A sweet aroma

A jar of honey, just a jar of honey. And then again, it wasn’t. It was an offering of appreciation. On the evening of the 50th anniversary celebration of Radio ZP-30, La Voz del Chaco Paraguayo, in Filadelfia, Paraguay, an older lady, a regular listener, gave what she could. She had travelled far from home, from the south near the Argentine border, to present the station’s director Egon Doerksen with this personal gift.

Radio ZP-30, as many readers may remember, was an EMC missions project back in the 1970s and 80s. The station came about through the thoughts, ideas and efforts of EMC missionaries working with Indigenous communities surrounding Mennonite colonies in the Paraguayan Chaco. Diedrich Lepp, a translator of Scripture into the Lengua, or Enthlít, language, and Frank Kroeker, also involved with outreach to the Indigenous communities, led the efforts to provide a means of communication with and to the many families and small communities in the vast, barren Chaco.

And now it was time to celebrate God’s faithfulness throughout 50 years of programming. I had the privilege to represent EMC Canada and be a part of the weekend of festivities and thanksgiving this past September 13 and 14. The celebrations started with a Saturday evening mass gathering of listeners who were treated to music from a number of groups from surrounding Indigenous communities. There were notes of congratulations, reports, testimonies and a generous amount of praising God. Sunday morning a German church service was dedicated to thanksgiving, to sharing some history, and to solidifying ZP-30’s commitment to continue bringing good news to listeners far and wide.

It was heartwarming to see the board and staff of the station commit to boldly present God’s Word and its truths to listeners, along with news, agricultural updates, educational programming and personal messages and greetings. I was impressed how listeners, who through technology experience a rapidly changing world, continue to rely on ZP-30 as their friend, their work companion, their trusted source of information.

My family lived in Filadelfia where I worked at ZP-30 from early 1989 to mid-1994. From that experience I had a sense of how important the reliable and faithful voice of ZP-30 was to the many families and communities from inside Argentina to the south and into Bolivia to the north. Today, native language speakers in Spanish, Guaraní, Enthlít, Nivaclé, Ayoreo, Portuguese, German and Low German continue to provide programming that’s informative, educational and comforting. Professional counselling services are provided for listeners to contact through a variety of means. Outreach teams travel to remote regions on a regular basis to meet with groups of listeners, some who consider the ZP-30 programming their church.

So, ZP-30 continues to be a sweet aroma, somewhat like that jar of honey is a sweet, sacrificial gift, one of many expressions of appreciation from the station’s many listeners in the ever changing and developing Paraguayan Chaco.