How did a Peruvian from the jungle end up marrying a Mexican from Morelos?
The first time our passports were together in the same bag, we were not yet a family. We were two people who spoke the same language, with customs different enough to confuse us several times a day — “ahorita” does not mean the same thing in Peru as in Mexico, and that is only the beginning.
What we did have in common, even before we met, was a question neither of us could shake off: why are there whole peoples without a single page of the Bible in their own language? Each of us arrived at that question on our own. At some point, the two paths turned out to be the same.
José Rosas (Pepe)
Pucallpa, Peru · LT Coordinator · SIL Global
I grew up in Pucallpa thinking about computers, not missions. What changed me was something small: on a trip to some missionary friends in the jungle, I saw a DirecTV dish on the roof of a house in the middle of nowhere. That is when I understood that technology was already reaching those places — and that someone had to think carefully about what to do with it. Since 2013 I have worked with SIL Global in language technology, supporting translation teams across the Americas. Today I coordinate that area for the continent, and I keep studying, because there is still much to understand.
Miriam Maya
Cuautla, Morelos, Mexico · LD Team South America · SIL Global
I grew up in Cuautla, Morelos. I trained to teach English, which was what I knew how to do and what I loved. I did not imagine that road would lead me to languages with no dictionary, no written grammar, not a single page of the Bible translated. Since 2018 I have worked with SIL Global in Language Development, and at the BMA I work directly with the nomatsiguenga community. It is not abstract work: it is sitting down with people to work on their own language, in their own place.
2025: we arrived at the BMA
Miriam and I had visited the community the year before, seeking a clearer answer from God about whether this was the people we should serve more closely. The answer came, and in 2025 we packed up — quite a bit more than the three suitcases I started with years ago.
The BMA is a community of missionary families who live, work and make mistakes together, near the nomatsiguenga people. Since we arrived, the field and the network stopped being two separate worlds.
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