Maritime Services
JAARS Maritime Services provides training, consultations and equipment to translators and support personnel who travel by water—often under distressing conditions.
To reach many areas where Bible translation is underway, personnel must travel for hours or days along sinuous river systems, swamps, lakes and volatile seas. Translators and their families may travel on ill-equipped, overcrowded boats, which lack the most basic safety equipment: life jackets, signal lights, radios.
And often, when storms strike or equipment malfunctions, no “saviors” can intervene; a local coast guard or search-and-rescue program may not exist.
For roughly 10 years, our Maritime Services team has worked to minimize these dangers and protect the safety of translators, support personnel and their families. We serve teams throughout the world by:
- Training personnel in water safety, navigation and maintenance.
- Supplying safety equipment, such as life jackets and radios.
- Providing vessels to translation teams.
- Conducting transportation surveys and designing innovative travel solutions.
- Coordinating search and rescue.
Through these services, we aim to reduce the stress, worry and fatigue that often accompany water travel in remote areas. As a result, translators can focus more of their emotional and physical energy on their mission: providing God’s Word in a language and medium people can understand.
