A couple weeks ago, another person working on this project with me and I met up with a couple of Dong folks to put in a week of work on the project. We did not make a lot of progress if counting only the number of stories completed, but considering most of the material we recorded was from the prophets and much more difficult to naturally tell in story form, we feel like we have passed the halfway mark, and the next time we meet we can now move on to the New Testament stories, which are much easier to tell.

As I have said before, scheduling is the most difficult part of this project. After five schedule changes, the Lord gave us a good week of work. Honestly, I feel the Lord is helping us out when we might overdo it: if we can continue to work in short one-week spurts, the work can be finished fairly quickly, and the authorities are less likely to catch on to what is going on.

Let us praise the Lord for the progress made. Now, there are six more stories told in a dialect of Dong that includes tens of thousands of monolingual Dong speakers who would not hear the word of God firsthand any other way. Stories that tell of the life of Elijah and the water drenched and fire quenched sacrifice on Mount Carmel, of Jonah’s reluctant travels to Nineveh, and of the beautiful prophecies through Isaiah of the coming servant of God that would take away the sin of the world.

 

Please pray that God will continue to guide us to the next opportunity we will have to meet together and record a few more of these Bible stories into this Dong dialect.