Report on the International Fellowship Committee Chilean Visit
August 2000
David Kantor, Chair; International Fellowship Committee

A number of Fellowship members and representatives from the international readership met in Santiago de Chile, August 18 through August 23, 2000, to participate in a conference sponsored by readers in Santiago. The conference was titled, "Forjadores de Almas del Siglo XXI" -- "Soul Forgers of the 21st Century" and coincided with the celebration of Jesus' birthday, August 21.

When this conference was first being planned last year, Rosey Lieske contacted me and we discussed the possibility of using this conference as a context in which various Latin American leaders with whom we were coming into contact via e-mail and personal recommendation might have an opportunity to meet each other and develop meaningful working friendships.

The conference sessions sponsored by the Chileans were excellent. The quality of the presentations was extremely high and reflected a depth of understanding of the revelation which I felt was exceptional. In addition, their planning and organization was also excellent. This is a very competent group with many years of experience. There is tremendous potential here.

The following individuals participated as representatives of the Fellowship or as our sponsored attendees:

James Gonzales, Puerto Rican reader currently living in Vancouver, B.C.

Jose Manuel Rodriques Vargas, representative of CORDESAES, Bogotá, Colombia.

Ana Maria Nacimento Roberto, reader working on a Portuguese translation.
Jose Marcelino Ramirez Salinas, reader/teacher from Venezuela.

Agustin Arellano Tirado, organizer/teacher from Mexico.

Avi Dogim, Fellowship President.

Lila Dogim, Advisor to Fellowship President and member of IFC.

David Kantor, IFC chair.

Susan Ransbottom, IFC member and translator.

Paula Thompson, Jesusonian Foundation.

Rosey Lieske, General Councilor and contact person who has fostered this group for many years.

Maria Soledad Delgado, reader/activist from Ecuador

Nelida Oliver, reader/activist from Argentina

The individuals listed above who are from countries other than the U.S. were flown to the conference by the Fellowship.

Following the administrative meeting on the last day, Agustin Arellano worked to organize the representatives from the various countries. They worked out a 1-year development plan, a copy of which I will forward to the Executive Committee and the International Fellowship Committee when I receive it from Agustin. He is still in Buenos Aires conducting meetings and will return to Mexico City the first of September. He also took an extra 2 weeks prior to the conference and met with readers in Costa Rica and Peru. A report on these meetings should also be available when he returns.

Although we were fairly successful in keeping this conference quiet until the last couple of weeks, there was still some harrassment of readers. The Foundation's representative in Peru wrote a letter to our delegates from Ecuador warning them to have nothing to do with Agustin Arellano, who was said to be "putting strange ideas into people's heads." In addition, the meetings which Agustin had arranged in Buenos Aires were attended by Carlos Rubinsky who made a big fuss about the necessity of formally pledging support for Urantia Foundation and avoiding the "Fellowship rebels working for Caligastia." Agustin indicated that in public, Carlos always talked about working together, but in private he showed Agustin a list of rules which the Chicago office had sent and which Agustin would have to agree to sign and follow if there was to be any cooperation.

While this harrassment by Urantia Foundation is somewhat annoying, in the long run it is a significant discredit to their organization. People show up at Agustin's meetings thinking they are going to meet the devil incarnate. Once they meet Agustin and talk with him a little, it is quite clear that something is very wrong with what they're being told by Urantia Foundation

Avi met with the Foundation's representative to Chile for a meeting which lasted for several hours and appears to have been very positive. I will leave it to Avi to provide a report on that meeting.

The day following the conference, the Fellowship rented a meeting room in a local hotel in order to hold an "administrative meeting" with individuals who are actively involved in translating secondary works, putting together dissemination programs, creating websites, etc. A significant number of conference attendees also elected to participate. A number of issues were discussed at this meeting in accordance with our agenda, a copy of which I forwarded to you prior to the meeting.

We looked at website statistics and had a conversation about the way in which the dynamics of dissemination were being changed by the Internet -- people are now coming to us for information and we need to evolve an infrastructure which will facilitate good responses. We discussed email distribution -- the forwarding of email inquiries coming into various websites to individuals in the same geographic region and language group as the sender. More will be done in regard to this issue in the future including the development of a centralized Latin American database. We also discussed the use of North American network services should it prove difficult to maintain such services locally in the various countries in which websites are being developed.

We discussed the development of social infrastructure by bringing together people who inquire via the Internet. The need for a basic study group "how-to" package in both Spanish and English was reiterated. (It is my understanding that such a package is currently in development by Alison Gardner.)

We discussed some of the financial aspects of dissemination. The importance of developing regional financial infrastructure in various parts of Latin America was discussed. One of the potential approaches to the financing of international dissemination which was discussed was that of matching funds being provided by North American groups. That is, a program could be set up where North Americans would provide a book for each one purchased through local fund raising. A similar approach could be taken to help subsidize regional conferences and other dissemination expenses. No definite course of action was established, but issues were put on the table and we were able to communicate that the North American readers had limited resources and that continued international expansion would require assistance from readers in the field wherever possible. It should be noted that Agustin Arellano has already begun working to develop a financial support infrastructure in Mexico although a considerable portion of it at present has come from his own limited personal resources.

A comment was made about the amount of money being spent by North American readers on legal fees when so much dissemination work was needing to be done. The amount being spent on such matters is overwhelming by Latin American standards and it is difficult to gain much understanding that our resources are very limited.

Nina Bravo, a key member of one of the Chilean groups, is a very talented portrait artist. She has created a very beautiful portrait of Jesus and has given Jesusonian rights to reproduce it and to apply all profits to the purchase of books to send to the Chilean groups. Paula is following up on this.

We discussed the translation of secondary works. Prior to this meeting, several individuals from different regions were working on identical translation projects. Putting these individuals in touch with each other led to the development of an organized effort (organized by Agustin Arellano) which will minimize the duplication of effort. A password-protected web space will be developed for people working on translations so that word lists and other translator's resources can be shared. In addition, a database will be maintained listing all secondary works with translations in progress, who is working on them, their email address, etc.

The Chileans brought up the issue of formal affiliation with the Fellowship, saying that they wanted to be associated with us in the dissemination effort. Avi reviewed the various options open to them and emphasized that even if they did not wish to affiliate on a formal basis, we were interested in working with them in any way possible. There was no final resolution on this question but the available options were reviewed. On the last evening of the conference, the Chileans circulated a copy of a prayer titled, "Alianza del Norte con el Sur" (Alliance of the North with the South) in which the hope was expressed that the service alliance which had been formed during the course of the conference among revelation workers from various countries, held within it the promise of a future alliance with all humanity. The nature and potentials of this alliance have yet to be developed but the expression of the idea was a potent beginning.

The Chilean's study of the book has focused a great deal on values. They have created a Spanish version of Jim Down's chart of values, the English version of which is sold by Jesusonian. There was discussion of how to get it into a computerized, reproducible form. Ana Maria Nacimento took a copy which she was going to translate into Portuguese. The shortage of bilingual readers with computer skills is acute.

Susan Ransbottom is mobilizing a "sister study group" project the purpose of which will be to find reader groups in North America who are willing to create alliances with reader groups elsewhere in the world, engaging in personal correspondence, helping provide books where necessary, and so forth. We've discussed several options here and will develop them further as part of the work of the International committee. Among them are programs to encourage each study group to donate a minimum of one book per month, and a website page where people can simply click on a country of the world, enter a credit card number, and a book will be sent. I have begun to work out details of this with Paula, but more needs to be done.

There is a lot of interest in developing materials for children. Maria Soledad Delgado showed materials which she was using to teach children in Ecuador. There is a need for a central coordinator to keep track of work being done in North and South for children. Again, a long-term need is to make sure that there is no unnecessary duplication of effort. We will use the private translator's section of the website for this purpose until a competent coordinator appears on the scene.

We also discussed the best way to get books to people. It appears that the cheapest way is to send one book per package. People from several countries noted that if packages were very heavy they often disappeared from the mail. In addition, most countries do not charge any duties on single books but if multiple books are sent in the same package, it is more likely to be considered a commercial shipment and charged accordingly, which can be as much as 30% above cost.

For your information, here is a breakout of visitors to the Spanish website for the three-month period ending August 13, 2000:

Total web pages served: 318,056

Average web pages served per day: 3,409
Average amount of data transferred per day: 48.743 Mbytes

Total number of individual visits: 99,392
Average number of visitors per day: 1,065

Noting that we were unable to identify the source of 113,795 or nearly 1/3 of the requests, we still have the following numbers which represent the number of web pages served. Divide by 3.2 to find the number of individual visitors, bearing in mind that an unknown number of these visitors likely returned more than once.
 
 41,868: .mx (Mexico)
 28,020: .es (Spain)
 27,829: .ar (Argentina)
 14,357: .pe (Peru)
 8,261: .cl (Chile)
 5,747: .co (Colombia)
 2,652: .uy (Uruguay)
 1,980: .br (Brazil) -- [Note that the Portuguese website is not included here. The number for the Portuguese site on the English language server is 11,272 web pages served for the same time period.]
 1,663: .se (Sweden)
 688: .ec (Ecuador)
 634: .ve (Venezuela)
 612: .pt (Portugal)
 527: .de (Germany)
 501: .ni (Nicaragua)
 299: .bo (Bolivia)
 267: .gt (Guatemala)
 266: .py (Paraguay)
 117: .cr (Costa Rica)
 54: .it (Italy)
 49: .hn (Honduras)
 29: .pa (Panama)
 25: .cu (Cuba)
 25: .do (Dominican Republic)
 
Unfortunately, it is not possible to accurately determine the number of visitors to the Spanish website who are located in North America. At our administrative meeting we discussed the implications of these figures as well as the fact that they are growing by approximately 14% per month. This is in addition to the several new Latin American Urantian websites currently coming online. We also discussed ways in which we could effectively coordinate our Internet dissemination efforts. There is a great deal of potential here.
 
This meeting in Chile was not intended to be a one-shot undertaking; there is a great deal of follow-up now to be done including the fostering of the many relationships we were able to initialize and renew. Coming months should reveal a much greater degree of coordination in the area of Internet dissemination.
 
I hope this overview has been helpful. I didn't mention the beautiful homes which were opened up to us, the gracious hospitality of the Chileans, the pisco sours, the empanadas, or the dancing, but those are stories for another venue.
 
I am very grateful to have had this opportunity to become more familiar with the development of the readership in Chile, to meet revelation enthusiasts from other Latin American countries, and to serve with my "compañeros de la alma" from the Fellowship. I could write at length about the contribution made by each individual; each person put in long hours working under challenging circumstances. I thank each one of you, knowing full well that this work is what you are living for. James Gonzales deserves a special note of thanks -- in addition to his warm personal manner and his ability to be relaxed while working in complex social situations, he quickly developed translation skills which were greatly appreciated by both English and Spanish speakers. I am also very grateful to Rosey Lieske who has kept a meaningful relationship with the Chilean readers alive for many years.
 
In the continuing adventure,
 
David Kantor