Brazil's ALEM

I left Jamaica on Sunday, January 15, flew to Miami, and then flew to Brasilia, Brazil arriving on Monday, January 16. The purpose of the trip was to assist ALEM (Association of Linguistic Evangelical Missionaries), a Brazilian organization dedicated to training national missionaries, with their computer needs. The courses had already been started and 26 students were enrolled. They were desperate for new computers as a portion of the training is in linguistic principles and needed computers and linguistic software for the course.

Vision 2025 focuses on transitioning from doing Bible translation ourselves to assisting the national church to accomplish the task. We thank the Lord that donors have the same perspective as several days before leaving for Jamaica, we were informed that a donor provided the funds for 13 computers and additional hardware (over $23,000). Two days before departing to Jamaica, we ordered 10 Dell desktops. They were waiting for us when Bob Wright (JAARS), Bill Penning (the Brazil branch network administrator) and I arrived there. We were absolutely delighted albeit not half as much as they were. We were kids in a candy store!

The other half of the project was the assessment to determine what it would take to set the entire building up with the computers, wiring, network infrastructure, wireless access, etc. Cristiano Barros, a Brazilian translator with excellent IT skills, and Davi Fuch, a recent German high school graduate in Brazil with his family, joined the assessment team. This was truly an international endeavor.

My role was to guide the discussion, ask the questions, and refine the results, and present it to the leadership. We successfully completed the project in the week alloted.