IN THEIR COMMUNITY
IN THEIR COMMUNITY
A Psalm on the Bus to Lomé
Kara, Togo · May 20-31, 2024
Psalms Workshop
A few days ago, a Scriptura trainer boarded the bus from Kara to Lomé — the long route down the length of Togo — and settled in for the ride. At some point the driver put on a video. On the small screen mounted at the front of the bus, a group of people were singing Psalm 150 in Kabiyè.
She knew the song. She had helped the team who made it.
In May 2024, in Kara, a group of Kabiyè musicians spent eleven days learning to build psalms into their own musical traditions, local instruments included. Most of them had never done exegesis or translation before. They worked through the structure and meaning of the text, internalized it, then composed. When consultants later checked the songs against the Hebrew, they found the compositions needed very few changes — an unusual result for a group that had walked in with almost no translation experience. Psalm 150 was one of three psalms that came out of that room. You can watch a recording of Psalm 150 being sung below:
Now it was playing on a bus, chosen by a driver the trainer had never met, for passengers who had no idea where the song came from or that one of its makers was sitting a few rows back.
She took out her phone, recorded a few seconds of the screen, and sent the clip to Bio, a member of Scriptura’s team who had worked alongside her at the workshop. His reply came quickly: “Wow! I need to share this with everyone!”
No one on the Scriptura side had put the video there. The recording, published by SIL, had traveled on its own — onto a driver’s playlist, into a stranger’s afternoon commute. In many churches across the region, prayer is built from the psalms; verses are painted on houses and vehicles; people believe there is power in these words, and that God works through them.
A song made by a few Kabiyè musicians in Kara is now moving through the community on its own — sung, played, carried down the highway to people who simply needed to hear it.
