Once again I greet you from the rainy season here in West Kalimantan! Since my last update a couple of weeks ago, much progress has been made in the area of Literacy projects needing to be addressed. Projects such as:
- Discovering what some of the literacy needs here in West Kalimantan are…
- Connecting with churches to discover what can be done to motivate the churches toward reading God’s Word…
- Continuing work on Semandang booklets/readers for their growing literacy program…
- Training believers to carry on the work of promoting literacy programs in the tribal areas of West Kalimantan…
I keep thinking that this will be the week that I can get back into some important Semandang translation projects (Old Testament verses and curriculum), but even now I am overwhelmed at all of my literacy responsibilities that need to be addressed before I can do that. I think this is a good problem to have. I just need to remember that everything must be done in God’s time and way. J
The Dayak (interior people of Kalimantan) people themselves admit, “Reading is not important enough to us. We need to be motivated by others. We don’t grow up from babies being read to everyday. It’s not natural for us. Reading on a regular basis is hard.” Think almost 90 different language groups that inhabit this island. Part of the reason for this is that there has never been an abundance of reading materials available to them. But we are seeing more and more young people who are asking us for books to read. One of our projects is to create interesting readers/stories in their languages that will increase the amount written materials available to them. The goal is to get people reading God’s precious letter to them. But if all you have to read is that, many will become discouraged and give up on reading just because it’s so much more work to read God’s Word then it is to read a simple story of something that happened in their village.
The past couple of weeks, our efforts have been concentrating mostly on one specific language here in West Kalimantan, the Embaloh/Palin language group. Yes, they have the New Testament and OT portions in their language. But very few Embaloh people are actually reading it. Some of the young people are concerned that by the time they are married and have children, it could be non-existent. Their Embaloh song book and other books are no longer in print. One girl said that she didn’t even know those books were in existence. So what can we do?
We start by opening a discussion with the church about their desires. We also begin writing and recording some cultural stories, geared toward children and adult, that are easy to read. Stories like “My hunting trip with my dad” and “My friends and I go to get durian fruit.” After that we move on to stories like “Ima learns to ride a bicycle” and “Turtle teaches monkey a lesson”. Through these stories they can be trained to do stories that might be a little bit harder like “David and Goliath” and “What is Easter?” and “How to treat malaria.”
These are not made up stories. These are the books that we’ve been working on the past couple of weeks along with some other ones. I’m trying to facilitate these projects. I’m trying to motivate the believers to be taking an active role in the production of literacy materials. I’m excited to see their enthusiasm and joy at creating something in their own language, a language that I can’t even speak or understand.
It’s a huge undertaking and we are so unprepared for doing it. We so much need God’s help and provision of wisdom and guidance for all of these projects. How to make the best use of the time God allows and how to involve those around us who have a love for God’s Word.
Thanks so much for praying with us and upholding us in prayer,
Darcy
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