Download the March/April 2021 Beans'talk with photos.

A long-standing problem

Over the years one of the challenges has been helping people get comfortable reading their own language. Now that the Quechua Bibles are out, the need is even greater. How can we help people read the Bible in their own language?

If anyone knows how to read, they learned in Spanish. While some people have become quite good at reading in Quechua, a great many people still struggle. Others have still never seen anything written in Quechua at all.

Let’s start reading!

Five and a half weeks ago Mark began airing a new Facebook ad to encourage people to install a free app he worked up to help them read Quechua. The ad is presented as a short video. You can click here to watch a special version of it he prepared in English for this letter.

It’s exciting to see the response. So far, out of 155,871 people reached with the ad, 14,557 have clicked on it to share it, respond to it, or get the app. A total of 1,055 have actually installed and opened the app.

That, to us, is amazing! If we ever sold over 1,000 complete sets of reading books so quickly in hard copy, we would be ecstatic! Not only that, but we have never reached such a broad audience before.

What’s in the app?

There’s a lot of fun reading in the app. After some instruction in Spanish, there’s an alphabet “book”, some traditional riddles, some easy reading stories, a collection of folk stories, and two classics: one about an Andean witch (a bit like Hansel and Gretel) and one about a character that’s half boy and half bear. All the stories include audio narration.

Following the numbers!

Mark keenly follows numbers related to the apps he’s posted. How many new people have downloaded the apps? How many different people use the apps? How many continue to use them after two weeks? A month?

While writing this letter, in the space of just a couple hours we saw that 265 more people had watched the ad. See how fun it can be to track these numbers! The graph below shows the number of users each day:

A joint consulting job

Just this month, Mark was assigned to an additional language group in Peru to serve as their translation consultant: Panao Quechua, working on the Old Testament. This will be a great opportunity for him to include the man from Guatemala he is mentoring. Antonio is learning the ropes of translation consulting. He will have the opportunity to both observe Mark at work and try out his wings while under supervision.

Young Panao Quechua girls

Praise and Prayer Requests

* Praise for God’s Word getting out to more and more people. Pray that it will have a life changing impact on people’s lives.

* Pray for Mark and Antonio as they begin checking the book of Job together. Pray for their working relationship and for their interaction with the team in Peru.

* Praise for the fact that Mom Bean’s facility opened up to visitors again. Pray that she might know she is well-loved as her abilities and memories both diminish.

Thanking God for his goodness,

Mark & Patti