For several months, we have been working to complete the translation for the Travel Guide to the Bible in Mizo-Chin. Mizo-Chin is one of the indigenous languages of Myanmar, with speakers in one of the provinces of India which borders the nation that was once called Burma.

Our champion in Myanmar is a man named Rova (a nickname). Rova is a pastor in Yagon, a Presbyterian, and a man raising his family in what has become very challenging circumstances in his country.

Since February 2021, the country has been under the rule of a military junta. The government has been committed to eliminating opposition and has systematically sought to suppress any rebellion against their rule. This has proven to be especially true among the many tribal peoples in the country. The military has arrested thousands of people and burned hundreds of villages of the tribal communities that they perceive to be a threat. Among those persecuted people are the Chin. 

In the major cities, the government has chosen to limit essential services, including shutting off the electricity for twelve hours or more. That includes Yangon, Myanmar’s most populace city of where more than 5 million people live.

That practice of unannounced electricity shut downs has caused a number of challenges for the translation project. At one point, Rova and his team were unable to retrieve the work that they had completed. New options to store the material needed to be secured. At one point, a malfunction in an operating system update caused the memory in one of the computers to be deleted and Rova had to re-enter the entire translation into a computer from the physical copies they had printed during previous proof-reading. 

In spite of these challenges, we received the Mizo-Chin translation of the Travel Guide and will post it at https://asimpleword.org/downloads/ in the next 48 hours. Rova is in the process of completing the Burmese translation, which, as soon as editing and field-testing are completed, will be posted on the A Simple Word site as well.

Thank you to all who have prayed for this project. There are still some steps to take to get the book printed and distributed in Myanmar. But we are thankful that the ebook is already in wide distribution. Mizo-Chin is spoken by 1,500,000 people in Myanmar, India’s northeast states, and portions of Bangladesh.

And continue to pray for then peace of Myanmar. The country is in serious turmoil.

And pray for the Church in Myanmar. Christianity has a long history in Burma. Adoniam Judson landed in Burma in the early 1800s and by 1834 had translated and published the Bible in Burmese. Most of the Chin and Karen populations identify as Christian. While Christianity, especially among the Chin, Kachin, and Karen peoples has had a long history of growth, the country remains over 85% Buddhist. Pray that, in the midst of these problems, the Church might stand strong and the gospel might have an even wider influence.