October 2022

Praise the Lord that at last the Embaloh Bible has been sent to the printer in Jakarta!!! This project has been a major part of our ministry for the past 5 years! Our update this month will focus on a look back at some of the miraculous ways that the Lord has worked and opened doors to bring this project to completion:

In 2017 I began discipling Rina, an Embaloh tribal girl. At that time no plans were put in place yet to reprint the Embaloh Bible, but preliminary steps were being taken. We began working on some Embaloh language projects. Even though Rina was working in her own heart language, she put a lot of effort into learning to type and discover features of her own language. As I was working on the translator’s files in our Translation software, she was typing up portions of Exodus, the digital files of which were not able to be located at that time.

In 2018 we made a couple of trips to her village to do some literacy evaluations which showed the need for improvement in literacy skills among the tribal believers.

In 2019, we continued working on creating and publishing small booklets that would help Embaloh children and adults increase their reading and comprehension fluency level. As a result, their church library has grown by over 50 booklets, a songbook, lesson and Sunday School curriculum and scripture portion booklets.

As you may remember, in July of 2020 a fire destroyed the Nanga Nyabau village longhouse which was a huge portion of the village and most of the Bibles that were left from the first printing in 1997 were lost. The following month, the Embaloh church requested that we reprint their Bible, and the project was moved to the top of our priority list.

The Lord also expanded our team at that time to include people from the church in Nanga Nyabau, the original Embaloh translation team, our typesetter and friends from our sending church in Sheridan. Spread out all over the world we worked together through pre-printing steps, proof-reading, formatting, final read-throughs and many checks. During this process we faced many challenges such as flooding and non-existent internet in the village, covid and difficulties communicating. From Asia to Florida to Wyoming, we were all doing our part as you were praying from your location as well.

It has truly been a long haul and another good learning experience, leaning on the Lord for wisdom and direction each step of the way. This week another major accomplishment was how the Lord helped me learn how to build a Bible app step by step that the Embaloh people can download and install onto their phones. It was ONLY by the Lord’s faithfulness that it was successful. (He sometimes brings us out of our comfort zone to teach us new things.)

Serving Him together,

Darcy, Ron and Nita Berglund

Praise & Prayer Requests:

• Praise for getting to the point of being able to send the Embaloh Bible to the printer.
• Pray for the consultant check of the Dem Bible happening in Papua.
• Praise for the completion of 1,488 more verses of Sekadau Bible checked last week in West Kalimantan.
• Pray for carefulness in the Taman scripture portions being read through and proof-checked now.
• Praise that the literacy fluency of the Embaloh believers has risen significantly.
• Pray for the Tugutil Bible Dedication coming up in the next month.