When people contribute funds to a project in PNG, say, printing Bibles, they often are under the impression that their funds go towards the price of publishing the Bible and then that Bible is given away for free to the PNG national who wants it.
That is almost true.
We do not GIVE away Bibles for free. Nor do we give away AudioBibles for free.
"Why not? Aren't the people poor? Don't they need a Bible?" - Yes, and Yes!
The problem comes in trying to apply Western thinking to a non-western culture. If you do not put a charge on the item, it is perceived as having no value. After all, if something is given away free, then it must not be that important.
Further, if you put a price on an item, and someone has to put forth hard earned money to purchase it, it creates in them an understanding of value.
The sound byte I use to explain this is:
'The way a PNG person makes a cigarette is they buy tobacco, and buy a page of the local newspaper. They roll the tobacco into a torn segment of the newspaper, and then smoke it. If we gave the Bible away free, suddenly the Bible becomes free cigarette paper.'
(this actually lead to a funny story of a man who committed to reading each page of the Gospel before he smoked it, and by the time he got to John he couldn't do it any longer as he was convicted it was wrong. A fun story of how an addictive habit turned a man towards Christ, but I digress)
So we can't GIVE the Bibles away or we are essentially saying 'we don't care about this, and neither should you.'
But we can't charge what it costs to produce them, because that makes them unobtainable, and we want people to have them. So we have to scientifically figure out a price that puts value on the Bible, but also makes it obtainable. The price is often a token price, and is there because culturally it needs to be.
So when you're giving money to have Bibles printed or Audibibles purchased, what you're really doing is subsidizing the cost by a HUGE amount, but also allowing us to culturally place value on the item.
Regarding the AudiBibles, we would LOVE to give these units away free, but they contain an SD card. The SD cards are valuable because you can put them in the cell phones (technology that has been rapidly adopted these past 3 years or so). Therefore if we sold the Audibibles for LESS than the going price of an SD card, people would see them as ... free SD cards.
So in the case of the Audibibles, not only do we want to culturally communicate 'these have value' but we want to economically communicate 'this is not a cheap source of SD cards for you'.
If you think 'THOSE PNG PEOPLE don't understand what an SD card is' you'd be wrong. PNG people are very intelligent, and when it comes to getting media and communicating, very resourceful. See my previous blog about William in the village who knows what an SIM card is.
They know!
Fun story, one woman listened to her audio bible daily, and her husband took a screwdriver to it and found an SD card and removed it. His wife soon realized that without it, she couldn't listen to the Scripture and demanded it back from her husband. Who was in the process of trying to figure out how to use the MicroSD card (4gb) to put on his computer to play music. When she demanded it back, she said 'I bought this to play the Bible, not for you to play with!' So he gave it back.
In that instance, had we given away the device for free, he could have replied 'don't complain it was free!' but it wasn't. She had earned money herself (possibly by selling garden produce) to PURCHASE the unit.
It is true, that the unit cost significantly less to her, than it did for us to order it, ship it, and fill it with data. It was a token price, and gladly paid, that communicated VALUE in a culturally appropriate way.
So, now you know, why we don't give it away free.
