What a team!

What a team!

Thank you so much for your prayers during the Literacy Workshop in Colombia.  It was a completely wonderful, exhausting and profitable time! The first days were with the ten people from different countries in South America who were beginning the training for literacy ministries. It was obvious that God sent each one not just to learn but because they had specific gifts that were needed in the project of writing literacy materials for the Jiw and Cubeo language.

Then the Jiw and Cubeo teams joined us. What a big, happy group we were! Everyone worked long, hard hours and we completed the drafts of the first 3 primers and began the 4th primer in both languages. This is an amazing feat and has moved the teams forward by months and months! There will be follow-up in the next months to finish the literacy materials, but the most difficult and greatest portion of the projects are done. For pictures of the workshop go to the picture tab and look in the 3rd album, Our last trip.

The new literacy computer program was a powerful resource in these projects. It got a real workout in its first field test and will certainly be a gift from God for each of the teams that will be writing literacy materials. We really appreciate the team that worked day and night in order to fix any glitch we ran into so that progress on the literacy materials could continue the next day.

This workshop really took a team – from those who gave financially, to the participants who worked long, hard hours, to the computer team, and those who were faithfully praying. We learned so much and look forward to continuing to grow in this literacy ministry God has for all of us as we serve other teams around the world.

A highlight

As each team completed a primer we would all celebrate! Jerry would format and print it into a booklet for the team to see and make revisions. A highlight of the whole time was to see the reaction of Sulay, the Jiw lady who was working as part of the team. She was absolutely full of excitement and emotion as she looked through the first primer. Our prayer is that through these materials many Jiw and Cubeo might become good readers and have full access to God’s Word!

 

What’s next?

We are catching up on all the other project that were set aside during the time in Colombia. Just finished teaching a few classes by Skype at the missionary training center in England. Our next trip is to Mozambique, Africa during May and June to do the same thing we did in Colombia; training literacy consultants and then putting it into practice by helping missionary teams with speakers of the languages write literacy materials. But this time it will be with three different language groups! Please pray for clear communications and preparations with these teams as we begin corresponding with them.