A friend of mine in Ethiopia has a small ministry to the blind Christian community there. He runs regular bible studies and get togethers and sometimes distributes donated materials to them. This is the third time I’ve built audio bibles in Amharic and Oromo to send to him.
Now, why build them myself? Can’t these be purchased? Yes of course. Megavoice produces high-quality rugged audio bible devices that work great. They even have models that charge with solar panels on the back for use in areas with poor electricity. They come preloaded with audio bible recordings from virtually every language available. Other groups like Faith Comes by Hearing use these same devices. The first time I went to Ethiopia, I bought several of them with me.
Unfortunately, they are are kind of expensive! The cheapest models are still about $50 a piece. You can get a large price cut if you buy hundreds of them at a time, but I can’t do that. They are also kind of small, about the size of a clamshell cell phone, which is fine for personal listening, but if you were using them in a group setting, one with larger speakers could be handy.
Fortunately, there are tons of portable rechargeable speakers being made in China and sold in America that work pretty well and cost only $10-$20. Most of them come with an SD card slot, so can effectively be preloaded with audio bible MP3 files, which are pretty easy to find online. Amazon has about 100 different ones at any given time.
So twice this year I’ve sent a batch of 10 of these kind of devices:
I use a pack of the smallest/cheapest SD cards I can find to load them with. Virtually everyone has a cell phone in Ethiopia and the vast majority of these are Indian-made clamshell phones or previous generation Androids. They pretty much all use micro-USB so that kind of charger and cable are everywhere.
When I put together 10 units this December, the total cost, with tax, was $201. So that’s basically $20 per device. The feedback I’ve gotten so far is that people like that they are loud and easy to charge. I don’t have reports of any of them breaking yet, but it’s likely some of them from 2 years ago have by now. Who knows. It’s also entirely possible they’ve been reloaded or augmented with reggae music. That’s just a risk I have to take at this point!
One trick is that these inexpensive devices have limited file navigation – usually just a forward and back button. That’s fine but you need to make extra sure your files will play in the correct order, from Genesis to Revelation (or Matthew to Revelation if only the NT recording exists), chapter by chapter. I had to use a mass renaming tool to make sure the files had the correct number or leading zeros so they could be navigated in the correct order on the device.
Here I have 5 of them charging at once before I package them up:
My wife made nice braille and print labels to apply to the devices:
At the end, all packaged up with some canes and some braille watches, it looks like this:
My friends at One Changed Life are spending 4 months there this year, so I sent the gear along in their luggage.
If you would like to put together some similar DYI audio bibles and would like some tips, feel free to contact me.