Building Bridges to Oral Cultures:: Journeys among the Least-Reached

By K. Carla Bowman and James Bowman

Millions hear the oral gospel.
Building Bridges to Oral Cultures narrates with chronological and adventurous detail, an extraordinary journey that began for Jim and Carla Bowman in the early 80s with a passion to share the Good News with a handful of the least-reached, indigenous groups in Mexico. Over the course of thirty years, their travels led to breakthrough discoveries and innovation in remote communities of traditional oral learners around the world. With time and God’s guiding hand, a new comprehensive, oral communications model emerged. Effective bridges to oral cultures were developed and tested. Without eradicating cultures, speakers of the local languages are embracing the local oral arts to communicate God’s Word and are reaching the lost for Him across the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Carey Library
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781645080541

Book preview

PART 1

Early Exploration Among Oral Learners

1

CALL OF THE CONCH

We don’t know how to read Mixteco. We don’t know how to read at all.

BELIEVER FROM MANZANITO, OAXACA 1982

Journal June 1982 Manzanito, Oaxaca, Mexico: We began our journey at the train station in Nogales, Sonora just sixty miles from our home in Tucson, Arizona. Our friends Jan and Rene Galindo dropped us off and said goodbye. We were quite a sight burdened down with sleeping bags, water purifier, camera gear, and duffels of clothing. It was the hottest month of the year in Sonora and in the states between Sonora and Mexico City. The air conditioners on the train functioned for about the first hundred miles but within hours, the metal cars became cauldrons. Northern Mexico was a barren landscape of adobe colored earth and giant cactus. In three days we reached Oaxaca City exhausted, but overwhelmed with anticipation. On our first morning we went to the address on 20 de Noviembre Street that the Mixteco believers had given us. We soon met José Santiago Martinez, a great apostle, a man who would become our mentor and our dear friend. José moved us to his humble home on the outskirts of the city and within two days led us on the trek to Manzanito with New Testaments on the back of the donkey. Before we arrived to the trumpeting echo of the conch shell announcing our arrival to all the surrounding hamlets, the believers had given up hope in our arrival until Antonia’s dream restored their confidence.

In the village, we were given an empty, thatched hut to live in, a meal of tlayudas , large corn tortillas and chicken with local Amarillo sauce made with yellow chili. The evening fires of pine pitch torches glowed up and down the mountainside as Mixtecos came from far and wide to greet us. Much to our surprise the next night hundreds lined up to obtain a Mixteco New Testament for a few pesos each. The very thick hardback books we carried over the mountain range represented twenty years of sacrificial work by the translators. The Mixteco brothers and sisters cried with passionate emotion at the acquisition of such a precious treasure book. There was a three-hour church service in a dimly lit adobe building set precariously on the side of the mountain. The service ended at midnight. We were overwhelmed by the tears of joy, the cries of gratitude to God that someone cared, that someone came so far, that their language merited a book, that the only book ever written in their language was the word of God. Reality set in the next day. Some brothers arrived early at our hut with their new books in hand but the books were opened upside down. Their comments varied. What does it say? What are these letters? How can this book be in the language of my fathers? We don’t know how to read Mixteco. We don’t know how to read at all.

As we spent long days and nights there in June we welcomed visitors to our small house and in turn visited the villagers daily. I spent many hours with the women sitting on their woven palm mats on the floor next to the cooking fire of three hearthstones with kindling and small pine logs. Clay pots steamed with boiling corn and black beans. A comal of clay was used to grill the large corn tortillas. Their Spanish was minimal, my Mixteco worse, but we communicated with the universal language of the spirit. My affection for them ran deep, and I was sincerely interested in their language, weavings, cooking, and children—all the things that were important to their daily life. They could sense my acceptance, and they responded in kind. Meanwhile Jim and some of the Mixteco men like Francisco, Pedro, and Miguel conversed in rustic Spanish, a second language for all of them. Jim learned about the crops: why the peaches were so tiny, the cost of chayote squash at the Saturday market, the reasons the recently planted corn crop would only yield enough maize to feed their families for half a year, what would happen if the rains were late, the reasons they picked cotton as migrant workers in the Baja, and the poor literacy rates of the children who attended school sporadically. The questions flowed. The answers were discouraging. A picture emerged of poverty and a certain sense that nothing would ever be different. God had brought healing and renewal but their lives were still very, very hard. Jim discovered quickly that they perceived no reason whatsoever to read their mother tongue, since for centuries it had been only a spoken language.

Since the morning after our triumphant arrival when we learned they could not read Mixteco—that most could not even read the national language, Spanish—we had been confounded and worried. Were the New Testaments about to become amulet altarpieces in every hut in Manzanito? How had we stepped into this surreal world where people didn’t read, where conch shells sounded just as they had for centuries? Where electricity was unknown but torch fires lit the ancient paths? Where roads were just donkey tracks? How had we even come to be in this remote, mystifying place where our lives would be forever transformed?

During those strange days, we pondered the literacy dilemma we had observed in the village. Our passion for the Scriptures and love for these Indian people became almost an obsession. Somehow the treasure of God’s word, the Scriptures, were locked up inside those printed pages. We needed to find the key. We contemplated the new challenge at hand: books, but no readers. I wrote in my 1982 journal that we needed to build bridges between those printed books and the Mixteco believers who needed to mature in the word in their mother tongue. It was our first encounter with oral learners, and we were unequipped for the assignment.

We firmly believed that Bible translation was one of the most important strategies to reach and disciple least-reached people groups. Without the word of God in the mother tongue, how could these people truly understand the good news and grow in their faith? Here in the Manzanito region a large movement to Christ had recently taken place as the message of the gospel came with power and healing. Our dream was to see deeper discipleship through engagement with the Scriptures in their language.

During our daily visits with the Mixteco believers one brother stood out as a potential bridge. Rosalino was bilingual, speaking his native language Mixteco and also able to converse and read in Spanish. We introduced him to literacy primers. Since I was a schoolteacher, teaching reading was the natural solution to a lack of literacy. Rosalino quickly learned the Mixteco alphabet and began to recognize key high frequency Mixteco words by sight. He began to read his first sentences. When we left we urged him to spend as much time practicing reading Mixteco as he could. We promised we would work with him again on our return the following summer. We left the village with a cautious sense of accomplishment.

Our time in Oaxaca was winding down but before leaving we spent some time back in the city getting to know our new mentor José Santiago a little better. We asked endless questions about Oaxaca, about the Mixtecos and their newfound faith. José was an overseer for a dozen congregations, like Manzanito, that had spread across the mountain ranges of central and southern Oaxaca. He traveled continually almost like the itinerant preachers of early America. We closely observed José interact with the people as he demonstrated the qualities of a true grassroots leader: humble, committed, wise, and respected. We listened carefully as José taught us many things but we knew we still had so much to learn.

STEAMING COASTS AND HIGH SIERRAS

Before leaving, we traveled hundreds of miles by bus along steaming coasts and through high sierras of Oaxaca getting to know the lay of the land. As we traveled on the back road from coastal Pinotepa, climbing up to Putla and on to the highland town of Chicahuaxtla, the rains became intense. These were not the blasting monsoon rains of summer afternoons but chilly, perpetual, all-day drizzles bringing a wet cold that penetrates deep into the bones. The old rattletrap bus slowed down on ascents and shifted into other gears to make the mountain grades, avoiding potholes all the while. When we reached Chicahuaxtla, the bus stopped on the side of the road to take on passengers. Cages of hens and chicks were loaded onto the top of the bus. Three Trique Indian women got on wearing the ankle length, blood red, woven huipil tunic of the Triques. They were also wrapped against the cold in brown and red, rough, woven blankets. Their black braided hair was soaked through, and they shivered as the bus moved on toward Tlaxiaco.

Jim and I had experienced together the altering of our universe by such forgotten, mystical villages, something like I had known in the sixties. These hamlets were to become our passage into a new world where the simple, isolated spaces of our upbringing were challenged by cultures and lifestyles that were radically different from anything we had ever known. As our first trip came to a close, we realized that God had dropped us into one of the most complex and diverse ethno-linguistic parts of the world. Inside the boundaries of the small state of Oaxaca were more than fifty-two distinct languages and hundreds of dialects. Linguistic surveys by professionals had identified over thirty-six separate dialects of the Mixteco language alone and forty-two dialects of the Zapoteco language. We returned to Oaxaca City and flew back to Arizona realizing that God had just revealed our future. This trip was just the beginning of a new life and a very long but fulfilling search for relevant communication styles centered on oral tradition.

WHAT WE LEARNED

•The linguistic diversity and complexity of our first field was overwhelming, but we knew we had to sort it out and learn all we could about the subject.

•The national language was not understood well enough to substitute for the use of their mother tongue.

•The literacy we took for granted was illusive in the villages of southern Mexico. Widespread illiteracy would create a huge obstacle to scripture engagement in these places.

•Oral tradition was prevalent for millennia in the remote mountain regions where the indigenous people of the Americas lived.

•There was a huge need for bridges between print and oral learners, but we didn’t have a clue what they might be.

2

RETURN TO THE SIERRA MIXTECA

We had no understanding of the learning styles of the oral, traditional societies of Oaxaca and the consequences of that ignorance were significant.

Journal June 1983 Oaxaca, Mexico: The Bells of Santo Domingo broke harshly into the morose silence of the Oaxaca morning. We walked down a serene street still in shock from the festival of the night before with its blaring noises of the Calendas, of village brass bands, and fireworks. A white dove, a survivor of the night sat on a sculptured monk frozen in time on a high niche of the Sangre de Cristo church. I remembered that doves, monasteries and frocked brothers were symbolically linked in colonial history. As we walked on cobblestone rescued from beneath layers of modernity I felt a part of centuries past, of an old Oaxaca, a startling combination of aristocrats and peasants. I watched as hundreds of villagers ventured down the pedestrian street of Alcala hurrying to some destination with determination and confidence. They seemed to be on their way to a rally or a protest of some sort. They were haggard and crumpled as if just off the bus from a village. They passed the crumbling adobe wall on the corner and soon reached the large Santo Domingo church snug under the morning