DAVID ADAMS reads Andrew Sav’s account of a 2000 kilometre he and two mates undertook in Queensland to raise awareness of the need for Bible translators…
Andrew Sav,
Walking Home – 2000km in 80 Days
L & R Morgan, Melbourne, Australia, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0987579218
No getting around it, Andrew Sav’s journal of a 2000 kilometre walk he and two younger friends – Andrew Carnell and his cousin Dave Carnell – undertook in Queensland in 2010 in the name of raising awareness of the number of people who remain without any Scriptures in their native tongue – is a grueling read.
Not because of the complexity of the language – in fact, Walking Home is easily digestible and filled with enough funny asides to keep you hooked – but because, kilometre by painful kilometre, we accompany the man known as ‘Sav’ every step of the way from Cairns to his childhood home of Stanthorpe, ruined feet, painful back and all.
“An enjoyable, inspirational, and, yes, exhausting read.”
A Bible translator and linguist who was born in Australia but now lives in France with his family, Sav initially had the idea of taking a long walk in Australia to reconnect with his roots. And while that remained part of it was about, the walk also became about raising awareness of the more than 2,000 people groups who, at that stage, still didn’t have any Scriptures in their own language (the number has since dropped a little below 2000).
Spanning 80 days from August to November, 2010, the walk largely followed the route of Queensland’s Bruce Highway (much to Sav’s eventual horror) and saw the walkers stopping at various spots along the way to spread the word about the need for ongoing Bible translation work around the world.
Starting off full of optimism, Sav soon finds that the walk didn’t measure up to all he hoped it would be and has to deal with his own frustrations along the way as well as the many other challenges that cropped up, not the least of which were related to his own physicality, but which also include managing relationships with his two fellow walkers (not easy when you’re thrust together for such a long period)
There’s plenty of adventures along the way – such as the time Sav went for a dip in what are crocodile-infested waters or the time they got told off for walking along train tracks – and lots of anecdotes centring on the people they met along the way. People like the chocolate milk provider ‘Bushy Beard’, the poem-reciting ‘Mr Banjo’, and Rohan, the bullock-driver.
We also gain an insight into Sav’s work as a Bible translator, in particular into the Taruuba language of the Sahara Desert, and how the three of them grappled in increasingly inventive ways to get the message across to people about the urgent need for Bible translation, in particular how to answer people who simply say: ‘Why don’t they just read it in English?’
The book is interactive, complete with scribbled notes and pictures and some QR codes for scanning, which adds to the fun of reading.
An enjoyable, inspirational, and, yes, exhausting read (and, as a bonus, all profits from the book go towards recruiting Bible translators from South America).
(Oh, and you can read more about the walk on Sight in our earlier stories here and here).
