June-July
2011
"Oh, at last I do understand the Bible!"
 The audio-recording in Moscow of the Children’s Bible in the Evenki language has been finished. To find anyone who could read the text turned out to be a hard task, though Evenki is the mother-tongue of many people scattered over large areas from the Yenisei River in the west to Sakhalin Island in the east and from the Taimyr peninsula in the north to the border of China in the south. People are simply illiterate in their native language! The salaries of the teachers of the Evenki language are so small that even elementary schools lack such specialists. For all these reasons it was meaningless for IBT to print and distribute the Children’s Bible without supplying it with an audio recording of the entire text.
Evenkis are thirsty to hear the Word of God in their mother-tongue. Father Timothy, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in the capital town of Tura says that the majority of his parishioners are Evenkis. The hardships of life in the Far North push them towards becoming seekers after God. People participate in church services and are eager to learn about Christ, but in most cases they start reading the Bible in Russianonly to find that they do not understand it.With  their traditional animistic beliefs they lack the fundamental biblical background which is needed to grasp the message of the New Testament. One elderly woman who is a true believer and a committed churchgoer rejoiced at hearing the Evenki text of the Children’s Bible during the comprehension testing. “Oh, at last I really understand what it is all about!”, she exclaimed enthusiastically. Unfortunately she is among those who can’t read for themselves, but need the audio-recording.
Elena Petrova is a new person in the project. She came to Moscow to take part in the audio-recording of the Children’s Bible and is very enthusiastic about this undertaking. “I always had a Bible in Russian, but to tell the truth I didn’t read it”, she confesses. “But now, when I am getting acquainted with the text in Evenki, I am for the first time in my life discovering the Bible for myself! I can’t find the proper words to say how interesting it is! All of my ancestors were baptized and married in the Russian Orthodox Church. They had great reverence for sacred things. My grandfather lived in the taiga. In the Soviet years he had an icon on the wall and a portrait of Lenin next to it. He used to explain that he kept Lenin’s portrait there for a special reason: to escape persecution for the holy icon! But my relatives didn’t know the basics of their faith. The same is true with respect to many generations of the Evenki people”.
“In fact the Children’s Bible turns out to be not only or even not at all a children’s book”, claims the philological advisor and one of the translators, Nadezhda Bulatova. “For the moment it is simply THE Bible for my people. The main biblical stories are reaching the Evenkis in their mother-tongue for the first time. They are presented in the most accessible form and accompanied by the most beautiful illustrations. There is simply nothing written in our language comparable with the Children’s Bible!”
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