Pray for Pacific

Ask the Lord of the harvest to raise up more Papua New Guineans to step forward to train as translators, literacy workers and administration/management staff. There is a huge need for trained translation consultants in particular. And pray for the right person with training and experience to take up finance and human resource development.

The Bible Bilum Parternship meetings in May hosted by the Cassowary Road United Church in Lae were a great success. This was the fifth meeting of the partners involved in developing a  strategy of reaching the remaining 300 languages in PNG still without the Word of God. About 20 organizations and church groups signed the covenant to partner in seeing the Bible in every bilum in PNG.

Rejoice that the final two New Testament books of 1 Corinthians and Hebrews were checked (for accuracy, clarity and naturalness) by the Bible Translation Association's translation consultant, Kidu Magi in May. Thank the Lord for giving strength to the Urat team and their translation advisor, Hilkka Arminan to complete the process. Ask God to guide the process of preparation for printing so this language group will have the scirptures soon.

Thank the Lord for work that is progressing in Morobe Province which is estimated to have over 100 languages. More than 30 of these still do not have any Scriptures in them. Ask the Lord to raise workers to take on the challenge of giving the Word of God to the people of these languages that are still waiting. Pray for the Church in Morobe Province as they partner with Bible translation organizations like the Bible Translation Association to see this challenge met.

Praise God that the Maskelynes and South East Tanna New Testaments are just about ready to go to the printer. Please pray that the printing and return shipping proceeds in good time. Pray for David and Sue Healey and the Maskelynes team as they work over the next few months on recording the New Testament, teaching literacy and encouraging the use of the translated Scriptures.

Praise God for the Bible bookshop of AuSIL* in Alice Springs. They are now able to offer customers audio Scriptures in some languages, either in USB or CD format, and have a continuing ready supply of stock for the shop. Pray that customers will be inspired to follow along in their books using these audio Scriptures. Pray for the manager, Coralie Grant. She will be working with a Warumungu woman, Lizzie Johnson, to begin drafting the first verses of Scriptures in her language. They will use OurWord, a simple comupter program for native speakers.

*AuSIL is the Australia Society for Indigenous Languages

Praise God that the Alyawarr Bible is now on the web, and that the on-line interactive Alyawarr Picture Dictionary trial is underway. The edits to the Luke audio recording have been completed. Pray that the recording can be duplicated during June for distribution.

Pray for the approximately 800 speakers of Yoidik on the coast of Madang Province. Their language use is strong, but there is no Scripture in Yoidik yet. Ask God to call someone to work with the Yoidik in translating God's Word.

Pray for the Translator's Training Course which runs from June 27th to July 5th. Pray for the mother-tongue speakers learning to be effective translators of the Word of God, and for the national translators who have volunteered as mentors and teachers. These are Bougainvillians training Bougainvillians

Ask God to give wisdom and knowledge to people working to advance the Multi-Language Initiative. The goal is to work out a general method by which SIL-PNG can design, implement and resource a multi-language project. In late June there was a Language Program Management Course taking place to discuss questions such as:
   What kind of people are needed to supervise multi-language programs?
   How do we organise clusters of languages?
   What kinds of resources are needed?
   What kind of training do language program managers need?