Geraldine Wright, gw_grin@yahoo.com
Translation Coordinator
Before I being gthe annual report, I would like to extend a special thanks to the auhors who contributed material to us this year. Rev. Clay Witt, retired pastor of Holy Redeemer MCC in College Park, MD, USA, finished his 3-year cycle of weekly devotions based on The Revised Common Lectionary. The talented young lay person, Marco Rubio, from Monterrey, Mexico, supplied some beautiful reflections, drawn from his own experience as a Christian, which have been very popular with our readers. Rev. Gelson Piber, pastor of the MCC in Niterói, Brazil, provided some instructive articles designed to give new Christians and church members a good grounding in basic Christian doctrine. In addition, Rev. Gelson has helped with some of the translations. Dr. Mona West allowed us to reprint three of her articles about Queer Theology. Finally, our founding pastor, Rev. Dr. Sandra Bochonok, contributed four new articles which embody her unique and tender devotion to Christ and to the readers who come to our site.
We received visits from 138 countries, from every continent, across the globe. As in most years, there were expecially large numbers of visits from Brazil and Mexico. The table below shows the number of articles downloaded from the site during the entire year, during January, during December, and during March, which was the best month of the year. Tallies are also broken out by language. For those who continue to insist that everyone speaks English, and that posting all the material in English is sufficient to reach the world, we like to point out that less that half our hits are on the English pages, and that the Spanish hits are very nearly as numerous as the English hits. We truly feel vindicated in our insistance on multilingual Christian outreach.
Language 2005 Jan Dec Mar (best) Whole site 426,570 34,613 40,663 44,635 English 167,745 12,511 18,628 15,807 Spanish 147,396 12,912 12,051 16,166 French 26,578 2,038 2,684 3,438 Portuguese 70,840 6,311 5,843 7,996 Russian 5,106 258 552 384 Chinese 2,327 198 131 282 German 2,346 113 297 186 Afrikaans 1,536 98 169 148 Esperanto 2,696 174 308 228
Overall, the number of visits have grown only modestly from last year, although there has been a doubling of the montly hits on the Russian, German, Afrikaans and Esperanto material. Interestingly, even though English is one of the official languages of South Africa, the majority of the hits from South Africa are going to the Afrikaans pages, rather than to the English pages. The relatively strong showing on the Esperanto pages, despite the small number of articles, indicates that it has been a successful tactic to use the "International Language" to reach people we might otherwise have missed by not having material in their native languages. Unfortunately, we have had a slump in the number of hits on the Chinese article, and I suspect this is a result of censorship by the Chinese government, which prevents nationals of that country from accessing Internet material that it does not approve of.
The bulk of our energy this year has been spent on translation of documents so as to increase the amount of material on the pages of the languages which are less full. The final installment of the French version of our popular Lent Devotions was posted early in the year, well in time for the Lent season. Five more of Marco Rubio's devotions were translated from Spanish into English and Portuguese and posted. Six articles were translated into Russian. We obtained German and Afrikaans translations of the UFMCC documents "Homosexuality and the Bible" and "HIV/AIDS: Is It God's Judgement?" The folks from the Ligo de Samseksamaj Geesperantistoj (League of Gay Esperantists) translated the article "The Bible...Our Story Too", by Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson, into Esperanto for us. The three articles written by Rev. Gelson Piber in Portuguese were translated into English. Additionally, a volunteer translator from Brazil translated the article "Psalm 23" into Portuguese, and has translated some other materials which we may be able to use on the site. Finally, we did get the new Chinese translation of "Homosexuality and the Bible" on which we had been waiting for more than a year. Folks from the Blessed Minority Christian Ministry, a Christian ministry for sexual minorities in Hong Kong, graciously checked the translation for us and we then posted it.
In addition to posting new articles on the site, we continue to try to make it attracive and easy to use, within the constraints of maintaining its speed of loading, even for those who have slow Internet connections. In particular, we restyled both the Russian and Esperanto pages to look like the the pages from the other languages. This not only makes the home page more attracive, but also organizes the articles a little better, as well as providing a site index so that any particular article can be located by name. We have also put a banner at the top of the all the home pages which explicitly states that our ministry serves people of all sexual orientations.
We posted a couple of new things on the Friends' pages, which provide articles about the inside workings of Soul Food Ministry, and which are not religious in nature. We posted an interview with the Translation Coordinator, as well as a "wish list", a list of articles we have prioritized for translation, and the cost for each, so that potential donors may contribute money for a specific article if they wish.
We did a number of things to publicize the site this year. I submitted an artile about the ministry to the UFMCC "Around the Fellowship" E-newsleter, which described what we do and asked for volunteers. I wrote an article for the Ligo de Samseksamaj Geesperantistoj newsletter to publicize our Esperanto pages to the Gay and Lesbian Esperanto community. I also did networking at the UFMCC Regions 3 & 5 Combined Regional Conferences this year to attempt to recruit authors and encourage people to visit the site.
Prayer continues to be an important component of our ministry. Rev. Bochnok established the "Global Prayer Club", which is being hosted on the UFMCC web site, and we posted a link to it on our site. We continue our association with the Internet Intercessory Prayer Team of MCC-DC in Washington, DC, USA. I translate Portuguese requests which come to the team, and function as the backup translator for Spanish prayer requests they receive. We have also posted a notice on our Esperanto pages that readers may send us prayer requests in Esperanto and we will translate them and forward them to MCC-DC's prayer team.
This year we got quite a variety of letters to the site. Some of them were people disagreeing with our position on homosexuality. Some of them were expressions of thanks for the site. Some asked us to E-mail them copies of articles. Some were prayer requests, which we forwarded to the prayer team at MCC-DC. These came form many countries, and were in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Esperanto.
There were a few things we explored in 2006 which have not yet yielded results. I attempted to get articles from our pastors in the UK and France, so far without success. I will continue to approach them in 2007. We had wanted to set up an Internet chat room so that at scheduled times our readers could interact with our pastor Rev. Bochonok. I had thought that the web server hosting our site had provisions for this, but apparently it does not. In the upcoming year I plan to explore forming a Yahoo group, because Yahoo groups does have such a service. Finally, I continue to try to formulate a plan for developing a circle of supporters. Until I can attract a volunteer who can concentrate on fundraising and grantwriting, I have to plan something that will not take away too much time from the translating duties. My present plan is to see if on line giving via credit card can be implemented, which will be easier for the contributors than sending a check through the mail, and to purchase gifts from Chi Rho Press which can presented to contributors who donate a substantial amount to the ministry.
For the upcoming year we have a number of things planned in addition to those mentioned above:
We at Soul Food Ministry thank you all for sharing this year's journey with us. We hope you will return again and again to receive spiritual nourishment from God's bounteous pantry. Abraços. (Hugs.)
