I pray and trust all of you are doing well! As we start the second week of June, it seems like a good time to catch up with you and give you some updates about how things are going at Wycliffe Associates and with our Bible translation teams all over the world...
Video Transcript:
I pray and trust all of you are doing well! As we start the second week of June, it seems like a good time to catch up with you and give you some updates about how things are going at Wycliffe Associates and with our Bible translation teams all over the world. Florida has just opened Phase 2 of what they're calling the reopening phase, which means our office can be completely open. Our staff can be fully back at the office and working together as a team, so we're pretty excited about this improvement in the situation here in Florida, and glad that the infection rate has gone down and that people are able to come safely back to work. So we’re looking forward to this return to normalcy.
I know many of you have been following, either online or in the mail, our response to many of our partners overseas who have been impacted by the global economic problems and the hunger and starvation, even, in some severe cases where our translators are suffering without food. So I just wanted to give you an update on that as well.
So far our online and our mail response to the emergency has returned about $135,000 which is tremendous! Also, as we've been corresponding with our partners overseas we've already advanced about $185,000. So little bit of around $50,000 deficit so far in terms of the need for a response, but we're still very early in the mail campaign and we know lots of people are still planning their response and will be responding in the coming days.
We've been able to help between 250 and 300 people, families in about 50 different language groups, 10 countries around the world, but the reports and requests continue to come in. Our partners live really in the subsistence mode most of the time, and so during this pandemic and during the travel shut down the basic staples of food are still not able to reach them. And so prices have gone up in their market areas and we're trying to respond with financial support so that they can afford the resources that are within reach.
Our goal is still to raise about $400,000 so we anticipate that the need will continue to rise in the coming days, so if you prayerfully consider how that might fit into your stewardship we appreciate that.
I just want to say at this point thank you so much for standing with these translation teams and for standing with us during this whole extraordinary set of circumstances that we've been in. We've felt your prayers, we've enjoyed the telephone contacts and the conversations that we've had with many of you. Thanks for staying in touch. Thanks for caring about Bible translation, for caring about us, and we'll stay in touch in the coming days to let you know how things continue to unfold. Thanks again.
