Recordings of Latin America Church Leaders Preserved

In the March issue of Rhizome we reported on an ISGA-initiated project to help preserve hundreds of interviews that Jaime Prieto, a Costa Rican Mennonite historian and church leader, conducted over the course of several decades as part of his research for Mission and Migration (Pandora Press, 2010), the Latin American volume of the Global Mennonite History Series. In the initial phase of that project, we provided financial support to transfer the interviews from cassette tapes to digital format.

Early this summer, Joshua García, a sophomore Communications major at Goshen College, digitally remastered the files to improve the audio quality. Now, with the help of Luis Tapia (see story on next page), the files have been organized and systematically saved as part of a larger ISGA vision to create a digital archive of resources related to the global Anabaptist-Mennonite church.  We will soon be adding additional audio files to the collection, including sermons from Mennonite worship services in Burkina Faso and interviews with former MCC and TAP workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.