The Coopers became members of Wycliffe in 1981, and have worked with the Buhutu people of Papua New Guinea [PNG] since 1985. Mary passed away in January 2020 but during her lifetime of service had keyboarded about 7000 verses, and done massive input to the Buhutu Dictionary She herself specialized in literacy and translation

 

Russ has worked for more than 40 years a consultant in linguistics and in translation, especially focused on training local PNG translators in language discovery (linguistics) as well as in translation. For many years he went back and forth PNG twice a year working with the Buhutu team as well as in multi-language cluster projects, but because of health factors, now works remotely from his home in Oregon, sending scripture passages back and forth to the Buhutu team "in the cloud."

 

In November of 2016 the Buhutu Mini-Bible was published along with a Buhutu Songbook. The Mini-Bible contains 2,582 verses from 27 different books of the Old Testament, plus the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Acts

 

All of the remaining books of the Buhutu New Testament are now completed, and the last four epistles are currently being consultant-checked in October 2024. Half of the New Testament is now through the "read-through" stage, and the remaining epistles are now being prepped for "read-throughs" prior to typesetting

 

Meanwhile the teams are doing drafting, village checking and back translations of eight additional Old Testament books.