The Radio Station at the Farm

About a year ago Jimmy and I started talking about a Kekchi radio ministry based at the institute/farm. We thought it would be a very effective tool. Plus, the students could be trained to run it and get another valuable skill. 

There are Kekchi radio ministries further south of us, but there are none that reach the majority of Petén. There is a monopoly on radio frequencies, so to purchase a registered one would cost $130,000. The ones south of us are operating without being registered and could be fined and shut down at any time. We really thought this was impossible, but still felt God was placing a radio ministry on our hearts.

Then last September Lifeword, a Stateside radio ministry, contacted us and asked if they could help us start a small radio station at the farm. We found out that if your station reaches under a 10 mile radius it doesn’t need to be registered. This ministry sent a team from Honduras to help us set one up. Professor Juan is going to head up the ministry and 2 students were trained on how to edit new programming. We have a store at the farm but it isn’t always open because it would cut so much out of our profits paying someone to run it. Now we can pay these guys, so that as they are running the store they can be working on programming when no one is there buying things. They can also rotate so that they can still work on their farm projects.

The Radio Tower Going Up

    The radio station runs from 6AM to 10PM. We record the 4 services during the week along with music, dramas, and other devotionals and discipleship materials the students are working on all in the Kekchi language. It’s neat because the radios in people’s houses run on batteries so even when there is no power (which is pretty often) and things get quiet, you can hear the radios coming from everyone’s homes. 

Students Being Trained (Everyone was interested!)

 Over the last couple months people from all the neighboring villages (8) have been coming to visit the radio station! They often bring donations because they appreciate it so much. We are looking forward to getting more training on editing and organizing programming so that we can have a large library of Kekchi programming. Jimmy and the students have translated several worships songs into Kekchi, they go out over the airways during the services. 

Our first youth service that went out over the radio.

The students want to start a call in program. They want to begin with pray requests but eventually make it a question and answer time too for people who have specific questions about the Bible. Lifeword contacted us again last week and said that they would like to continue helping with training and also with equipment to start more radio stations around Petén as the students graduate and spread out into the unreached villages!

So God put this radio ministry on our hearts without us understanding how it would be possible while He was orchestrating all of the details. Please pray for the men working the radio and that God would continue to use this ministry to open doors into the unreached hearts and villages all over Petén!

Like our church and our fourth child, it is taking us some time to come up with a name. Everything is just "the church at the farm", "the radio at the farm". So when we figure any of those out, I will let you know!

A Little Technology in the Jungle Goes a Long Way

Louis Powell has now been down twice to visit us. We first met him when he tagged along with the group from LifeWord radio ministry last March.

It was then we began planning several more ways to reach Kekchi people, specifically centering on more Bible training for those unable to get training. Louis has designed the T-Box for just this purpose. It is a small speaker box that accepts a micro-SD chip and/or a USB drive. It also is equipped with a radio tuner and it's speaker is loud enough for at least 25 people to hear easily. In November I (Jimmy) will be giving the 22 boxes Louis brought down to the national missionaries here in Petén. They will placing these boxes in villages with men who desire to be pastors but cannot come to our training. We are putting together a Kekchi mp3 library with teaching on various subjects. Every month I will be giving the new month's USB to the national missionaries who will in turn switch them out with the old ones in each village. Each month we will have a new theme and the men can listen to the training in a correspondence course format. You can see a picture of one below (on the left).

However the box above is not only proving training in just one house, it is running a radio station! Louis also brought along this trip a radio transmitter and antennae. Every village we work in is a result of the radio station in the southwest corner of Petén, therefore every village already has a radio presence. Except that last December we helped Mateo Botzok start a church in the city of Poptún, where the big radio station doesn't reach. We began paying for him to be on a local, spanish radio station for one hour each week in Kekchi, and with this his work began to grow quickly.

When Louis mentioned to me about his small radio station I immediately thought of Pastor Mateo and the work in Poptún. Mateo previously worked an even larger Kekchi Baptist radio station for 5 years in another department. With his prior knowledge and good radio voice, we knew that this could be very successful.

On the 18th I took the gear to Mateo's house and we began setting it up for a trial run. 3 hours later we were broadcasting the book of Matthew in Kekchi on 100.1 FM.

{Please excuse the cellphone photos}

Mateo supports his family by working as a carpenter. As such, he had all the tools needed to set up a makeshift tower.

Again, this is just a temporary set up until we build a more fixed tower, but it worked well for testing.

You can see here that it is not very high above his house. After getting it stable and setting up the T-Box to play we began looking for a frequency that was not being used by somebody else. Then we started driving to see how far it would reach. As we drove we would pass Kekchi house after Kekchi house that is currently not involved in the work, but now has the Gospel available to them. With just this short tower we had a range of 2km. At full height we should reach 3 miles or 5km. Beyond that range will be difficult to convince people to walk to church anyways.

The purpose of this is to strengthen the church there. First we will be able to give the current members more Bible training each week. Mateo plans to run the radio for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening. Secondly this will be a great outreach to the Kekchi families that don't know about the church yet. It gives us something to put on flyers and pass out door to door and there is no other form of Kekchi language entertainment besides this radio station. We have a good monopoly in that regard.

Besides having our programs, he also has Kekchi music and the entire Kekchi New Testament already on the T-Box. Pray for Pastor Mateo Botzok as he works with this in addition to his growing church and his carpentry business.

Sunday after church we all gathered inside Mateo's house for prayer to ask God to use this new station.

{Mateo's son, Gamaliel, setting up the radio transmitter}

{Praying for the station}

The Kekchi National Missionaries

While the radio team was in Petén we visited with Domingo and José's families. They are the 2 Kekchi national missionaries that we work with. They are the only 2 nationals that have been finding the villages that call in to the radio station saying they want to hear more about this God. Recently Domingo's brother, Abelino, has just committed to start working with them as well. We have not done any outreaches with him yet though.

The red dot is radio Berea and the red circle is its coverage range. The blue dot is where we are building our forever house and where KBI will be. The yellow dots are where the white fields are, the villages that have no Gospel in them and call in to the radio. There are dozens and dozens of them in these yellow dot areas. To get to the yellow dot the missionaries drive on a highway from the red dot, to the blue dot, to the lake, down to the purple dot where they can go down some dirt roads into the jungle. It is 4 hours to here from where the national missionaries live near the red dot, so we are in the process of helping them move to the purple dot. The purple dot is actually Poptún, the town where we have been helping start a Kekchi speaking church. This will help them be able to spend more time with their families rather than being gone several days at a time.

We are also working with this radio group, Lifeword, to set up solar powered radio repeaters that will reach the rest of Petén. Until we get KBI set up and start training more pastors, there is no one to work in anymore villages that call in anyway.

So on to Domingo and José's house...

{Silas & Domingo}

First we stopped by Domingo's. Some ladies were sitting out front of his house shelling corn.

This is his wife, Candelaria, cooking lunch for us.

It was a caldo, meat in a soup that taste like is has been simmering all day, very delicious. It was so nice of them to have the whole team in their home and serve us such a wonderful meal. Jimmy is not pictured at the table because he was running a fever and didn't eat a thing all day.

He was chilling in the hammock with my sweaty boys! It was an extremely hot day. Thankfully Jonah and Silas love just plain water, so it is pretty easy to keep them hydrated.

This is Donimgo's family. The two oldest are girls, the two youngest are boys, and his wife is pregnant and due any day!

Domingo lives very close to the radio station, so while we were there we stopped by.

I learned something that day, don't walk into a radio booth unless you are planning on saying something LIVE over the radio. They had all of us say something... yikes! So we all said hello and how thankful we were for all that God is doing through this radio station and all the people that work to make sure it stays on air.

Afterwards we went to José's house. He has a wonderful family too. Most of his kids were off at school, so I just got a photo with him and his wife (whose name is Candelaria as well).

I felt sort of bad because Candelaria had fixed us a large, very good meal too, but we had just eaten about an hour and a half before that at Domingo's. I think we all shoved down as much as possible until we were going to pop!

Except for poor sick Jimmy of course. That was the only point in the day when I did not feel all that bad for him!

I cannot think of anyone in ministry I have any more respect for than Domingo and José. They make so many sacrifices just because they believe with all their hearts that God has called them to reach the unreached with the Gospel. I am so thankful for them and their families. Please pray for these men and their families. Satan would love nothing more than to take men as effective as these out of the ministry God has for them. We see Satan fighting every day.

The Kekchi Radio Ministry in Petén

A couple days before we left Guatemala for this furlough we had a radio team come down from Lifeword. It is a ministry that spreads the Gospel all over the world through indigenous radio. They help in the areas of technical support, programing material, special equipment for rural areas with no power, follow-up strategies, and support for the nationals following up on the people who call in. They will also be helping us with some solar powered repeaters since the radio station only currently reaches about 1/3 of Petén.

The Kekchi churches in the SW corner of Petén started this radio, but Lifeword has done a lot and will do a lot to help it grow and be even more effective. We have shared this in churches, but maybe not on this blog. The Kekchi are animists. When they hear about this new God on the radio they call in to find out more about Him. Is He powerful? More powerful than the gods they already have? Should they worry about Him? They want to learn more and ask someone to come to their village. You cannot just show up to a Kekchi village unannounced. Even another Kekchi man from a different village is a stranger. These calls are what open the doors to these villages that are in complete darkness.

After you have a way in, you can start forming relationships. Then you can share the Gospel. It takes some time, but eventually several come to have a personal relationship with Christ. They turn away from all their little gods, to serve the one true God. A mission is started. Then after more families accept Christ a self supporting church is formed. It's a beautiful thing!

{Luis & Domingo}

The team first started by training Domingo and José on some new equipment. One thing they wanted to distribute are small, mp3 playing crosses (like the one around Domingo's neck), preloaded with the Kekchi New Testament and a radio receiver. They last a long time on one charge, but Louis Powell also brought some solar panels to charge them. Jimmy told the guys that they looked like Catholics with their crosses, but Domingo laughed and said it's a good cross because it had God's word inside it.

{Louis & José}

Louis also brought some Proclaimer boxes. These boxes are self charging with a built in solar panel or even a hand crank. These also had the Kekchi New Testament on them, but they are much louder and can be used in a small group setting.

After the team trained José & Domingo, they trained Jimmy, to make sure nothing was lost in translation!

To get this team out into some remote villages Jimmy needed a 4 wheel vehicle that could carry 7 people, but there weren't any available at the time, so Maricio (the owner of the beautiful place we eat at across the lake) rented us his Land Cruiser (that he hadn't driven in a while). While the team trained at the hotel, Jimmy had to take the Land Cruiser to the tire repair place. One tire went completely flat overnight.

This little boy was the tire mechanic available at the time.

We got it all patched up, but while climbing a hill on the way to our first village, a different tire blew out.

The beautiful thing about Land Cruiser is the jack fits into the bumper. It made changing the tire pretty easy. They plan on bad things happening on the road.

The first village we went to was San Miguel Alto Uno.

When we first visited this village with Andy Schalchlin 3 years ago for a medical clinic, there were no Christians in the village. We have been back several times to show movies and last summer visited the first Christian family with the youth team from Daytona and did an evangelistic presentation.

In early March a second family accepted Christ. Manuel (below in the checkered shirt in the middle) is an influential man in the community that recently accepted Christ. We give a Kekchi Bible to each family that accepts Christ. While Jimmy was there Manuel asked him for 22 more Bibles (he and Juan already had two) and 12 hymnals. He told Jimmy that by the time we got back he expected there to be 24 Christian families (out of 100 families in the village) and he wanted to make sure they had Bibles.

The weekend after this team left, another family accepted Christ and the weekend before we left fro the States we heard that 8 more people had accepted Christ. While we've been gone they have started building a church building. Manuel told Jimmy that day that if he would teach him how, he would like to be the pastor of this new church.

{Manuel}

We left some crosses and a proclaimer with these new believers so they can begin to listen to God's word.

On the way to the next village we came upon a truck that asked us for a jump. Having just experienced truck problems, I didn't want to pass up giving a favor when we might need one just around the corner. Their truck wouldn't jump off the battery in the Land Cruiser, but a little push was all they needed to get on the road. It was funny that the side of the truck said "Jezebel."

We also visited the village of Esquipulas. This was another village we visited with the teens to follow up with last summer, however at that time there were no Christians. The next month we went back for a "salvation service" when 3 families and a single man accepted Christ.

This lady says she is Catholic, although there aren't services in her village. She is very kind to José and Domingo when they visit and was excited to receive a Bible for the first time. She cannot read and has her daughter read to her, so the cross mp3 player was perfect for her so she can listen to the Bible whenever she wants.

This is Juan, one of the men who accepted Christ last July. He has taken it upon himself to encourage the other new Christians in his village and witness to his neighbors. He is working to try and build a church building.

We also took the team to visit the radio station. It is 3.5 hours from our house. Our whole family went with José, Domingo and the team, so we took our Microbus. It was the first time that the team had air conditioning in their vehicle and I think they appreciated it. On the final stretch of road we lost our spare from underneath the bus, but we quickly got it back.

The latch on the bottom broke, but José had seen this before and with some borrowed string, tied it back in place.

I will post more from our radio visit and dinners with Domingo and José's families soon. Please keep the radio ministry in your prayers along with all of the nationals who work so faithfully to keep it running.