Printing the Good News for all to read
18 February 2010, 09:00When I first got to Mae Salong, Patti sent me the gospel she and Ning used to use when they were in Chiang Mai. It was translated in English and Thai, and I got a few people to help me translate it into Akha and Chinese. For the Akha, Law-uh did all the work, laboring over it for many days to make sure he had it exactly right. He was the best person for the job, as he’s Mrs. Wong’s Akha interpreter each Sunday.
The translation to Chinese was much more involved and was quite difficult. There’s no easy way to type in Chinese, and we had to download a program to help us. We used a paper that gave sound hints for using Pinyin to make the characters. Since we had this paper, we all got a chance to sit down and labor over the translation, with a Chinese lady looking on to make sure we had it right.
After we got it finished, we had a tract with the Gospel message in English, Thai, Akha, and Chinese. So now it doesn’t matter what languages you speak, and which ones you don’t speak; you can hand the tract to anyone in town, and they will be able to receive the Good News message. It was the same message I had used earlier to reach Ching Ting. I was very happy to get that finished. It took nearly the whole stay in Mae Salong to complete, but that’s a resource that has remained there ever since.
~Jonathan