RONG DOMRIEX, CAMBODIA — Tel Im, a 13-year-old, sat cross-legged on a bench, eager for her reading lesson.
“Please turn to Lesson 33,” said a woman’s voice rising from a Sony cassette player powered by two wires clipped to a car battery.
The tape was the closest thing to a school in this village shaded by banana trees, where water buffalo meander in from the rice paddies.
Im and her classmates flipped to Page 134 for a passage from the New Testament.
“The title of this story is: ‘Jesus Was Crucified,’ ” said the teacher on the tape, slowly pronouncing the words in Khmer, the local language, as the children followed along with their fingertips.
Six months ago, Im couldn’t read a word and had never heard of Jesus. Now, through a literacy program run by the local chapter of an international Bible group, she has a Bible that she can read and she says she wants to become a Christian.
Using technological devices ranging from simple cassette tapes to solar-powered audio players and an iPod-like gadget called the Bible Stick, Christian groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to make one of the world’s oldest books accessible in remote corners of the planet.
Complete versions of the Bible can now be downloaded onto cellphones in parts of Africa. To reach those who can’t read – nearly one-fifth of the world’s population, according to the United Nations – Christian groups are rapidly increasing production of audio and video versions.
Christian networks from the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are working together, coordinating the efforts of people as diverse as a computer cartographer in Virginia and linguists in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
Since 2000, the Bible – or parts of it – has been translated into 600 more languages, making it more accessible to tens of millions more people, according to the Forum of Bible Agencies International. An additional 1,600 translation projects are underway that will leave only about 3 percent to 5 percent of the world’s population without the best-selling book of all time available in their native language.
Building on generations of work to distribute the printed Bible, Christian missionaries said new multimedia presentations in hundreds of languages are vastly expanding the Bible’s audience and spreading the influence of the world’s largest religion.
“It’s a movement to revitalize religion in the world, and it’s huge,” said Laurie Westlake of Faith Comes by Hearing, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that works in 92 countries.
This year alone, Westlake said, her organization has started 33,000 “listening groups” of people who gather to hear dramatic Bible recordings done by local people in their own languages. She said those gatherings now serve about 3 million people – three times as many as two years ago.
David Hammond, who works in Nairobi for the British-based United Bible Societies, a network of agencies in 200 countries, said Bible formats are changing to suit a changing world.
“Audio,” he said, “can be better than a big black book.”
Some Cambodian Buddhists have complained that Christian missionary groups are too aggressive.
In June, government officials issued a public reminder of a ban on door-to-door proselytizing and the offering of food or other aid only to those who join churches.
Thousands of Christian missionaries have flooded into Cambodia, which is about the size of Oklahoma, since the early 1990s. Devastated by the Maoist-inspired Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s, during which an estimated 1.7 million people were killed or died of starvation, and by the decade of war that followed, the nation remains impoverished, with many workers earning just a dollar or two a day.
Cambodia remains overwhelmingly Buddhist, with 4,000 gilded temples filled with saffron-robed monks.
“We are getting used to globalization, but it is important to maintain our identity,” said Nguon VanChanthi, director of the national Buddhist Institute. “For centuries and centuries, we have been Buddhists.”
But, he added, people have a right to choose their religion, and the government is grateful for the medicine, food and manpower that Christian groups are bringing. As for the Christian literacy program, he said, “If Buddhists worry about it, they should teach children to read too.”
In Rong Domriex, the farming village where children play knee-deep in the rice paddies, a local Christian pastor said he believes that maybe half of the 11 children in Im’s literacy class will become Christians.
“Whether they follow Jesus Christ or not is up to them,” said Dom Saim, the pastor and a former Buddhist.
Im’s father, Sum Tel Thoen, 37, a fisherman, said he didn’t care that Christians were teaching his daughter. “It doesn’t matter if my daughter is Christian. My focus is education,” he said. “I can’t read or write. I want my daughter to.”
He said he was pleased that his daughter was dreaming of getting a job someday, now that she can read, instead of spending her days collecting firewood.
Her father stood next to his daughter as she described Jesus, holding tightly to a paperback Bible, the first book she has ever owned.
