Rong Domriex, Cambodia - Tel Im, a barefoot 13-year-old, sat cross-legged on a bamboo bench, eager for her reading lesson.
"Please turn to Lesson 33," said a woman's voice rising from a Sony cassette player powered by two wires clipped to a car battery. The tape was the closest thing to a school in this village shaded by banana trees, where water buffaloes meander in from the lime-green rice paddies.
Im and her classmates flipped to Page 134 for a passage from the New Testament.
"The title of this story is: 'Jesus Was Crucified,'" said the teacher on the tape, slowly pronouncing the words in Khmer, the local language, as the children followed along with their fingertips.
Six months ago, Im couldn't read a word and had never heard of Jesus. Now, through a literacy program run by the local chapter of an international Bible group, she has a book -- the Bible -- that she can read, and she says she wants to become a Christian.
Using technological devices ranging from simple cassette tapes to solar-powered audio players and an iPod-like gadget called the Bible Stick, Christian groups are spending millions of dollars a year to make one of the world's oldest books accessible in remote corners of the planet.
Complete versions of the Bible can now be downloaded onto cell phones in parts of Africa. To reach those who can't read -- nearly one-fifth of the world's population, according to the United Nations -- Christian groups are rapidly increasing production of audio and video versions.
A diverse effort
Christian networks from the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are coordinating the efforts of people as diverse as a computer cartographer in Virginia and linguists in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
Since 2000, the Bible, or parts of it, has been translated into 600 more languages, making it more accessible to millions of people, according to the Forum of Bible Agencies International. An additional 1,600 translation projects are under way that will leave only about 3 percent to 5 percent of the world's population without the best-selling book of all time available in their native language.
Building on generations of work to distribute the printed Bible, Christian missionaries said new multimedia presentations in hundreds of languages are vastly expanding the Bible's audience and spreading the influence of the world's largest religion.
"It's a movement to revitalize religion in the world, and it's huge," said Laurie Westlake of Faith Comes By Hearing, a U.S.-based non-profit group that works in 92 countries.
This year alone, Westlake said, her organization has started 33,000 "listening groups" of people who gather to hear dramatic Bible recordings done by local people in their own languages. She said those gatherings now serve about 3 million people -- three times as many as two years ago.
More than 9,000 miles away in Virginia, Christopher Deckert tracks where the Bible has gone -- and where it has yet to travel.
The computer cartographer, relying on information from sources such as Wycliffe Bible Translators and Google Earth, creates colored maps that show the progress of efforts to bring the Scripture to every last patch of the globe.
Deckert's maps, available at http://www.worldmap.org , hang on walls in Third World mission offices and in wealthy donor churches from Seoul to Atlanta.
"There is not a country in the world where missionaries haven't gone or looked at the language needs" in order to bring the Bible there, said Deckert, who works for Campus Crusade for Christ. Like many of the major Christian groups working abroad, it shares information, maps and translations.
"It's an awesome opportunity" to help bring the Gospel to all nations, he said. "Tens of thousands of people are out there working."
The Bible, with its parables and centuries-old figurative language, can take as long as 30 years to translate, at a cost of as much as $1 million.
Sometimes a missionary's biggest challenge is sickness, such as malaria or dengue fever, said Fredrick Boswell, head of the translation group at the Forum of Bible Agencies International. Other times it is wrestling with how, for example, to translate stories about the 12 Apostles into a language with words only for "one," "two" and "everything more than two" -- such as the Tok Mari language in Papua New Guinea.
Overcoming obstacles
Then there is the hostility that missionaries encounter in some parts of the world. Officials from several Christian groups said they do not disclose the location of some of their workers in predominantly Muslim areas in North Africa and the Middle East, out of concern for their safety.
In nations such as Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and China, where the government restricts or forbids the import of Bibles, multimedia versions are increasingly important. Evangelists said it is far easier to import a single compact disc, which can be copied repeatedly, than to import large containers of printed Bibles.
In Rong Domriex, a local Christian pastor said he believes that maybe half of the 11 children in Im's literacy class will become Christian.
"Whether they follow Jesus Christ or not is up to them," said Dom Saim, the pastor and a former Buddhist.
Im's father, Sum Tel Thoen, 37, a fisherman, said he didn't care that Christians were teaching his daughter. "It doesn't matter if my daughter is Christian. My focus is education," he said. "I can't read or write. I want my daughter to."
He said he was pleased that his daughter was dreaming of getting a job someday, now that she can read, instead of spending her days collecting firewood. Brushing her black hair away from her large brown eyes, she said matter-of-factly, "I am too poor to go to school."
Her father said that he, too, was learning about the new faith from Im. He stood next to his daughter as Im described Jesus whileholding tightly to a paperback Bible, the first book she has ever owned.