by Donna:

The month of December started out just as any other time of the year. Our lives were immersed in school, work and ministry and the general business of life. The area where we live is not particularly dedicated to the beauty of Christmas but rather the consumerism of the season. It was definitely a struggle to stir up any resemblance of a festive occasion.

Then everything changed. We traveled back to the place where we pay our taxes and began to prepare for the coming of the celebration of the birth of the Savior.

Jorge and Jason labored for days to add warmth and comfort to our living room by covering the cold, ceramic floor tiles with wood. A decorative tree was set up and most important of all, Christmas praises began to ring through the air! It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas!!!

Then, the extra ordinary began to happen! Little Aurora arrived and ran over to the stable and exclaimed, “Baby! ” and 4 year old Isabel broke out in her joyful chorus “Come and see Jesus!” These beautiful children ran to see Jesus! Friends and loved ones arrived sharing wishes of good cheer! What Joy! Christmas had indeed arrived! Jesus came into the center of the picture and that is when everything became transformed! Many years ago in Bethlehem, Jesus was born. Nothing was ever the same again! The King of kings lie in lowly manger, an angel revealed to nearby shepherds that in the city of David a Savior was born, which is Christ the Lord, and a multitude of angels began to sing

“Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth good will toward men.”
Christ blessed our hearts this Christmas as we sang of His advent and His glory! Everything is changed since we received our Savior!

New Year Resolutions:

As usual every year, for the past 40 years or so, we held our New Year Resolutions ceremony on the 1st of January. This is a simple but meaningful time together, where we pray and thank the Lord for the all that He has done during the previous year and make a Resolution for the New Year. Each person also claims one or more scriptures. Those who are not present may send their resolutions, which are read and kept in our records. Many burdens and wishes were brought before the Lord. My personal verse for the New Year was/is Isaiah 43:19 : “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”

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1. This year we had a similar year as 2018 but we did everything in greater scale. Among other things, we distributed a lot more audio Bibles than last year. (SR600) Besides Africa, namely Mozambique, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda and Burundi (see pictures here, and here, and here) and we made new contacts in Pakistan, India and Portugal. Just this December we distributed over 500 units (200 to Kenya, 200 to Mozambique and 100 in Portugal).  We are still in the process of sending more audio Bibles to these different regions. Everyone is grateful for these precious gifts.

2. The online work, through the web site, was expanded and we are happy to report several new developments. We introduced new languages such as Khmer (from Cambodia), Sinhala (Sri Lanka) and Hungarian. There is a new feature on the main page called “verse of the day”. The purpose of this is to send an encouraging Bible verse everyday to friends and acquaintances who are interested. We know of several people who are using this feature in their own language to encourage others daily with the Word of God.

3. We have recorded the audio of the Filipino (Tagalog) New Testament. Also, we are in the process of recording the Brazilian narration of the Portuguese Bible. Our narrator in Brazil had a setback with some faulty equipment, and we found that the quality of the recordings was not good, so he is in the process of recording all over again.

4. The New APP (Wordproject Plus) has been finished and available online. There is work to be done to include more languages. Meanwhile the old App is being fixed and updated, possibly will still be usable.

5. Here are some of the new pages and sections introduced this year:
Khmer selected Bible verses
Hungarian selected Bible verses
Hebrew Audio Bible
Hungarian Audio Bible
Hungarian Audio Bible
Khmer text Bible
Sinhala [language of Sri Lanka] text Bible

6. We are always very busy with improving and maintaining the online presence. A lot of changes were implemented in our main website, including updating to HTML5, the most recent web language format. Internet technologies are always changing and we also have to monitor the operation of all servers to make sure that they do not breakdown and if there is a problem with one server, direct the web traffic to another server. It takes constant monitoring and maintenance to keep our site online and working 24/7

7. Our social media pages (Facebook and Instagram) are being populated with image banners that contain Bible verses. This work is done by one of our young contributors (Benjamim). He also does the follow up of those two media sites.

Stats

We believe the Word of God can make a difference in this world. In fact, from India to Russia from Egypt to South Africa, North America, South America, Asia, everywhere, people need the Word of God to lead and guide their lives and to inspire them and give them a reason to live. Many places where churches cannot go, we are there sharing the Word of God. Our online statistics this year show a total output of over 77 million Bible page views as compared to 76 million last year. The number of visitor to the Wordproject site was just over 18 million for the last 12 months, that is an average of about 1.5 million visitors every month. One of our strong points at WP is that we supply people with audio Bibles to download. That means a lot of people download the Bible into their mobile phones or computers and they use it in their own playlists. The data volume of audio downloads from our servers was amazingly high: 288 Terabytes, which means, 288 million megabytes, which at the average of 1 Bible Chapter = 1 MB, it is roughly equivalent to 288 million audio chapters of Bible served from our servers [154 million last year]. That include Bibles in most important languages of the world. Our main fields continue to be India, China, Brazil and several countries in Africa, with many users from Middle East countries, namely S. Arabia, Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, etc. As last year, we have detected several sites that have copied our materials and published them under their own local name (domain). We continue to offer a copy of our site in every language, which can be downloaded for free and then used offline: 

2020 Planning:

1. We will continue to produce SR600 MP3 players to send to different areas of the world, Africa, India and Pakistan, Portugal and to distribute locally, including to Filipino community.
2. There will be lots of work to be done on the new APP, already available here in English, Chinese and 4 other languages, but the indexing of many languages needs to be done – it takes about 100 man-hours per language and we have 40 audio languages (that will be 4000 man-hours). Also, the IOS version of this new App needs to be developed and we are praying for a solution.

3. We finished the audio narration for the Filipino New Testament, but we could and should work on the OT. We hope we can do that this year.

4. We will continue with the narration of the Portuguese Brazilian Bible, now in course.

5. We will continue to look into the possibilities of a longer term investment in Portugal and Africa, for recording and distribution of audio Bibles.

6. The update and maintenance of our major site is a permanent task, and we also hope to have time to update other less visible sites, such as wordplanet.org and wordfree.org.

7. We appreciate your prayers and support.