Because the Engan people of Papua New Guinea are largely an oral culture, a translation team is creating audio recordings of each book of the New Testament as they are completed. Those audio records are then distributed in two main ways.
The first way is on solar-powered MP3 players. These audio players allow people to listen to God’s Word in Enga for hours at a time, and when the battery dies, they simply place the player in the sun to charge. We’ve heard stories of people saying, “When we read the Bible in Tok Pisin (pidgin), we never read a whole chapter at a time. But we can listen to an entire book of the Enga Bible in one sitting without getting tired!”
Once people start listening to the Bible, there is a tendency for those with basic literacy skills to want to read along with a printed copy as they listen to the recording. In the process of doing so, they teach themselves how to read their own language. As a result, we are also releasing audio recordings of the Enga Bible as an Android phone app that highlights the text sentence-by-sentence as the audio recording plays.
Even among people who live with no electricity or running water, Android phones are starting to become more and more common. And The other benefit of the Android phone app is that the distribution is completely free for anyone who has an Android phone. Technology is truly revolutionizing the way Engan people access God’s Word!
Adapted from a story by Adam Boyd on PNG Experience
Photo by Newbreak Church