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:<\/p>\n
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\u2019s time and way. J<\/p>\n
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The Dayak (interior people of Kalimantan) people themselves admit, \u201cReading is not important enough to us. We need to be motivated by others. We don\u2019t grow up from babies being read to everyday. It\u2019s not natural for us. Reading on a regular basis is hard.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s so much more work to read God\u2019s Word then it is to read a simple story of something that happened in their village.<\/p>\n
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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\u2019t even know those books were in existence. So what can we do?<\/p>\n
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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 \u201cMy hunting trip with my dad\u201d and \u201cMy friends and I go to get durian fruit.\u201d After that we move on to stories like \u201cIma learns to ride a bicycle\u201d and \u201cTurtle teaches monkey a lesson\u201d. Through these stories they can be trained to do stories that might be a little bit harder like \u201cDavid and Goliath\u201d and \u201cWhat is Easter?\u201d and \u201cHow to treat malaria.\u201d<\/p>\n
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These are not made up stories. These are the books that we\u2019ve been working on the past couple of weeks along with some other ones. I\u2019m trying to facilitate these projects. I\u2019m trying to motivate the believers to be taking an active role in the production of literacy materials. I\u2019m excited to see their enthusiasm and joy at creating something in their own language, a language that I can\u2019t even speak or understand.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s a huge undertaking and we are so unprepared for doing it. We so much need God\u2019s 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\u2019s Word.<\/p>\n
Thanks so much for praying with us and upholding us in prayer,<\/p>\n
Darcy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2026 Connecting with churches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[448],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-ethnos360","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/darcy-berglund\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}