Recently we held a primer writing workshop where we wrote a complete curriculum for teaching the Tarahumara to read in their own language!
God answered many prayers. We prayed and prayed that God would provide native people to help with this project, and we were blessed to have ten people who consistently helped for the two weeks.
Three literacy consultants came to give oversight to the workshop. They have experience developing literacy programs in languages that hadn’t previously been written, and they’ve also developed an amazing computer software that makes it so much faster and easier to develop the primers.
God also provided a suitable facility. The largest church in the area gave us the use of their facility, including rooms to stay in, and a kitchen. They provided three cooks who did an amazing job serving us three meals a day, always on time.
It was beautiful to see the people getting excited about this project! Before the workshop, they had only a vague idea of what it was all about. But as they worked to write stories in their own language, they had so much fun, realizing they were actually making books in their own language! One of the girls told me, “This is more amazing than I thought it would be!” And several days into the workshop, she said, “This keeps getting better and better!”
People from three villages helped. Each village varies slightly in their pronunciation of certain words. We had to decide how we were going to spell these words. The people for the most part didn’t push for their own way, but worked together to find a way that would work for all three villages.
We are excited that another step has been taken towards the Tarahumara being able to read the Bible in their own language! However, we’re not there yet. The next step is to have a trial class where we teach using the primers we made, correcting any mistakes we find.
We hope to train people from each of the three villages to be literacy teachers. Once there are new readers they will need lots of books to practice their reading. It will be a big job to write books about many subjects for reading practice. And we pray that before too long there will also be portions of the Bible translated for the people to read.
– The Tarahumara Team