May 2023

Dear PRAYing family and friends,

April is the time of year when I (Darcy) focus more on Literacy projects in Asia-Pacific. Our tribal church planting teams put a lot of emphasis on Literacy programs. The reason for this is because illiterate people do not automatically have access to God’s Word when we print a Bible in their heart language! It takes a lot of hard work for them to be able to read and comprehend it well. I spend a significant amount of time involved in this, so we thought it would be appropriate to update you on some of the Literacy projects that I have focused on this past month:

Once a year we ask our tribal teams to update their list of materials that have been developed and made available in the tribal language. This includes literacy program materials, readers, translated scripture, and curriculum. Some of this material has been printed and some is available digitally. A lot of our teams have downloaded translated material onto cell phone apps that have been developed.

One of the Literacy projects (begun early last year) that I work on every month is translating the Literacy Manual into the national language. This manual has never been translated into the national language, but is a very important resource for our many Asia-Pacific co-workers. Since I translated the Literacy Software a couple of years ago, it made sense for the same translator to work on the Manual in order to maintain consistency of the terminology. One of our Asia-Pacific literacy consultants is working on this project with me. We are currently translating Chapter 13 of 17 chapters total.

Last week the teachers at our national missionary training center were introducing the Literacy Class to the final year students. They studied the importance of Literacy and were given instruction for utilization of tools that have been developed to build a literacy program in a tribal language. (The photos are of the students taking the literacy class.) After downloading and booting up the software, one of the missionary candidate students was totally dismayed to see that it opened automatically running in English. The student looking at it said, “Oh, I can’t use this!” The teacher assured her right away that they just had to change the language settings and reboot the software. After rebooting the software and seeing it come up in her language, the student had a big grin, saying, “I can learn how to use this!” The class was then divided into teams to put together first pages of a “primer” and input all the data into the literacy software.

This conversation, relayed to me over the phone, was a real encouragement to me. Sometimes we don’t see many results to hours of effort put into translation projects like these. So this is a tiny glimpse of God at work helping our team translate the Literacy software and Manual. Another encouragement came from my co-translator who expressed great thanksgiving to the Lord for having the Literacy Manual in a language that she can understand. I hope you are also encouraged since you are very much a vital part of these projects coming to fruition.

Last week I had a rough week with my computer not connecting to the internet. Praise the Lord, after much prayer and a lot of help from our IT team, a solution was found and I am back online.

Praise & Prayer Requests:

• Praise that my computer is fully functioning again
• Pray for our teams as they prepare literacy programs in tribal languages
• Pray for fluent readers in tribal churches
• Pray for Oke and I as we are working on content checking Old Testament portions to be checked in September.
• Pray for wisdom for our car search and that I will find good tickets this week.
• Praise for 7 new families arriving in Asia-Pacific this summer.

Thank you so much for being part of our global church planting team,

Darcy and Ron & Nita Berglund