The Collins Family

Dear friends,

Greetings from the lovely Amazon Basin. I’m sitting here at the keyboard overlooking the Ucayali River and listening to streaming classical Christmas music on the Internet. It’s 80 degrees at 7:00 AM. I’m a morning person. It just doesn’t get much better than this. I’m thinking of Nancy in Ashland where it’s 32 degrees with a winter mix. I’ll see her, Lord enabling, in just a week. But for now, we’re nearing the first day of summer here in the southern hemisphere. Yesterday I saw a four-foot long iguana and a coatimundi (sort of a cross between a racoon and an anteater).

A friend of mine had a buddy in college that everyone called “That’s nothin’” because no matter how outrageous an experience you may have had, he always responded with “That’s nothin,’” and he would then proceed to tell an even more outrageous saga.

Dear and good friends,

Greetings from the Amazon basin. It’s still 81 degrees and 80% humidity at 10:00 at night. I’m hoping it will rain later to cool things down, and it might. I heard thunder earlier today.

Thanksgiving is coming up, which starts the holidays in my book. I will start listening to streaming Christmas carols, and I might string some green and red streamers or something from my yellow and tan walls. Actually, we get lots of color from the local vegetation. There are all kinds of tropical plants and orchids (actually bromeliads) around that you pay big bucks for at home, but here they just shoot up by themselves. I’m staying in a small house just a few hundred feet from an oxbow lake on the Ucayali River, the main tributary to the Amazon, which is born about 400 miles downstream from my perch. Small fishing boats drift along and others, powered by small peque-peque engines putter by at all hours of the day and night.

Greetings from Peru. We have no electricity or water where CLAVE is supposed to kick off on Monday. We hear that things will be ready on Saturday.

Classes start on Monday (Oct. 25). We are planning for twenty students speaking 10 different indigenous languages. Pray that students would get a long well in very hot and humid circumstances and in intense classes. They will spend about 7 hours a day in classes.

Many of this year's students do not claim to be Christians. Pray that our faculty of ten would be a blessing to all of our students, both academically and spiritually.

Thanks much.

Wes

Dear and good friends,

Greetings from lovely Ashland on warm fall evening.

They say not to start a letter with an apology, so I won't apologize for not letting you know about our Colombian friend, Ismael, and his challenges back home "on the reservation." The fact is, I thought I had already brought you up to date on his situation and I see now that I haven't. But don't take that as an apology--a confession maybe--but not an apology.

I had written about the politics of his group, the leaders of which are well served by indigenous solidarity. But Ismael had become a Christian and, while still holding tightly to his language and culture, he is now firmly pursuing life in Christ. This goes against tribal rules and tradition.

This Sunday, September 12, Wes and Nancy Collins will be at Parkside Church. Please come greet them and hear an update on their ministry with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Peru and Guatemala at 11:15 am in the Fellowship Hall. They will also be at the Missions Table in the Commons throughout the morning.

Hi Friends,

Here are some prayer requests for us.

1. We're back in Ohio for two months. CLAVE will kick off in mid-October in the Amazon basin of Peru. There are plenty of details regarding room and board, travel, venue and curriculum that need attention. This training is directed specifically to speakers of indigenous languages to promote the analysis and reading of their native languages. We expect 25 students, 10 staff and 12-14 different languages.

Hi friends,

 1. We're grateful to God for the Parkside VBS offering that will go toward promoting literacy and the reading of the Scriptures among the Mam of Guatemala.

2. Our students are taking a month-long semester break from classes. Pray for their safety in travel and their recuperation. They have four more months of intensive training starting August 16.

God's best to you.

Wes & Nancy

Friends,

Greetings from cold and gray Lima.

I got a quick request for prayer from Ismael, a former student. You may remember that Nan and I were in Guatemala from October of last year until March. I taught several courses to native speakers of Indian languages from several different countries in the Americas. One of my students from that course is a university student in Bogota, Colombia. He is headed back to his home village during these days between semesters. He is one of just a very few Christians in his entire language group. He has heard that village elders have looked on his conversion to Christianity as a very bad thing and that they plan to reign him in and force him to return to the religion of his ancestors. He says that he is willing to die for his faith.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from cool, gray Lima. Nancy considers it cold and dreary, whereas I see it as an opportunity for the students to stay indoors and study. Judging from their phonology midterm, some did just that, while others may have spent a bit too much time outside coping with the cold. You might wonder what phonology has to do with Bible translation. Well, phonology is the systematic study of the sounds of language, partly how to identify and repeat them, and partly how to fit them into an alphabet. Both parts of this equation are important. To translate well, one must speak, and not just have an academic knowledge, of the language one is translating into.

Dear Friends,

Classes at CILTA have entered their second month. There are 16 students from 10 different Latin American countries. The training is intense. Pray that students not only thrive academically, but that they would see God's purpose in their training for cross-cultural ministries that each student aspires to.