From The Archive - Did You Know

7/15/2019

(originally published on June 1, 2015) The team finished duplicating another 4,000 French-Lingala microSD cards for Africa. This completes a special project of 20,000 microSD cards designated for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Did you know:

There are an estimated 1.5 million believers in the DRC.
There are some churches that have congregations of over 12,000.
In the capital city of Kinshasa there are 704 Message churches and over 100,000 believers.
In May 2015, we established the 103rd VGR distribution library in DRC. Each distribution library serves 7 to 10 sub-center libraries, and those serve an estimated 15,000 churches throughout that country.
Congolese believers are very missionary minded, spreading the Message to places like Iran, England, France, China, Finland, the Middle East, and even the United States!
Because of the rainy season and the lack of paved roads, the main transportation routes in the country are by river. The Congo River is the largest transportation route in the country. It's 2,920 miles long. Missionaries bring the Message up the Congo River in dugout canoes to the believers that live in the forest. The Congo River has crocodiles, hippos, and pirates. However, the most dangerous threat is the malaria-carrying mosquito.
Although most Congolese speak French, Lingala is often the preferred language. VGR has currently translated 38 sermons in Lingala and more are on the way.

The 20,000 micro SD cards headed for DRC contain 6,040,000 audio messages and 28,680,000 printed messages. If we lined each message in this project in a printed book end to end, it would stretch across the United States almost 1 1/2 times!

If 6,040,000 audio sermons were to be shipped to the Democratic Republic of Congo on reel to reel (1 sermon per reel), this project would weigh approximately 3,020 tons!

In comparison, items that weigh 3,020 tons:

974 Ford F-150 SuperCrew trucks
1,348 25-foot Donzi Ragazza power boats
5,441 ExMark Zero Turn mowers
A city of approximately 33,500 people (if the average weight of each person was 180 pounds)
274 school buses
6 fully loaded Boeing 747 passenger jets