We have internet in the jungle!

Many of you have been praying for us to get a satellite connection (VSAT) up and running in the village. A couple of weeks ago, Kurt Metzger (far left) and Wayne Ferris (far right) came from Ukarumpa to get it set up. They are pictured above with Ben and Emil Ninkure after getting it up and running in a day and a half.

“Why do you need an internet connection out in Arop?” you might be wondering.

We need to back up translation work. When you have 11 languages saving a book like Luke, for instance, the files get HUGE. We could not do this over the radio connection. Additionally, Skype allows us to contact the village when we are not there. Consultants and advisors assist us in the translation work remotely. Also, computer support people can ‘take over’ a computer and fix it from another location. John Nystrom, our teammate in the US does this for us already.

The VSAT has already helped save the lives of a mother and her twin babies! After coming back from the village, we learned from Emil via SKYPE that an Arop woman couldn’t deliver her second baby. Ben called the hospital in Aitape, a 2.5 hour drive away from the village and connected Emil to them using Skype so that they could talk to each other. The hospital personnel sent a car out to get her right away. A week later, I was able to reach the hospital by phone and found out that although the mother and babies survived, the mother needed blood. Once again, we got on SKYPE and asked Emil to send a family member to the hospital to donate blood for her. We praise God for the life of this mother and her babies. We are grateful for the VSAT which allowed us to help them get to the hospital!

 

Co-laboring together: collaboration on translation notes with Paratext 7.1

I last posted here about our translation team testing a BGAN satellite terminal to share our translation notes back and forth between our remote village and the outside world.

UPDATE: I asked you to pray that…

• I can delete the old projects successfully
  • It took me until the wee hours of the morning, but I was able to delete the 63 old projects that were in my name.
• we figure out how to keep this from happening again
  • Thankfully, the network administrator was also able to help us delete over 1000 old projects from his end. This is a good thing! That means we shouldn’t have these old projects reappearing if one of the 20+ members of our team forgets to delete them and accidentally puts them on the server again.
• John will be able to use the BGAN to receive the new notes
  • Yes! It is working, and John and I have sent our translation data back and forth a few times already. This is the first time in the history of our project that we have been able to send this amount of data back and forth this easily and within the same day that we are working on the translation in different parts of the world.

In the Aitape West Translation Project we are using the newest version of translation software (Paratext 7.1) developed by the United Bible Societies. We have been helping them test the alpha and beta versions of this software in our multi-language context for the last two years. Last week I was using it to write translation notes on 1 Timothy which I sent to the Arop team in the village as they are preparing their translation to become the immediate source text for the other ten languages to translate later in the year. This week I’m using Paratext to write translation notes on Luke which I’m sending to the three Onnele teams as they make final edits and clean up their translations for publication in the next few months. Here’s how it works…

Let’s share translation notes with a BGAN satellite terminal

Although our family had to stay at our national training center, our teammates John, Beth, and Jessie still went out to Arop village, and they are meeting with a smaller number of translators since we were not yet able to get a new septic tank installed to accommodate the whole group. That means that as I check over 1 Timothy, I also get to help John test a new method of sharing translation data between Arop village and the outside world.

Loren and John troubleshooting the BGAN connection last July

Yesterday, I finished writing up about 35 notes for 1 Timothy chapter 1. I sent an email to John in the village letting him know that I sent those notes to an internet server managed by the United Bible Societies. He can get that email over a high frequency radio connection, but he can’t get the translation data over that slow connection. So he’ll be testing a new piece of equipment called a BGAN to connect to the internet and receive the data. BGAN stands for Broadband Global Area Network. It’s a satellite internet terminal about the size of a laptop. At about $6.50 per MB, we won’t be using this to surf the web.