INTERNSHIPS AVAILABLE!

 

How many of you had internships as students? I did. I had a fantastic experience conducting oral history interviews in Chicago.

How many of you were paid for those internships? These CBF interns did. They worked with us last summer developing educational videos and puppets. CBF's Student.Go program (or, given current circumstances, Student.Stay program) provides a variety of creative options. 

If you, or a student you know, would be interested, feel free to contact Taisha Seabolt, Global Missions Student and Training Specialist, or apply directly at www.cbf.net/studentdotgo. 

We're looking for an intern again this spring, too, to help us with social media. Feel free to contact us directly for more information.

Are you a college student wondering how God can use your gifts virtually during the Spring semester? Apply now to serve and learn through Student.Go, the student missions program of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Students will take part in a virtual orientation in late January 2021, receive a stipend, and serve for 14 weeks, including monthly meetings with CBF staff and field personnel, and weekly meetings with an encourager. Learn more and apply before the January 8, 2021 deadline at www.cbf.net/studentdotgo.

Opportunities List Spring 2021

Student.Go Virtual Positions

 

Webpage and Social Media Advisor/Designer – Westervoort, Netherlands– (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – Spring 2021

               Skills required: Desire to serve Christ's Kingdom;  computer, website and social media design and use; patience in working with members from a generation who do not have the same skill set.

 

Assistant for Silent Art Auction – Bali, Indonesia (field personnel currently in South Carolina due to COVID) – (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – *Special Project (mid-to-late spring through early July)*

*This is a special project that will start mid-to-late spring and go through early July. Student must be flexible as the pandemic may shift the position to a virtual one, and the type of work required may also include other responsibilities.

Skills required: Interest in art and culture, research and writing skills, social media promotion skills. Must enjoy talking to people and telling stories. Design skills are a plus.

 

 

Human Rights/FORB Researcher – Kosice, Slovakia – (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – Spring 2021

Ideally, the candidate chosen will have previous contextual knowledge of at least one African country from the Baptist World Alliance list.

 Skills required: Ability to work in a collaborative environment with an existing, diverse, and dispersed human rights advocacy network. Must have clear writing and communication skills and an understanding of how to weigh the value of research sources.

 

Media Strategist – Somerset, Kentucky – (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – Spring 2021

Skills required: Media Strategist needs to be knowledgeable in all aspects of Social Media, comfortable with website design, proficient in PowerPoint and basic video production. The Media Strategist needs to be self-motivated and comfortable working remotely. Excellent communication skills are a necessity.

 

Spring Program Intern (Spiritual Formation Assistant or Social Media Assistant) – Miami, Florida – (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – Spring 2021

Skills required: For the Social Media assistant opportunity, the student should have a creative mindset, knowledge of social media platforms and analytical tools, good communication skills, medium level of video creation and editing knowledge, experience using PowerPoint, Word, and YouTube, along with experience with design on Adobe or Canva (or other design websites). Additionally, students should have a desire to explore creative ways to share content pertaining to TML’s mission, ability and willingness to work with others as a team member, flexibility and ability to meet deadlines.

 

Tutor for Kids / Kids Bible Club – Fremont, California – (1 Student) Undergraduate or Graduate Students – Spring 2021

Skills required: Ability to work with children and help with schoolwork, should be friendly, enthusiastic, and creative. Should be able to work on their own and with guidance. Must have a computer and ability to use Zoom.

 

 

It's fun to see these kids playing MOSAIC

Would you like to play Mosaic, too? 

How-to video available at:  Davar on YouTube

Written instructions in Romanian, English, and Dutch available at: Davar: Bridging to Literacy. 

Many thanks to Vasilita, for leading this children's club;

to Coco for translating this game into Romanian;

and to Alina for being the voice for the Romanian version.

Introducing Our New Host . . . Again?

Many things are new. 

• We have a new host for our Davar: Bridging to Literacy videos. 
  
• We have a new, updated version of Blog-spot. 
• And we have people who looked at this Blog-spot last week and came away with new questions. Like, why wasn't there anything in this blog post???

Because of the new, updated version of Blog-spot. If I have managed to learn something new, this post will now contain a photo of our new puppet host. And if it doesn't, I still have new things to learn!

“Remember not the former things,
    nor consider the things of old.
19 Behold, I am doing a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

(Isaiah 43: 18-19, very badly taken out of context!)

AN UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT--PUPPETS!

What have you found yourself doing this summer that you never expected to do last summer? Or even last winter? 

Our list includes: 
~working with two student interns through CBF's Student.Go program;
~making instructional videos of DAVAR: Bridging to Literacy games (with said student interns);
~working with a puppet made by one of these interns for use in the instructional videos.

The Student.Go interns couldn't go anywhere this summer. However, we had a couple of media projects that they could do long distance. 

When everyone was on lock down, we started making videos so families could do DAVAR games at home. This evolved into making instructional videos with the added goal of having people from an oral culture background easily learn to lead the games for groups.

Someone suggested using a puppet in the videos. One of the interns responded enthusiastically. 

He wrote: I would like to say i am loving this program and process and i think potentially growing these videos would be a fantastic experience and definitely beautiful for a resume. Thank you for letting me do this.

Here's some photos of the puppet in progress. 

Stay tuned to see what God will do with this next!

Parents (and Aunts) Learn to Teach at Home

How many kids live in your house? Enough to start a club?

A couple we know have that many in house, though they only have two children themselves. We'll call them Silvia and Eduard. Before Eduard married, he helped in his own Romany village with the first field trial of the Parent-Child Club. Now that he is a parent, he and his wife have started doing Parent-Child Club activities . . . in their own house.

This house has three rooms. A different family lives in each room. All together, there are 9 children roaming around, ages 13 to infant (Eduard & Silvia have two, under the age of 2.) So Eduard and Silvia were very open to trying out Parent-Child Club activities in their own home. Eduard's sister Aliona helps.

And in between the Friday afternoon activities, the children go on playing the games themselves!
Interested in learning more? Check out the Parent-Child Club activities in English or Romanian. (Dutch language version available upon request.)

And even though there are a lot of people in Silvia & Eduard's house, they need even more help. We are looking for prayer support, 3-9 people, who will regularly pray with them from now until Easter. Children don't have to live in your house . .  . for you to be part of their family.

For Moms and other interested parties--Parent-Child Club

Did your mom read to you? Did she show you how to work puzzles? Did she give you crayons and coloring books? Did she play games with you? Let's back up a step--did she have games to play with you, crayons to give you, and books to read to you?
These moms don't. But they can teach their children all those literacy-related things your mom taught you through a Parent-Child Club.

What is the Parent-Child Club?
Fun activities that help children learn. Young children participate together with an older person from their family. This person could be a mother, grandma, an aunt, a sister or a father, uncle, brother or grandfather.

Why use the child’s first language as much as possible? 
Children learn best in their own language, partly because they feel more at ease when their own language is spoken. Also, it improves a person’s sense of self-worth when their language is considered important enough to be used in activities like this.



These photos are from the first field trial. We would like to do at least two more this coming year. Interested in helping? Or leading one yourself? Let us know! 
Activities: available at Davar Parent-Child Club.

Building Bridges . . .

Coco is building bridges. She's the one with the glasses in this selfie of her team. She's building a bridge towards the future by investing in these Romany youth. The young man on the right recently took the major step of being baptized.

Parent-Child

Start Games

Together, they're building bridges to a small Romany village in southern Romania. They've visited homes there to personally invite parents with young children to a Parent-Child Club and to invite children to a once-a-week Bible club.
Once a week, she and her team of Romany youth travel an hour or so to a village in Romania. They're using Davar: Bridging to Literacy materials in these back-to-back gatherings.

They're building bridges to Jesus Christ as well. Remus, one of the team members, speaks the local version of Romani fluently.

Remus speaks in Romani

He used materials from the Wycliffe/SIL Roma Service Team to tell the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.

Everyone's interested in following along.

Several of the listeners have already prayed to receive the new life Jesus offers. 

Want to join Coco's team, too? She could use all kinds of support, beginning with regular prayer.
Want to build bridges in your own community? Let us know if Davar is a helpful tool (http://davar-education.eu/).

Learning to Read

How many times did you learn to read? Most of us who learn to read only learn to read once. My husband Keith learned to read in English, with the type of letters you are looking at right now. Then, later, he learned to read Cyrillic letters (right). He can read street signs in Moscow. He might not know what they say, but he can read them. When he lived in Korea, he learned to read the Korean alphabet. (See below. This, he says, is one of the easiest alphabets in the world to learn. It was created by King Sejong, around 1445.) Again, he does not always know what the Korean signs on the stores in urban New Jersey mean, but he can read them.
He does know what German means when he reads that (usually) as well as Dutch (more often than German) and some Romani languages. And this is not just because he is a linguist.
Dutch and German use the same alphabet, more or less, that English does. However, each of these languages has its own system for assigning sounds to those letters. For example, "nee" in Dutch is pronounced the same as "neigh" in English. Additionally, each language has its own unique system of sounds. There are sounds in English which do not occur in Dutch or German. The beginning of "the" is an excellent example. Keith could learn these other systems without too much trouble. After all, he already knew how to read.
Keith can read three different alphabets. He can read and understand newspaper articles in three different languages (English, German, Dutch). He only learned to read once.
My point? Learning to read is a big deal. Children shouldn't have to learn another language to learn to read. Studies show that people learn to read best in their own language. Then, like Keith, they can transfer that knowledge to other languages, sometimes even to other alphabets. I'm starting a Multilingual Education (MLE) on-line course to learn more about this. Let me know if you'd like to learn more about this, too.

Reading Outloud--An Acquired Skill

Keith demonstrating

As the previous post illustrates, reading out loud is an acquired skill. Keith has seen (or, rather, heard) this over and over again in the course of recording. Some people will have excellent voices for a part, say, of the apostle "Mark." They are literate in the national language. But when they sit down to actually record, they stumble. And sometimes, instead of reading: At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan, they say something like: At that time Jesus Nazareth from came and was Galilee baptized in.
Some of this, Keith credits to being unused to reading their own language. They may have read Slovak or German or whatever in school, but they really are not used to seeing their Romani language in print. It takes a bit of practice for the brain to translate these marks on the page (or the screen) into what are essentially oral/ auditory meanings. Add to this the fact that written language IS different than spoken language. And add to this the fact that Keith is frequently recording languages which are infrequently written. So maybe they haven't been written very well. Jesus at that time from Nazareth in Galilee came is acceptable English, but is it good contemporary English?

All this to say that recording a language which is usually oral rather than written is a good thing. Many Romany are much more used to getting and making sense of things that they hear rather than from what they read. But recording a language which is usually oral rather than written from a written text is not always possible. Sometimes it just works better to have someone from the translation team say At that time Jesus came from Nazareth . . . with the desired phrasing and intonation and have "Mark" repeat exactly what he just heard. Oral/auditory-to-auditory/oral. In what form do you best encounter the WORD?

Romany Education

All around Europe there are Christians--Romany and non-Romany--involved in educating Romany children. Wycliffe Poland partners with churches in Ukraine. A Dutch nurse started preschools at the request of her Romany Christian partners in Romania. A former missionary in Latin America begins a preschool in Serbia. Just within our CBF Romany team, we have a long-term partnership with Project Ruth, three sets of short-term personnel at the Gandhi School in Hungary, and another couple, Jon & Tanya Parks, preparing to work in a Romany school in Slovakia.
We recently set up a blogspot so that all these people could more easily network, share information, ask questions, learn from and encourage one another. We welcome posts in any language, to encourage discussion among teachers who are not native-English speakers. Check out the beginnings at: http://romanyeducation.blogspot.com/.