Latin American Media Conference
In October, José Abel, Viña's director, as well as board members Rick & Carol McArthur, attended a four-day conference in Mexico City focusing on: Scripture, Media, Distribution and Community. There were 178 in attendance from 70 ministries, 15 countries, and 40 indigenous language communities from Mexico, Central America and South America.
We met with many people interested in dubbing Deditos, including this couple who head up a network of Christian leaders from all the tribes in the Amazon basin of Colombia. Their leadership wants to dub Deditos into four languages right away, then continue with many other languages in the area.
Solangy, the woman pictured, shared that they had seen the impact of Deditos when they used the videos in Spanish with a group of bilingual children.
She commented that in their culture, the children are told that if they point at a rainbow, their finger will rot off. After watching the video on Noah and the flood, the children understood that the rainbow was a promise from God. (And this from a video using fingers as actors—gotta love it!)
Mesmerized!
One of the few children at the conference, this girl spent hours in front of the monitor, viewing the Deditos videos.
Training others
José Abel taught a four-day, eight-hour class on video production. He also gave an hour-and-a-half workshop on Deditos, two times.
The trip to Mexico put Deditos production on hold. But at the same time it was very important for raising Viña’s presence in Latin America.
Having interacted with various institutions and individuals in EMDC, what I (José Abel) and the McArthur's strongly noticed is that there are a significant number of ministries who want Deditos' materials and the need is urgent. Some of them already have experience dubbing media while others are total beginners. It is urgent to come up with more recording options for the smaller language groups who can’t do it for themselves. Unfortunately, our current dubbing partners can’t handle all the demand. Helping those without the technical capacity will require more effort and creativity. We give God the glory for providing the resources for us to attend this event and for, we believe, allowing us to have been a blessing to many others while there.