Ethno Media Associates

The U'wa

In the northeastern sierras of Colombia live an ancient people group named the U’wa. Although they only number in the seven to eight thousands, they are known on the international stage for successfully preventing oil drilling on their lands and for creating de-facto biological reserves by prohibiting all human access to large tracks of forest. Fiercely traditional and primarily oral, the U’wa use song as a way to pass their culture and spirituality from generation to generation.

"[It] was probably one of the most difficult challenges we took on in the past 16 years,” writes Sandra, FDPM audio technician, “The U’wa authorities denied us entrance to their territory, so we had to record with only two readers.”

Those two readers sacrificed their vacation time for four years in order to finish the entire New Testament outside of U’wa lands.

Once completed, another challenge awaited: getting the Scriptures to the U’wa people.

In 2017, Sandra and her colleagues loaded their vehicle with New Testament players in U’wa and embarked on a long journey across the eastern zone of Colombia. They traveled through four departments, traversing regions with beautiful flora and fauna, immense cultural diversity, and a strong presence of guerrilla and paramilitary forces. “This made our trip a bit tense, peppered as it was by military checkpoints and notices about bomb threats and military confrontations,” Sandra recounts.

At one military checkpoint, several of the soldiers were very suspicious of the FDPM team. After all, their car was full of apparatuses that looked like radios —radios that could contain messages for the enemy. “They were surprised when we finally succeeded in explaining that it was the Bible in audio in an indigenous language,” writes Sandra. Then something incredible happened, the soldiers wanted to know if FDPM had audio Bibles in Spanish that they could listen to. The military checkpoint became a class on how to download a Spanish audio Bible from the internet. The military commander was one of the first to do so, and enthusiastically showed the rest of his troops how to follow suit.