Panama News

Here’s a short movie of the Emberas in Parara Puru enjoying the reading materials:

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Last week all four of us accompanied a group of children from our local church up the Chagres River to an Embera community called Parara Puru. The church kids have gone before to minister to the Embera kids and today they did the same - games, singing, sharing food, Bible stories, personal time of sharing the Gospel. Chaz had brought along a stack of provisional editions of Matthew and Paul’s letters and also samples of beginning reading materials in Embera. See sample: (more…)

About six weeks ago, Sonia, one of the students at the nearby Youth With a Mission training center, was leaving for an Embera village to do a month-long ministry practicum. I happened to have five copies of our latest provisional Scripture book in Embera, so I gave them to her to distribute in the village. I didn’t have very high hopes because this village’s church does everything in Spanish, some of the children don’t even speak Embera, and we haven’t had enough time to teach much reading in Embera (many can read in Spanish).

Last Sunday we saw Sonia at church and asked her how her time had gone. She said she had given away the books. A number of people were making an effort to read them. One day as Sonia was approaching a house she could hear one man was reading from Matthew and explaining it to his kids. To top it off, people said the translation was “perfect.” Emberas do not normally give compliments like that.

“Even now the harvest workers are receiving their reward by gathering a harvest that brings eternal life. Then everyone who planted the seed and everyone who harvests the crop will celebrate together. So the saying proves true: ‘Some plant the seed and others harvest the crop’.”  —John 4:36-37 CEV

When Cornelio and I were checking this passage some weeks ago, Cornelio said it sounded OK but he wasn’t sure why Jesus was saying it. The order in which the information is presented doesn’t help in making the Embera draft any clearer. Often when we have trouble drafting or revising a passage we talk first about what it’s supposed to mean. After a couple of failed attempts in explaining it, I finally asked Cornelio,
“When you first believed God’s word when you were a kid, who taught it to you?”
“Brother Gregorio and Brother Beltran,” he said.
“When you left the church,” I continued, “do you think they were sad?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Cornelio said.
“Now when you decided to come back, who taught you then?”
“You, Doug, Luis, Jamie…”
“When Gregorio and Beltran found out about this, do you think they were happy?”
“Yeah, sure they were.”
“So now all of us are happy, aren’t we?” I fought back the tears.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what this passage is talking about.”

What’s NOT on the schedule for June? Our consultant, Marion Miller, will be arriving June 1 along with her husband, Jim. While Jim helps out a translation team working in another language, Marion will be checking the first 10 chapters of the Gospel of Luke with us.

Part of the time Marion is in Panama she will be working with the translation team that works in the Naso language. I was asked to get training as a consultant by checking the Gospel of John with this team. This is the first time I have done real checking in the consultant’s role. I am pretty nervous about working face-to-face with them. That will be the week of June 11-15. Marion will be assisting me.

The last full week of June Doug and I will be meeting along with a few Emberas to do more reading of our draft of Luke. We have done more checking of it lately so the group read-through goes faster.

Thank you for your prayers and financial support!

The month of May is busy for everyone with end-of-the-year school functions and so on. For one example, the first weekend of the month Danny performed in a school play, took the SAT the next morning, and sang in a talent show his youth group put on that night to raise funds for their summer mission trip (see post below). It was also Missions Month in one of the churches we participate in, and we participated A LOT! One thing we did as a family was to take the children’s group from the church to an Embera village for a day of fun and interacting with the children there.

Bienvenido has recently completed drafting the book of Acts. That is another milestone and we are grateful for his hard work and his willing spirit to devote so much time to this work. He is a great asset to the translation project.  See his picture below.

Cornelio, an Embera we mentioned in an earlier post, came to help during two different weeks on the second revision of the Gospel of John. We finally finished last Thursday and he is beginning the back-translation in Spanish for our consultant.

In a post from December we mentioned PAAM. A meeting is being held May 28 to formalize PAAM as an official government-recognized organization. Representatives from denominations, independent churches and other organizations will be present in order to commit to being member organizations of PAAM. We will elect board members as well.

In April our N. Embera translation team met with one of our consultants, Bill Bivin, to finish a second check on Genesis. Since Genesis was the first book I did, it has had to be revised a lot, and so we felt a second consultant checking it would be worthwhile. It is approved for publication pending a group read-through of the whole book. We also checked 1 Corinthians with Bill and he has approved that as well. My partner Doug is using provisional copies of 1 Corinthians to test a couple of changes in the alphabet, which we agreed to try in 2005. Pray for clear direction in that.
Once Bill left we used the rest of time to read through more of our draft of Luke and got as far as 11:13. That material has now been prepared for our other consultant, Marion Miller, and she has already sent me her comments on those chapters. We will discuss them as a group when she comes to Panama in June.

Dear friends,

The youth group at our church here in Panama City is going on a mission trip this summer to Peru. Danny will be a part of this mission trip. They will be doing a vacation Bible school, concerts, sports clinics, medical help and any physical labor that is needed. We have posted a video of the youth pastor explaining the trip:

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The entire youth group put on a talent show two weeks ago to raise money for the trip. Here is Danny’s solo/duet, accompanied by Jeff Penn, one of the youth leaders who will be going on the trip also.   (note - the lighting was very poor and the video was digitally lightened, then compressed to upload to YouTube.  This is to explain the inferior quality of the video as well as the audio.  But it still gives you a good idea of how it sounded).
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The youth still need to raise more money for their trip. If you’d like to help out with this, please let us know so we can tell you how.