God's Word for the Kuna San Blas
Inside a concrete church building, surrounded by a thick layer of sound-absorbing foam, two Kuna men sat behind microphones waiting for their next cue.
“One, two ...” counted Shingo Katayama, and the narrator began speaking his lines. His words were recorded directly onto a videotape of Campus Crusade for Christ’s JESUS film. Shingo, a recordist from JAARS, mopped sweat from his face as he waited patiently for each narrator to rehearse the next phrase.
At times he and his coworker, Marty Lange, struggled with frustration. Would they be able to complete the recording? Without air conditioning, or even electricity, the makeshift studio was a “hot box” that affected people and equipment alike.
An even more serious problem was noise: the shouts of children playing, the screeching and chattering of birds, and the drumming of torrential downpours on the aluminum roof.
They persevered, and after eight days of hard work and much prayer, they finished the project. They also recorded local music and portions of the Gospel of John for use on an audiocassette.
The cassette was not part of the original plan. However, Marty’s wife Karen had learned that most of the Kuna people could not read the translated Scriptures, though churches were planning to hand out tracts and copies of the Gospel of John as part of the JESUS film campaign.
The principal Kuna narrator, Lino Smith, was well respected and an excellent reader. Many evenings, after a full day of recording, Lino read the Scriptures for hours while people followed along in their Bibles.
But there was only one Lino and 52 Kuna islands.
Since many people had cassette players, Karen suggested making a cassette tape with music and read-along Scripture passages to hand out with the literature. Excited by this plan, Lino and the other pastors determined to finish the recordings before the JAARS team left.
The media campaign was met with an overwhelming response. The first order of 300 cassette copies was quickly followed by another order for 500. Increased interest in reading and in the Scriptures resulted in requests for new churches to be established.
Within one year of the first recordings, the entire Kuna San Blas New Testament had been recorded on audio cassette. To complete the recordings, the Kuna translation team worked with JAARS Vernacular Media Services; Hosanna, a Scripture tape ministry; and Viña, a Guatemalan vernacular media ministry sponsored by Wycliffe Bible Translators.
As the Viña recordist looked for speakers for the tapes, he discovered many fluent readers among the Kunas and a great interest in the Scriptures. The introduction of video and audio cassettes the previous year had served as an effective bridge between the Kuna San Blas culture and the Scriptures.
Today, God's Word continues to changes lives in the Kuna San Blas language group—by speaking in the language and medium they understand best.
