A year ago we were faced with a challenge: rapidly develop a machine translation (MT) system for written Pashto with limited resources. We had three full-time native speakers (one with a Ph.D. in general linguistics, and translation experience) and one part-time descriptive linguist with a typological-functional background. In addition, we had a legacy MT software system, which neither the speakers nor the linguist was familiar with, although we had the opportunity to occasionally confer with experienced system users. There were also dated published grammars of varying (usually inadequate) quality available.