Post 47 / The Next Language
June 17, 2021
Special Assignment
The Board of GRN authorizes and agrees to the director going in-field for a two year recording and training assignment, continuing to act as Director in field, with Dan Rulison serving as Acting Director on-site. The two year project will be documented and utilized to inspire future recordists. – GRN USA Board of Directors motion, May 2021
Last month the board of Directors of Global Recordings Network USA unanimously passed the above motion. This frees me for the next two years to move to the front lines. The focus will be on training and mobilizing youth to reach the last unreached languages on the globe.
Already God has provided two interns to learn, then teach, as we travel the world together.
Meet Nathaniel Loper, the 21-year-old son of Ralph and Ruth on our staff. He was in his third year of audio engineering when covid slowed that down. Nathaniel is gifted in technology and has been involved in our technical development in GRN for several years.
Meet Marcos Mejia. Marcos is 23, another engineering student who left school about a year ago when God called him to work with our mission. Marcos is a native of Culiacan, Mexico. Has been involved with distribution programs with the migrants for years. He is a charismatic gifted musician and just getting along in English. He has no visa for the US so may need to join us in a third country when we go international.
Our first focus is going to be Mexico. June 15-29 we will be in Chihuahua State trying to record one or two unrecorded languages. We will have the company of 10 or 11 other Americans who want to get involved in recording. This will be an exposure to the recording process for all of them.
Then in the month of August we will have a formal recordist training course in Oaxaca, Oaxaca State, Mexico. We have 4 Mexican trainees and one Colombian/Brazilian. Ed Young and Gustavo Calixto will be teaching with me. Our plan is to travel out with each of these trainees to contact and record unrecorded languages. Mexico still has close to 100 such languages with no recordings.
The plan then is for Marcos, Nathaniel, and myself to become a travelling/training/mobilizing team going directly to other side of the world and some of its unrecorded hot spots. That will include Nigeria and Indonesia for sure. It has been suggested that we should also include India. In both Nigeria and Indonesia we have already identified Christian youth that are available for training. Those two countries together represent well over 1000 of the world’s unreached languages (dialects). We would benefit from first spending time with our senior technicians in Australia for advanced training and evaluation of new equipment, techniques, and software. Australia may well be our first stop after Mexico.
Please pray that as we go God will add to our number those who are focused on the unfinished job. Perhaps even more will join our training team. This two year internship is intended to be about not just training but spiritual discipleship, as we study and minister together.
To follow our progress your best source of information as we travel around will be my weekly blog.
God Bless,
Larry DeVilbiss | Executive Director
Global Recordings Network USA