August 2004

Dear Praying Friends,

As this letter arrives, we are anticipating the soon-to-begin and long-awaited dedication of the revised New Testament for the Kashinawa of Peru. Many of you have been part of this endeavor, with your faithful and often daily prayers, your encouragement, and your financial gifts either personally or through your church. Thank you, each and every one of you. You are all part of this.

I have left Dick in "Kashinawaland" to make the final preparations and I have gone on ahead to Lima to meet some guests who are, much to our joy, coming to share in this special time with us. With their help, I will hope to have some nice pictures to share with you. We are hoping that the Kashinawas will plan one of their big food sharing fiestas between, the two family divisions in the group, where one group gives gifts of food in the morning, and their relatives reciprocate in the afternoon. This would assure lots of enthusiasm, lots of food, and lots of visitors from nearby villages.

After the "feeding of the 300", we will have our first New Testament dedication-presentation event, appropriately in the village of Balta where we had previously lived with the Kashinawas for 12 years and raised our two children. I hope that each one who has been a co-translator of either the original New Testament printed in 1980 or this present one will have something to share of what having the NT for 23 years has meant to them and to their people, and what it means now to have a revised one to replace the few "dog-eared" copies that are still in use.

Our dear visitors from the US are already inscribed on the gnats', chiggers' and mosquitoes' "Welcome!" lists. But we will hopefully be able to escape from the bugs for a while and share a nice dip in the Curanja River, where we bathed for 12 years. This is still the dry, sunny season in the jungle and we are expecting the river to remain clear and nice.

"The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Balta, and I trust that the Lord's beautiful display in this village (with the only artificial light coming from little lamps made out of coffee cans) will be as spectacular for our visitors as it has been for me over the years. We can see the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross, and have used these to help the Kashinawas learn where north and south are. They know that east is "the sun rising direction" and that west is "the sun setting direction", and they use "upriver" and "downriver" easily, but north and south are a foreign concept to them.

After a night of our visitors and us camping with our Kashinawa friends of so many years, Dick and our Mission Director will head down river by canoe and spend the first night at our palm house in Nueva Luz. Then they will continue on down stream to visit the Kashinawa Bible Institute building now under construction (thanks to a very kind gift of a friend of many years). They will visit as many of the 18 Kashinawa villages as they can to distribute Scriptures. Their final destination will be Esperanza and they will be praying that the "every Saturday" flight will really come, which is often not the case... If it does not come, there will be a mission charter for them on Monday. We don't like to have to stay in Esperanza very long because every Kashinawa on the river with financial needs seems to find us, but on the plus side, there is a lovely 1/4 star hotel there for $3.00 a night and the Lord has flung open the doors for us to share the Gospel with many folks there in Esperanza. We are always an encouragement to the pastor there, and we had prayed for 30+ years that there would be an evangelical church in Esperanza, and it is now in its 16th year.

We want to express our overflowing thanks for your faithful prayers and financial gifts for us and ask you to pray with us for the following:

• Thank the Lord that the New Testament for the Peruvian Kashinawas is completed and ready for distribution, and that we think that the funds we have received are adequate to pay all the bills involved. This is another of the Lord's wonders that we have been privileged to see develop. Many of you have helped in this and we thank you very sincerely.
• The dialectical adaptation for the Brazilian Kaxinawá (yes, a different spelling because they use a different alphabet) has been completed with a great group of Brazilian Kaxinawá familiar with the dialectical changes needed for those living on the more distant rivers in Brazil. I will be taking this to the Brazilian Bible Society in São Paulo, Brazil in late September for manuscript preparation, as we did when we went to Bolivia to prepare the Peruvian edition.
• Pray for Dick as he stays behind and continues with Old Testament revision. I will join him ASAP and work with a second group of co-translators, also on the Old Testament, hopefully starting with Psalms. This is a hard book to translate and I have enjoyed preparatory reading of various commentaries on how to translate poetry for non-Indo-European languages.
• Pray for the Lord to fence in the translation teams and us from Satan's attacks. We are confronting him with the advancement of the Scriptures. Claim Christ's protecting power along with us.
• Pray for good health and endurance for the two teams to work long hours with good concentration, so we can move ahead well with our selected Old Testament portions. We have been hoping to have 40% of the OT ready for publication when we prepare to leave Peru in about December of 2006. All of Genesis is close to being completed, so that is a nice section almost done.

Yours because of Calvary,

Sue

For Dick and Sue Montag

Write to us at:
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Montag
ILV, Apartado 52
Pucallpa, Peru, SA
RMontag@mtwla.org or dick-sue_montag@sil.org