challenge for the team.  One interesting fact we discovered is that in the Aghem language there are only 3 words for colours: black, white and red. So ‘green’ would be translated ‘as black as the grass’ for example!