Meet Our Missionary Marian Hungerford

Marian was recommissioned as the official missionary of Faithful Savior Lutheran Church to Chad, Cameroun, and Points Beyond in October of 2008. Here is a brief summary of her story:

I was blessed with Christian parents who brought me up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We homesteaded 10 acres between Milwaukie and Gladstone, OR. I am the oldest of 9 children.

My parents sent me to Lutheran Bible Institute (LBI, now Trinity College) in Seattle for 1 year. There I heard about Wycliffe for the first time. But I was a "back to the land" hippie in the late 1960's and wanted to buy land and raise goats. Missions was for other people. At the beginning of year 2 at LBI,  friend sponsored me to Basic Youth Conflicts. I was blessed and healed in my social soul.

There followed Clackamas Community College, and then Eastern Oregon College in La Grande. In La Grande I heard again about Wycliffe and signed up for my first Summer Institute of Linguistics at University of Washington, Seattle in 1972.

SIL is both a summer institute and an organization of those working with Wycliffe for Bible translation and literacy in all the world's languages. During the second summer institute, I joined the organization of Wycliffe and SIL.

I graduated from Portland State University with an Anthropology B.A. and a minor in public health in 1974. The same Fall, I went directly to six months of jungle training in southern Mexico and then was assigned to serve in the Republic of Cameroun.

On the way to Cameroun, I spent 1976 in France learning to speak the French language. I Caught a tramp freighter in Marseille and arrived in Africa by ship at the end of February 1977.

Since then, for the last 30 years, I've been traveling between Cameroun and Chad. In 1978 I moved to the capitol of Chad, N'djamena to learn Arabic. God protected my feeble lamp from being snuffed out during the battles of the Civil War of February 1979 which drove me back across the border to Cameroun. I have "REFUGEE" stamped in my passport.

The 1980's saw me learning from the Kera peole in Chad. The New Testament was dedicated in 2006.

Other Significant Dates:

• 1984: First Medi-Evac from Chad to hospitals within Cameroun
• 1993-1997: Master's Degree in Intercultural Studies from Western Seminary in Portland
• 1981-2006: Interacting with many new SIL members as I taught at the Africa Orientation Course from Yaounde, Cameroun. The same course allowed me to live with Camerounian families all over the southern part of Cameroun
• 1997: Moving to Maroua, Cameroun and investing 10 years with the Muslim Fulani people.
• 2000: January, God protected my feeble lamp from being snuffed out again. A brain aneurysm on the carotid artery got me a fast Medi-Evac to South Africa
• 2006: An open door for Old Testament translation among the Guidar people

• 2007: A 2 hour move south of Maroua to Bainga to help the translation committee

Three Porjects

• Kera the New Testament in Chad and Cameroun 1981-1990, Fulani Muslims in Maroua, Cameroun
• Learning to script Arabic , 1997-2007
• Guidar Old Testament in Cameroun and Chad, 2007 until God moves me