Hi everyone, I am Dhruv and I have Praveen here with me and Hasgeeks is hosting us and thank you Ambika and Nandipi and everyone I am hope for this session and it's nice to find people who associate with the kind of work and the narrative you're doing so it's really nice to be here and so we're going to talk about something called achar and achar is a smelly food that Indians eat and the good part of achar is the best part of achar is that you put some ingredients and you wait for a while for some magic to happen and in some time the idea is actually take some form which you had intended I think that was the idea that basically the act of pickling ideas and how design actually helps in planning ahead for a perfect pickle and so the session today is about design's identity as a catalyst for reimagining futures which are not singular, they are plural in the sense that they are iterative, they are not headed to a singular direction, they are not predictions of any sort, they are just preferential imaginations of designers that how they think that future might be so and most of the processes that we are going to share of people and of the things that we have done, all of them have one trait in common that all of them are very inclusive, they are very inclusive of the community that they are based out of they are inclusive in terms of participation and yeah so moving on introducing what I think Praveen you have the controls yes so achar is four and achar is a four and hence this name and what we have we are a designer duo and we map toolkits in the sense we try to create toolkits which help map out the preferential future in a particular domain and this includes processes of speculation and futures thinking and writing fictions and design and imagining scenarios and understanding what are the evidences of those scenarios in the present and how do you create meaningful artifacts which effectively represent or symbolize the future that you are trying to put forward and on the right talk you can see five six words which are about us so I would like to very specifically focus on one word which is fun and this process actually came out of this entire idea of me and Praveen working together on something that is beyond the present temporal frame was because that we were like kind of feeling a certain boredom in serving the present capital interests that design does and we were very lucky to be you know stumbling upon some things that we have read in the past few years and they really led us to what we are doing today moving on yeah why are we here so Praveen just queued in the jiff a little earlier usually when we talk about the work that we do so comprehension is a big problem in terms of people that people usually do not understand the value in doing speculations and we have to explain them to this to them in a very simpler fashion so so why are we here is exactly the session was a particular importance for us most of the work that we do Praveen I think we can do away with the jiff now it's quite distracting and but it's fun so what we are doing is that usually just a second there's a participant saying that she's not able to receive any audio there's something she can do I think you can just she's not receiving audio I think someone can help her out probably yeah we look into it you can just continue talking yeah so most of the work that we do is very contextual for instance like in the past few years we have been delving into crafts and reimagining craft practices and so usually what we understand about any new idea coming forward in terms of craft practices or in terms of community is that it should be inclusive it should be based upon the community itself so part of the reason of this webinar happening is that we want to interact with the community we want to get our ideas out there and receive some reflection upon it from each of you who are coming from your own particular domains and actually reflect upon the toolkit that we will share and the ideas that we will share and collaboration I think is a way forward for if you want to do something truly transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary I think more people need to talk to each other so that is the primary reason that we are here and moving on to start with some examples of what speculative design has been some very some examples of speculative design are very popular but then we just try to go with the ones that we particularly associated with a lot so this is a cookbook by Next Nature Network they are amazing people doing some truly fantastic work you should just go check them out right away after the webinar and so the book is called it's a book it's an actual product that you can go buy on Amazon and the book is called 45 recipes you cannot cook yet so the whole paradigm is that they're speculating upon the future of lab grown meat if you have a certain DNA of a certain animal you can actually with the present technologies you can grow a piece of meat or some cells of meat very easily in a lab and so some designers some I would like to say people who capitalize upon this idea and they thought of a cookbook that might just exist in the future so this is like a particularly good introduction to what speculative design can do it can give you a very evidential and a very tangible into a particular future that you're imagining moving on the next example so this is a very new thing I just saw it on Instagram few days back and this is by two researchers I cannot pronounce their names and so sorry but then you can find the work on speculative edu is a channel if you click on the internet of dogs heading the red one so you can just go to the link directly so we have embedded all the links in the presentation and we'll share the presentation with you once the webinar is over and so this is a very critical mapping of what entertainment system for a dog would look like in the future so they have actually understood that more dogs are being left at home and so what might the future look like if you want to entertain your dog when you're not at home and you can see the controls and you can see the for some of us it might just be doodle with some annotations but it actually is a very interesting question into what entertainment for another species would look like designers have always indulged in creating and entertaining humans since we are humans but then can we really employ empathy to generate entertaining content for another species so that is the bigger question that arises here and moving on I mean so another great example of what a speculative project or a project that tries to artifact futures can do so this is a 99 cent shop this is a pretty common visual in U.S. and so what these people have done is that they have imagined the 99 cent shop in a particular future where certain products can be easily availed like a DIY organ transplant kit and a currency converter so what these products actually tell us is that the designer is actually going through the effort of mapping out a future where this product a DIY organ transplant kit holds some importance and is a part of a greater system so I think that is the takeaway from such projects and this is another studio called extrapolation factory who do amazing work and it's more like an event that happens at a certain community they go inside and create something with the community again a very inclusive format you guys should just go check them out moving on I think Praveen would like to explain this. Okay so we are going back to I think one of the first examples we saw on speculative design this is a herzian chair also a parody chair from herzian tales from Anthony Dune and Fiona Ravi I think whoever has heard about speculative design they know like Dune and Ravi and they were so we wanted to keep this example at the end so you know we show the starting like how we started with criticizing even our daily lives okay so this this example is about how you could be truly at peace in a society where everything is you know connected through wireless communication or wireless waves so it gives you a resting space where none of these electromagnetic waves can you know interfere with what is happening with you inside so this is one of the example which we wanted to share with you before we start I think about speculative design okay so before starting speculative design I will just touch upon what is discursive design because since we have been also reading a lot of content or literature over this so this model of discursive design was given by Thabh okay and it shows the current context which we speak about when we are talking to most of the designers in our community this is the first question which occurs like speculative design is criticized in itself that it is useless in the sense because it's out of the traditional design area and it is like we accept that it is outside the traditional design space and but what happens with the discursive design practices where you sort of talk about things you know we you start asking these questions which may be reflective upon the practices you know internal or external of the industry or even our lives okay and from that we generate something which starts the stream of critical design practices where we are actually asking or reflecting upon practices from the traditional design or industrial design space like even in the faraday chair like you can see it is not a chair right but it is they named it chair so that was the part of critical design we started with and from there we start going into speculative design practices where you sort of envision future taking into consideration that it is outside the traditional design but considering more of a you know like a social technical future which can exist in the few years maybe or few decades or maybe few centuries moving on we have this presentation right now because I think even we are trying to unravel what is speculative design and you could see like it's sort of a mix of a lot of things and it helps us understand you know like okay so speculative design has a component of critical design design fiction and design art science okay like future thinking okay but thing is there is a space which is missing here I will say which is on purpose something about user-centered design which has become a lot prominent nowadays along with design thinking so you could see like design thinking is having a space there in speculative design practices so what we understood like we are also navigating this space with community in our self because you know when we converse with people then we understand the differences like where are we standing with speculative scenarios then we come to future school Dhruv, I will take over from there Very evident relaying we are doing here so coming to future is gone so this is like this was honestly like for me this was the starting point of you know research into this area this particular visual from a book called speculative everything and what it says essentially is that there are if you see the broadest spectrum it's of possible futures there are a lot of possible futures that can just happen if you took the if you take the conditions today and the details today it can amount to a lot of possible futures you know which can be shifts of power changes in economy global warming and the health of the planet coming into account very recently unfortunately and then there are a narrow spectrum is plausible futures and then there is another narrow spectrum called a probable futures so preferable futures are somewhere between probable futures and plausible futures and this is where intention comes in the red part is the intention of a particular designer or a visionary or a technologist or anyone any citizen of the system so designers are just one standpoint of this system and there are many people affecting change so we have to take that into account also so moving on what have we been up to so we have been up to a lot of things and again Jeff that Praveen just likes to watch we have been up to a lot of how do you say that is what we have been doing and I think we can do Jeff now yeah so we have been talking to a lot of people we have been attempting many open calls and we have been drafting our researchers and essentially what we have been up to is we have been articulating some of our own ideas through some tool kits that we generated and initially the idea of speculation into crafts came from a singular idea of the future that we imagined and hence we understood that just one idea for future isn't enough we need to like really understand the process that we are going through and probably share that with the community so that we can have more people talking about the things that we want to talk about and so moving on we moved to the first project that we kind of articulated so we wrote this this project was a I would say it was a very textual imagination we imagined it in terms of text on me the visual was associated a little later so what this project was that we imagined a certain so I am from Jaipur and Jaipur is a place where there are a lot of crafts happening all the time every time in every corner and the pandemic has really affected a lot of crafts because most of them are from a area which is the containment zone most of the crafts are from containment zones and so unfortunately that is the scenario right now but then what we had imagined in 2018 is that there is a lot of data that generates when a craftsman works you know let's say there is a person who is working with metal pots or any craft for that model so with the visual data the tactile data the tool usage data and the form generation data the aesthetic data so we tried to sort of understand what are the various data points that are being generated from a traditional craftsman and the ethic of this was I think one very important thing about choosing your preferences when articulating futures is that you should have an ethical system because it really acts as a guardian guideline as you move along the project so one ethic of our system predetermined ethic was that whatever data is being generated it should benefit the craftsman in some form or the other and later on we materialize that idea in the sense that probably a skill profile of a craftsman can be extracted from the work that he is doing and usage of that skill profile in a 3D prototyping or a robotic system might just help the craftsman also so that was the basic idea and we went into a lot of domains like what would be the interactions of a particular craftsman in the future what would the fabrication system look like so you can see in the visual also we have included a small tripod or a pentapod mounted robot which might just help the craftsman in performing tasks that are repetitive and probably do not include a lot of human decisions and the craftsman can really focus upon areas which really require human intention and decision making so that was the idea and we included a chair also that means the craftsman can just relax for a while so here what we thought is that apprentices can assume a digital identity since sociological trends amongst communities of craftsman in India is that the young generation doesn't want to pick up crafts because they just have very different lifestyle needs and I think that also needs to be taken into account that probably the young do not have aligned interest anymore and probably machines can serve the craftsman in a more meaningful way for his benefit or her benefit and moving on Praveen another workshop the next project of ours was a workshop thing where this was triggered by the anti-ca protest that were happening and amongst the international media we also saw trends of descents taking form and as we can see right now it's a lot of descent in the world right now and so descent became a very interesting topic amongst friends also and community of designers and where I teach with my students and I know Praveen also this was the topic of the temporal timeline that we were in that time and so we actually thought of like what is descent it is defying the norm probably it is questioning the norm of any kind be it government be it culture be it tradition so you can have descents which is in the family you can disagree with your parents you can disagree with your children that is a descent that we can also experience so we really understood the emotion of descent and with the group of around 15 to 20 people we came with the idea of a lot of different types of descent so these are actually works of different participants and if you go to the link you can see their names as well and so this I would like to discuss this one of them so because it just found relevance very recently so this touched me not project this happened in January this year and the corona I think the talks were just starting at that time in India and like we had a little snippet of a news that China is experiencing this virus and it just came out and it really wasn't such a scary time just earlier this year and at that time when we did this work the groups actually came up with this idea that possibly a pandemic might rise where the sense of touch or the feeling of touch or the mere act of touch is like a non-accepted social cultural norm what might that society look like what happens when we lose the luxury of touch over a long period of time so I think that found very interesting relevance and okay we'll be putting the discussions over the next half which will just come very soon so we can have an open mic session that time alright Benel I think you were asking that you wanted to join so moving on and like while we are continuing the presentation you guys can just type in we can start a conversation on chat as well because I think that functions better and once we are done with our narrative we can just open up the mic all right Praveen I think you would thank you okay so this is something which we have been working since I think last 3-4 months this is called speculative graph apprentices so I mean continuing our you know how we could speculate about graph we thought that okay there has been discussion through the perspective of you know a social ecosystem or even government ecosystem or commercial ecosystems but what about the apprentices because when we talk we used to find the major thing that the son doesn't want to continue the father's craft practices most of the time they want to shift to cities or they want to have a different lifestyle so we thought in our context in Indian craft traditional apprentices are generally family members or somebody who you are related to so we thought that okay what if we look at speculative crafts from the perspective of apprentices so we started this discussions among our groups in you know like with different design practitioners there were few people from different background also we were not just talking to designers so that gave us a very interesting perspective with design students what do they think about it since they are more of the same age a similar age of the newer apprentices and we were having these the thing was like it was going all this array since it has been a beaten down discussion so it was going all the way to different areas so we thought that we will put two boundaries and discussions which was like you know when we are speculating these are those who was talking about that we should have crafts which benefits itself right if you are looking forward the craft should benefit right and maybe the craft practices should continue and technology should not act as a replacement which is the major concern when we are talking about industrial production because most of the criticism is coming from the industrial production means replacing the Indian craftsmen generally so for that what we used to do was we used to have a workshop period where we used to discuss so our primary thing we understood through our processes we want to discuss first to understand how the particular topic or particular thing is taken in the community right so we were just doing these discussions of Indian crafts apprentice and technology like how people are looking at these three things during like an hour or two hour session so we will get these points so what happened like after having these discussions among the communities we understood that there are some patterns so we created a toolkit out of it so this is the first part of the toolkit which is like you have to sort of define an apprentice like because we understood like everybody understand apprentice in their own context so we thought that if we want to speculate on apprenticeship then it's better that we understand like what is apprentice for everyone right or for that particular person who want to speculate on it and maybe what are the ways of exchanging skills and how to communicate with the craft masters because then we wanted to understand we wanted to keep craft as a continuing practice we wanted to understand like how you think they exchange skills something like right now we know that craftsmen started using WhatsApp a lot there in earlier communication even with e-commerce as a participant in the ecosystem so WhatsApp was a game changer in this sense and then the second step we thought after discussing was something of there's a 2 by 2 matrix so what we observed in our discussions was like you know people were sort of taking spaces or taking parts in this grid either people were saying that craft is based out of human emotions and human skills and maybe there were perspectives from engineers also where we were like craft is just tools and techniques because there were questions like is making a computer chip is a craft which is mainly done by computer programs right now and then there was this perspective where crafts were seen as a community practice because it's actually an ecosystem or craft is seen as a solo or individual practice you know like what we have with artists generally so we divided this thing for starting as a trigger to speculate because we wanted people to you know stay in one space and then speculate so that the biases don't affect the future generally after this we just had a sort of imaginative name and what idea of future craft practice you think there will be and then we asked people that how do you think a particular journey in that craft will look in 2050 so how maybe a apprentice is working in 2050 in those type of scenarios right so this was the basic three-step toolkit which we were working with we did it with 2-3 groups and we found okay what type of imagination people are coming because there were like questions coming where one workshop somebody said that is parenting a craft right so then do we ask start questioning parenting also so how do we learn parenting right so those type of interactions were coming when we were trying out this toolkit which is very interesting for us so what happened after that we thought that okay let's just you know like go ourselves with it like do our own intensive session with it so we both started on this part so what we did was like this is something which I did so I mapped the concept of apprentice for me and then I triggered I chose four different futures from the four different quadrants and named them something like eco which was like a solo practice where craft is taken you don't require human transition something like blossom which is a solo practice and where craft is human skills so the names were coming from like you know extremities so one I will just show you like one result which is like we have made four different results for these so this is like a final output we decided that okay this is a map for this future which is called eco where individual craft practices are there based on tools and technique and we defined or we imagine this that the apprentice is just like a craft service provider he's not creating anything new but he's just a service provider so he has these work ventures which he could you know get an order from the AR marketplace and he will or VR virtual marketplace and then he with these robots are given order and they pick up some materials from the bottom and they start creating this object which look something like this we gave a very weird wireframe and since they are it's just a craft service provider it is not the main job they are just doing it as a part time gig since you know so we also started doing back casting with it like how the story went after corona like how people started migrating or leaving this craft practice going to cities and then maybe you know there's a revivalist movement sort of where people started digitizing these craft practices and they come up with these workstation which they started distributing among our family members and things like that so this is what we have been doing since the last 3-4 months on the craft practice what is next you want to get on this since there is a lot of things we have been talking about what is next and even this session which is happening right now is part of that what we will be doing next so we are sort of looking for more participation in people you know where we want to have discussions over different topics which is coming from community we want to have your topics which we would like to discuss and then come up with these custom tool kits which are specific to those areas and we look at how we could imagine a future on making some sort of a timeline based on that okay the office time now yes yeah and okay these are some other names that you can look at these are some things that are happening right now and most of the design community would just know this and this is where we also kind of get a lot of research material from so we are just sharing that most of our hypotheses are based on their hypothesis so yeah that's the kind of community and so basically the Jeff also meant that they are looking for more community participation starting now that we have shared kind of the work that we have done over the last two years I think since we have been working together Praveen and I and we would like to have more avenues now moving on from craft I think craft was more closer to home so to say because I live in Jaipur and I am from an institute that taught me a lot about crafts and so it has been a very integral part of my life since the last 10 years I think 2010 I started my formal education with crafts and design and since then so we are kind of looking at new avenues that are kind of domains that we can move into and since people here are from a lot of varying backgrounds we will just open the mic now and anyone who wants to speak can just raise their hands if they have any questions if you have any questions and you want to comment or you want to suggest something so I think it can help us all because that is pretty much the content we had to show and thank you has geek Zainab and Amog thank you I haven't interacted with everyone but then we have been in touch in some form or the other and thank you Ajayab Ghar Ambika and Nanditi and you guys do some really amazing work I keep sharing it with my students all the time and I think more discussions I think we are really happy that we got this place to just express our ideas I think that was pretty much it that is why we do it I think that we can just share it at some point with the community and we can have some questions and answers or comments or anything and you guys can just raise your hand you have two questions on chat guys would you guys like to just speak the questions out and we can have a conversation and we have a conversation Ajayab can you hear me Ajayab it was a nice presentation I could only grasp few things didn't know much about all these and not in my background but I had this one question regarding this suppose you have a design and so how do you know you can manufacture it about that apprentice like how do you model it like can this be produced feasible or not because I have a lot of design in mind but maybe it's not even possible right now given the limitations of machinery or craftsmanship available something like that this is a very valid question and this is the very primal question that we get so most of our process if you look at it it is based upon evidences that we can find today and back casting really helps you like if I can effectively map out where we have moved since the last 10 years till the I think the present day and I think we can effectively take the projection of where might a technology lead that for example an AR marketplace doesn't exist right now but then it is very much feasible with the machinery we have right now and most of our ideas let's say the apprentice 4.0 idea that we showed but to that slide yeah the sketch sketched this one no the earlier one like the initial one so I think that can be a good example so most of the things that are happening in this visual let's say so this particular robotic product already exists and the technology to convert visual into a profile we chose some proof of concept so this is a very interesting thing that most designers and I think most engineers also have this that we have something called a proof of concept so actually some ideas which are using similar technology and Praveen being an engineer so he can actually account for if this can be with a particular effort can this happen in this domain also so I think we have proofs and references heavily attached to any text we write even I would like to add this also tells this community also you should also maybe talk to engineers maybe other industry people so the thing is it becomes more real that this thing can happen actually through discourses honestly okay so it's more like an experience basis like asking an engineer like what has been showing it something like that is it right right it's mostly a lot of it's speculation is what it is speculation is the right word you actually pick on some ideas that are happening right now and then you try to very effectively articulate that how might this what might this grow into or what what all might this grow into okay and most of these are not predictions again I would want to say that these are not in any way predictions these are just preferential futures that a designer is trying to assert or a person who ever is creating this future is trying to assert for example if you look at this very effectively we can see this in like Hollywood movies like Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey so in that till up until that point of time the possibility of inducing gravity in a spacecraft with rotation of the spacecraft hasn't happened till now up until the point of international space station probably and at that time with the available theories about space exploration and looking at various physical models or because after I think a certain number of years five or six years US lost their first space program so Stanley Kubrick gave a vision which wasn't very accurate but it was not flawed in physics I would say so I think that is the kind of expertise that we are also trying to reach where you can effectively predict not predict imagine a technology or a sociocultural trend growing into so I think that is more of a question here what might photograph food look like and given the trends happening today so I think that is more of the domain that we are taking I think there is a lot of art involved also this can be considered as a statement of art also in certain contexts it's not pure okay yeah thank you we have a question I think so so when is there, Adne is there and Yathath so we can give the mic to Yathath who do you like to have the mic I think you can speak if you want to hi everyone hi Yathath yeah really confused what to say like I feel I've also been working in a similar domain recently I feel like we were having a discussion in the chat right now on the speculative design and how this whole word speculative design has a baggage of RCA, Antonina and Ravi it's all very hyper fashionable European things which are these it does not work in India like the way we look at it in India we want to have that when we say we are speculative designer you can't even connect with a lot of designers in your own community because it comes with like you are like very fashionable, very stylized I think what's very important for this project also like to build a community in India is that it should be very participatory that this idea of which should not come from like we are not speculative designers we are the facilitators the idea of like Anaf James from Superflex is an interesting thing the people who have the least power to shape their future suffer the worst consequences of it yeah that's very, that's somewhere we have to focus we have to build a community that we don't have to prescribe futures in the future I mean it will be so neat in India there will be flying cars in India in which there will be leather I don't know like the idea of the future should be given back to the community that if we are craftsmen we should ask the craftsmen what their future is we should have workshops with the craftsmen what they think their future is which is very simple I did something like this and it ended up that it is my future yeah we also had this discussion we should focus yeah I think that's very much valid and this is the question I also have in most conferences when I attend as a viewer with some futures organization which is based in let's say LA or the Silicon Valley most of them are based out of either German cities of Europe and Silicon Valley in the US and there's a question that I also have looking at the current trends of economy and the capitalistic how do you say expansion, aggravated expansion going on that if you talk of a green future that just seems so you know distant from what is actually happening or if you look at the but then I would also like to add to this that Jaipur in particular most of our craft premises are based out of the experiences that we have in the community of Jaipur and Jaipur due to some architectural planning actually what happened in Jaipur is that it was very effective architectural planning at certain point of time which included urban systems also craftsmen were kind of a priority at certain point of time I'm not saying that they are still right now or they have the same societal strata but then at a certain point of time they were the center point of the industry of that particular world city or the old city area which we call it right now which was the planned city of Jaipur and Savai Jai Singh I think was the king who facilitated everything of this and he also came from a planning background so if you look at the craft how do you say systems today in Jaipur they're not as bad like most of the craftsmen that I have worked with they come from a if not the same I'm just taking this a wild guess because you pick on cues how the person lives and what are his aspirations and but then the aspiration set is pretty old I would say it is not in the bottom strata of the hierarchies and Jaipur has been able to give the craft community that thing I think and most of the karigas here most of the people that I studied with in the college called IICD five or six of them like my closest friends were from craft practicing families of Kutch or Assam or from Jaipur itself from Bikaner from Barne and they had very different sets of aspirations I would say and I think I would agree to this that we do really need some very indigenous ways local ways and community-driven ways of predicting or choosing a preferential future in terms of India I think that is very much required and I think we are in that pursuit right now and I can I okay so like this discussion has been done a lot with you and me and sometimes I come with a very opposite view and I say let the crafts die because maybe I like the idea of a heritage of a craft let's say because the young person tells me that he doesn't want to do craft he wants to go and live in a city and maybe work as a serviceman for somebody else better health and those things so if I prefer that then I choose that okay let the crafts die okay so when this thing comes and there is you know like this discussion happens and we come to a balance in between yeah but I also have this view sometimes that okay maybe crafts how we envision right now which is associated with particular group of people should die because maybe it's not working for them and maybe there should be a new way of looking at crafts or maybe it can be called something else right that comes up in a different community or a community which has stabilized this economical preference okay so like this is another view we have so this is just like great to discuss these different views so and yeah like I would also say that once after thinking that I understand that's a very maybe extreme view and we come to a conclusion that okay yeah we want to benefit craft in essence or at least craftsman yeah but who's stopping sorry I'm interjecting but I just feel like stopping us being crafts people as well like if you're making AR filters like why are you necessarily quote unquote a designer like maybe you are also crafting it you know like so I think this agenda that we've been fed for so many years through you know our design educations of looking at them as the other and while continuously feeling guilty about it and simultaneously feeling we need to do something for them whereas not looking at ourselves as designers who have all the same skills in the studio that we've learned call ourselves we still call ourselves designers we don't call ourselves craftsmen craftsmen because I mean at the end of the day most of us are actually just doing project management right so why aren't we calling ourselves project managers exactly that's very true so many of these hi Praveen thanks this was a great discussion thanks for starting it off actually and actually I also take off from Ambika's point I think it's a very interesting point because I think like it's also the question of where like design education began for India you know and at this point of time if they're looking at speculative frameworks and in a way the speculative frameworks have also been set by a very Eurocentric point if you know like the corner of possible futures this toward cone which was adopted by Dan and Radhi and now we're kind of trying to like Yathak said it's almost like a sort of it's trending in a certain way and how do we sort of like you know take from it but then also make it our own I think this question has been haunting design and gender because even the setting up of design education I mean if I look at say NID and the whole team's sort of model which was again a very white sort of you know centric model let's come and you know rescue the craftsmen from their whatever lives and you know give them better livelihoods so that sort of thing is I think it's been haunting like the field of design in general so and now looking at speculative design again as a genre as a category that we kind of want to think through I think requires us to return to some fundamental questions which is why which is probably like the reason why I think the question of agency is one and the question of you know even the future the question of the future is also I think a critical question because I mean time in the present is also actually arriving from the future we are already in a speculative world you know the economy is a speculative technology is a speculative so how are we thinking of a future something that's further away from us rather than in the now so it's so I think these are some of the questions that kind of we could probably even like think about you together yeah yeah I think that's very important to understand how a particular what I take away from what you said is that how a particular intention of a future is affecting absolutely and also how I think if you look at dystopic fiction so that's also like dystopia has become the Netflix trend it's become so consumable in a certain way and a lot of speculative design collapses with dystopia fiction so I think some of these things they become almost escapist rather than kind of bringing conversations about agency yeah yeah even the same thing happened in the last session when we were going through those grids know about craft and that was one aspect that I didn't want to go into a dystopic future so even in one of the version we thought that the craft practice will still remain the same you know where it's a community driven human practice so we people will still be using the old potters wheel to work in the village but we thought that maybe the paradigm of working full time craftsmen will change to something like you know like a seasonal craftsman so they become craftsmen during only a period of time so that's what we wanted to have after having these discussions we understood that like in our community or people in India perspective even if we are not say belonging to that community we have a different perspective of looking at it so in our sessions I think none of us went into a dystopic future at all and that was very good you know like the thing I noticed right just to add like Praveen was following you and stuff like I did a thesis on this topic only so I would just put the link here and yeah it was all these discussions like I dealt with them last year I am just taking a break from it for now and let's put it in the link all the research I have done yeah that do you mind if I put this link in the hasgi comments so later if somebody comes to the page it's so defined Benil you wanted to have yeah Praveen good to see the work so I just want to ask whether the have you guys been able to map the data sets related to the art of craft based making and does it need to any enqueues or any patterns arising out from that I think am I audible yeah yeah yeah I think right now Benil we are not we are not actually going in that direction of taking queues from the act of the craft I think we are just make all the development that we have done which we are presenting and the kind of the way that we are also taking is mostly based upon you know the socio-cultural placement of the craft and how technology affects it in certain sense in terms of market or in terms of logistics or in terms of creation of the product or in terms of material how technology is the craft into a certain future future yeah thank you for this and this is a very interesting okay so do we have more questions or anything there is one yeah so hi guys Anuj so I have this question regarding that like how you said crafts and the future right so maybe sometimes you speculate and over emphasize on technology part or else like if we are proceeding towards that future maybe then we should focus more on embedding the knowledge into the local craftsmen so that they can start working with the technology just like how after industrialization we had the robotic arms right which said that okay these will take over the jobs of the people but then it didn't right because people started to learn how to adapt and work with them so I guess that's where some it lies like how you can start to mold it yeah I think that is a very that is the way we also look at it that a particular technological barrier should like innovation a particular technological innovation or invention should not replace the human it should rather extend the human and the human needs to understand how to extend through the innovation I think that is what you are also saying that we need to understand what skills might we need to learn as craftsmen and as part of the craft ecosystem for that particular future to happen I think it is the effect that we are also looking at as a statement that you want this particular aspiration set in the future then this is the process to do that because like as you said like we always look at when we say craftsmen we always look at the people weaving baskets or pottery very traditional but we are ignoring the digital craftsmen that we are here today so how can we start to bridge that gap so maybe that's what interesting our tech part also comes like if you just take machine learning the GAN networks so if you could start to collect various data from all these like weavings let's say weavings as a base right in various part of the country there are so many different types and the way they use so how that could come together maybe then with help of the GAN networks we can optimize and find certain things so as a result with which we can further interact with the locals so I think that and yeah regarding to the science fiction it has always been dystopian I don't think there has anywhere utopia yet or it won't be so yeah yeah I think we should anticipate and yeah these things I think this can be a very interesting cue for the next activity also that we are planning with the group so probably we can take into consideration these things and since we have some people determined into can I just ask you what do you do I know I am an architect I just graduated and currently working from home but yeah so we can have like certain group sort of a thing and we can come up with the domain and triggers for that and we can try developing a toolkit actually having visuals with various ideas features and yeah okay with a very like plug like interest I will say that if you guys continue the conversation on hasgi comments it might become a space for all of us to safely talk about you know more about this subject and build ourselves within that sphere they are kind of like very open and also in terms of sort of strong understanding of code of conduct and general ethics so perhaps a good place to take this conversation further without feeling he's zoom Chinese hey something like that yeah we are very open on this concern so please like feel free to contact us even if you want to just do even a short discussion with us because we are always kept up to talk about speculative design from different perspective also yeah can you leave your email ID but I can just get it from the list of attendees registered so I can actually write you back after reading the thing because I think we can have a conversation there also yeah I think we have his email address all right guys I think we if anyone has any more questions you can just email us or yeah or DM us on Instagram or whatever just a quick question like how do you guys plan to take this at like would we be having more discussion like this or developing a base platform where everyone can contribute yeah from the next session onwards so we'll probably have some documenting tools like a workshop tools as a enabler to the discussion so all the discussions that we'll do will be channelized in some form or the other and eventually what we lead up to is that after I think one session or two sessions probably we can then then we take some time and work out where the discussion has extended to all the extents of the discussions what all was covered so we have a process that is mostly very inclusive in the sense that we try to address each and every extremity that comes up in the discussion if someone says that that making a chipset is a craft and someone says that weaving a saree is a craft someone says that making a particular culinary experience in terms of tastes is the craft so we try to take all of the extremities into account and then we come up with a toolkit which takes some time but then I think that is the way that we have been so I think another documented discussion and we'll have an activity associated with it by the end of the discussion so we can have some form of visuals taking place of ideas in forms of collages and then we also work upon the visuals a little further after the thing is done and then we present it back to the group so that is kind of our process we take cues then we share the ideas back how we think about it and then so it's like a two in flow thing so we'll have activity from the next session it won't be a pure show and tell thing it will be a show alright guys thank you so much looking forward for it thanks Anuj guys I think we have extended all time so thank you everyone for being here and if you guys are interested we'll keep you posted about the next session so you guys want to discuss on the particular chosen topic we all could be there okay thank you bye thanks almost thank you Nishtha thank you everyone


So in Acts 14, verse 27, says, and now when they had come and gathered the church together, they reported all that God had done with them and that he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles. So they stayed there a long time with the disciples. Here in the context is the apostle Paul and Barnabas after the first missionary journey, coming back to the churches that have sent them out in particularly in Antioch of Syria and going on to the churches in Jerusalem to beginning to give a report of all the missionary work that had been done and accomplished so and with the direction and with the focus to give glory to God for those good things. So today is just the point is to catch you up on what's been going on in Guatemala and to be able to explain some of that work and to give glory to God together for the good things that he's done. So first off, then I would wanna tell you the outline that I would gonna follow is just a great commission outline. I'm gonna tell you about the vandalistic work there. I'm gonna tell you about the discipleship work there and then about the church planting work there. Tonight is gonna be more Q and A. So I know you'll have questions from that but tonight we'll have a fellowship time, five o'clock. If that's still, is that still the time, five o'clock? And at five o'clock we'll talk about any kind of questions that you would have about the ministry. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Mark Mudge or Marcos Mudge, depending on where I am. So I'm a missionary to Guatemala and I've been sent there to plant a church from our church here, Cornerstone Baptist Church in the city of Guatemala. So I wanna just introduce Guatemala to you and a little bit of who's there. So the country of Guatemala is right under Mexico, Central America, it's about the size geographically but the size of Tennessee has about 14 million people in it and about four million of those people are in the capital city. We're in the capital city, Guatemala city, easy to remember and the city and the country is one that the demographics of it, what it's like is that religiously is about 50% Catholic and about 46% evangelical. Now the way that the people, how they think is they've been overcome by the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is the dominating lie of the city. Thanks brother, that's very kind of you. The Pew Research Center is a reputable research center. 2014 they did extensive studies for religion in Latin America and they surveyed about the prosperity gospel and the way they define that is by asking the question that do you believe that if you have faith you will receive health and wealth in this life. Pretty simple, right? Well nine out of 10 Protestants in Guatemala city believe that. 89%, 89% of Catholics believe that. So that was surprising to me. So if you get 90% of evangelicals and 89% of Catholics and if you're adding the math Dr. Dodge, you get about 96% either Catholic or Protestant. Basically nine out of 10 people you meet believe in the prosperity gospel. That's grieving, surprising. So if you consider Latin America, right? Guatemala has the highest percentage of evangelicals in Latin America. So many consider when they look at missions they consider Guatemala as a place not to send missionaries because of how reached it is. They can understand because of the prosperity gospel and Catholicism it is a completely unreached country. It's an unreached country and that in the same way you would talk with a Mormon and they would define faith different or you talk with a Mormon and they define repentance different or almost any term you use, the Bible, apostles, priests, they have a different definition. In the same way somebody who believes a prosperity gospel has many different definitions. You can use the same word but have define them differently. So if I stand up and talk about faith, they have a different understanding about what faith it means than what you would have as a performed Christian. So the country is given over to these lies of Catholicism and prosperity thinking. It's very prevalent and very strong. The Catholicism is stronger than it is here as well. It's more people believe it.  They'll have maybe sometimes they'll have all nuns carrying this statue of Mary and during Christmas time we saw a lot of that and they have people who follow behind the processions of idols. They have people with drums and trumpets so that nobody can preach. You can't hear anything as the idols pass through. They've got it planned out. So I'm giving that as an illustration to say how strong the Catholicism is that this is a regular practice and something that the country takes pride in that around holidays they parade the idols to the streets and they give veneration or worship to these idols. So there's a great need in Guatemala for the gospel. There's a great need in Guatemala for the gospel. Guatemala has had a history of great violence, and atrocities from the 1970s and the 1990s. There were 200,000 people who were killed in the countryside because of a civil wars between communist guerrillas on the countryside and then a military run CIA backed government that was, the presentation is, understanding the history and in the 20th century of Guatemala helps you understand how evangelicalism rose in Guatemala. It rose in the 19, particularly in the 1980s when Pentecostal president got elected, Rios Mont, and he is now, that guy is now in jail, okay? He's now in jail for war crimes, but at the time he was a president in the 1980s, he was considered a pastor and president of the country. Every Sunday night he'd preach a sermon to the country and he helped Pentecostalism rise in Guatemala going from a very small percentage, like 3% of the people to then escalating to what it is now. And it's still on the rise, it's still on the rise. If you compare it from the 2014 Pew Research numbers, they would have around 41% of the country evangelical and then you would get a more recent update from the newspaper, they haven't risen to 46%. So in a matter of three years, evangelical numbers have gone up 5% in the country. So I'm just trying to give you numbers to give you an idea of what is it like there? What is it like to talk to people about the gospel?  Nobody knows the gospel. There is a great dependence in works righteousness. If you talk to somebody, you ask them, do you believe you're a good person? In Guatemala, a lot of people will say, no, I'm not a good person. And then you ask, what's your hope? How will you have your sins forgiven? And then they give a good person solution. They say, oh, I'll try harder. I'll try harder. They say, they know the right thing to say and think is, well, I'm not a good person because they're very religious. But then when you say, what's the solution? They have a good person solution. They don't really believe themselves to be as bad as the Bible describes that we are. And so the, so we're in this country, right? Country that's given over to Catholicism and prosperity gospel, these false gospels. And so then how do we fit in there? So the Rusi family and the Mudge family are living in an apartment in the central part of the city. We're downtown in a fifth story apartment, sharing that together. And it is a great blessing to be able to live with them. Lee is currently looking for work and going through the immigration process in order to be able to get his papers in order to be able to work there. He's had an interview recently but it was for a very small amount and be able to pay the rent kind of job. So he's hoping for his paperwork to come through in the next few months so that he can pursue that. He has been a great help and a great blessing in the ministry. We've done everything together. I couldn't be more thankful for the partnership. Gabby is running the home school. She's doing a good job raising Judah and Ezra. It's exciting to see them being to get friends that are in the neighborhood so that they're speaking more Spanish.  They know more than they let on. And the Benjamin is growing fast and he is a little Spanglish machine. He does understand the difference between Spanish and English so he just mixes them all together. And Ashley's man is here and they've been of course a great blessing to be able to serve with and a great help with all the ladies. So that's a little bit of introduction. The country, who we are, what we're doing and then now I'll get into the outline. Some stories about evangelism, some stories about discipleship and then about church planning. So first off with evangelism. In evangelism we're trying to make use of various means. So we'll try and do street evangelism. We'll try and do open air preaching. We'll try and do what is a newer evangelism for me, what I would call synagogue evangelism. So in some of the street evangelism there, we don't typically go door to door because there's so many people in the streets that it doesn't make much sense.  If you've been outside the US in many places in Eastern Europe and Latin America and Africa, many of the islands where you go, the houses are like a little fortress. You know, you gotta knock on a metal door and they got razor wire so you can't jump the fence and that's just how everybody lives. And so in order to get into the fortress, it doesn't make much sense when I got people, I got more people that can evangelize walking in the street. It's very easy. It's very easy just to, and people are more open to conversation culturally there than they are here.  That's not the way it is in Latin America. So a great number of the people don't even have a car so then they walk to the bus station, they're interacting in all these community levels, right? So it's very easy to start a conversation on the street, just walk out the back door and walk into the street and there's people walking around and so you pick up a neighbor very easily. So in our central part of the city, we'll be at zone five in the city, we've had numerous conversations where the ladies really have focused in on that area during Saturday afternoon or sometime. And so some of the stories there is we have a next door neighbor named Angel Gabriel or the Angel Gabriel in English. It sounds different in Spanish, but he was somebody who's, because I can look out my back window and see him working on a car, he's a mechanic and we're hanging out on the street corner and he's a short indigenous guy, like very short, like people there are very short and he Lee went up to him and was talking to him about the gospel and so he gave him a track and it went like a regular conversation. He read the track and he was very convicted from the track. He was expecting a track to say about how God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and so then when he was reading it about sin and judgment, he was very convicted and so then he contacted us and talking about how, what a difference this track is. So he said he wanted to follow Christ. In the conversations with Lee, he'd already explained his background in gangs and his background and then that his, one of his children had been killed by the gangs in the city and so then he in turn went and killed some of the gang members. And so he was just describing this to Lee in a conversation. And so then we were kind of left in a pickle or in a decision point of, okay, do we invite this guy, which he's openly admitted that he's killed people, do we invite him to church, which happens to be in the house of somebody that's part of the assembly, a part of our church in Guatemala. So we decided that we're gonna move slow with him, we'll continue to meet with him on a weekly basis, go through hard to believe with him and see how it goes. So we happened to be going through the book of Mark and the story with Matthew, the tax collector and all of his violent friends and how they come to hear the gospel. So by God's sovereignty, we're going to this text and so we invited him forward for fellowship instead of putting the church member at risk, we decided to invite him over to our place because he does where we live anyway if we're across the street. So we invited him in and he was saying, I want you to know I'm a true Christian, I'm a true Christian and he used some prosperity kind of, if you know prosperity lingo, he's like, I declare, I declare today that I am a true Christian. And so I was watching Lee, this is at our kitchen table, dining table with a church fellowship, everybody from the church comes to church fellowship because we're such a small church, right? And so I'm watching Lee and what happened is within a short time, he went back to the same lifestyle of sin within just a few a matter of weeks. And what happened is in his family, his girlfriend, a long time living girlfriend that they have a baby with, she ain't got in a fight with us with the mother and fist fight and then from that trial, he decided to go back to his sinful lifestyle. And so what I'm describing is some of the, an example of evangelism that didn't end like you would want it to end, but it's just what the Bible talks about. It's just like what the Bible talks about when trials come and what happens when you preach the gospel. So the same things that happen here happen there. The same things that happen, so the same things we do here, we do there. It's not any different. What they did in Israel with the disciples, planting churches in Samaria, in Judea, to the ends of the earth, what we do here, we do there. It's not really any more glamorous or any different. It's the same, the same work just in a different country, different culture, different language, but it's the same work. So another example of evangelism is when Lee and Gabby would go out and we have a supermarket that's across the street. It's kind of like their version of a public's, right? It's a relatively nice place in it. And so the ladies will go there in the parking lot and it's, the city of Guatemala is full of evangelistic opportunity. They're not so restrictive as here, you know. You go into certain developments and they say, oh, you can't preach gospel in this development. You go to certain apartment complexes. Oh, you can't preach the gospel in apartment complexes. Or you go into malls. Oh, you can't preach the gospel in malls.  Oh, you can't go in the strip mall. You can't go preach the gospel. Or you stand up in the bus station down in the link station. Or there's just so many places here where they say, oh, you can't do that. In Guatemala, it's not like that. It's very easy to get an opportunity to be able to preach the gospel. It's rare. You have to go to very rich areas in order to get kicked out. There's many, many, many opportunities to preach the gospel there. So one of them is a supermarket. And so the ladies were able to have a conversation with a neighbor named Karen who was there in the supermarket. And so she's been attending the church for the past month or a month and a half or so. So she's coming out of a difficult background. Her father was murdered and tortured to death when she was three years old. She never knew him. He was coming out of a military background in working the police. And then so the gangs or what kidnapped him and killed him, which is that kind of story is not that unusual in Guatemala. And so her husband died when about five years ago, is it? And so she's a nine-year-old son who really didn't know his father either, named Brandon. And so she has Gabby is taking her under her wing and teaching her what does it mean to discipline your son? What does it mean to, and how does that apply to the gospel? How does the gospel apply to disciplining your son? How does it mean for him, for the good of his soul to discipline him? And so she's using all different avenues to be able to explain the gospel to her. Karen was somebody who didn't understand the gospel. She would be somebody who would have attended a prosperity church just a little bit. And the first service she came to, afterwards she came up and she asked me to be a mediator for her. And so I was asking, what do you mean by that? And she explained that she wanted me to lead her in the sinner's prayer and so that she could be saved. And I explained there's only one mediator between God and man. It's not Mark much, it's Pastor Marcos, it's the Lord Jesus Christ. And that he didn't say that's how we have faith in him, but that's how we become Christians by praying a sinner's prayer. So we're praying the Lord would save her. She's very humble and teachable and continues to come to everything last Sunday. A week ago she's at fellowship and we try and use every opportunity, every car ride, every fellowship time to be able to explain the gospel to her in a different way. And in every way that we open the Bible and explain it, she's very humble and teachable. We had a, we're going through on Sunday mornings a strange fire class or focusing in on cessationism, charismatic issues by using that book for them to read and then going through a class that's outlined similar to how the book is outlined. So I asked one of the brothers in the church to get videos, kind of like Justin Peters did, but to get them in the Latin world. And to find Latin preachers that are doing abuse. So he found one of the brothers in the church Ricardo Pablo, his face is on one of the pictures over there. He's a white looking tall guy from Argentina. And he's a very studious brother and very zealous brother. So he's able to find some of those videos. He found a video of a guy, where was the preacher from, Costa Rica or something?  And he was a very obvious example of prosperity preaching, right? But what Karen said is afterwards is, you know what, if I hadn't been here, like in our church, I probably would have believed what he said. And for me, it was like such an obvious example. I was thinking, oh Ricardo, why did you get such a obviously bad example that everybody's gonna know that guy's bad. Nobody would be fooled by that guy. He's got money on the table dropping it while he's talking. And what's sad is there are many people that are deceived and fooled by even what we would consider to be very obvious false teachers. So that's some street evangelism. Open Air has been such a blessing to be able to, we've been usually open air preaching in the central park there. Lee was able to find a side street that is normally shut off.  And the street is within two like tall buildings downtown that the other building is probably as far as ways the wall is from here. And so it kind of protects your voice so that your voice doesn't get lost in a large open area. And so people are able to hear as they pass through in the streets. And in Guatemala, many people stop and listen to the preaching. It's not unusual to preach there and have 20 people, 30 people all sitting there and listening for half an hour or to an hour and listen to the sermon. And so I began to thinking, man, there's more people listening to my sermons in the park than in church. And so I better bring actual sermons as opposed to just winging it and just talking about the gospel. So in Christmas time, that the downtown park area was absolutely packed. We had like 50 people listening to a sermon. We tried to do this thing where you do carols and then preach the gospel and preaching short sermons. What happened is we first did it. We started to sing, few people gathered around and maybe it was because of my singing. But the few people gathered around and then I began to preach and I planned just to preach for like five minutes. And so then a number of people stopped and were listening to the preaching and then, so I just preached for a short time, five minutes, 10 minutes, I went back and we started singing and all the people dispersed. And so we said, let's just preach instead. So we just then we just preached and then 50 people listening. It's a large amount of people develop in a circle and they're listening as we're trying to describe the gospel and really focus in on themes like justification and regeneration because Pentecostals don't understand those themes in large part and large part and their essential themes, essential themes and George Whitfield would focus on those themes in his open air preaching because of the great ignorance of justification and regeneration. And so we try and focus on those things because they rightly defined, they help you differentiate between the lies of the prosperity thinking and Catholic thinking as well. So the one such time, it was only I think maybe a month ago or so, Lee and I were preaching, 25 people stopping, listening for half an hour on a Saturday afternoon. And then afterwards there's a TV channel there that is called Channel 27 and they're known for Neopentecostal, kind of subdued Pentecostal prosperity thinking. They're not like crazy, they don't take off their jacket and kind of winging around but they still have the same beliefs, kind of like Joel Osteen. Joel Osteen, he doesn't do something crazy when he preaches, but he still has that same theology, right? So this Channel 27 is known for that and so they came up afterwards, we're after preaching, they came up to us and said, oh, do you wanna take a video and would you promote our new Moses Tank Amendment series that's coming out? They had billboards everywhere throughout the city and I said, well, I'm really thankful for the opportunity but we, I don't know the movie so I can't promote the movie because they were asking if I'm a pastor, they wanted pastors to make a little commercial so they could play on the TV station and so I said, yeah, I really can't promote that. I just, I don't know the movie and but Lee said, but we can talk about the Tank Amendments, who you talk about the purpose of the Tank Amendments, because that's the name of the TV series and so they said, okay, let's do that and so we talked about the purpose of the Tank Amendments and how it drives us to Christ and so I don't know whether they put the video a lot on the TV station or not but it was a very good idea from Lee and so we've also been able to use Lee Wall so sometimes play the drums downtown and people will come and listen to the drums and then he stands up after playing the drums and then preaches the gospel to crowd so he's done that on numerous occasions and that also has gathered many people and many people will refer to the gospel from that. The, another type of evangelism that I've been excited about is what I would consider synagogue evangelism so how I would define that is inviting yourself to a religious group and having the opportunity to be able to preach the gospel to them so in other words, so I began to hear I had wanted to do that but I know like Edgar has opportunities to do that. Edgar gets invited to churches around Florida or goes and preaches to them or has these kind of connections. I'd never had that until I got to Guatemala then I'm like, wait a minute, I'm the missionary and people will invite a missionary to come and preach their church so I thought, well let's just start inviting ourselves to do churches and see if we can go and preach the gospel there. So we started in our neighborhood so we'd go up to some Pentecostal churches that in the neighborhood and by ourselves hey, I'm a missionary, my name's Mark, I live across the street and I would like to be able to preach the gospel. Youth group, whatever, here's our doctrine, here's our gospel track. We believe this is our doctrine in 1689, call us back if you need somebody to preach to and we'll preach the gospel. So we got rejected a few times, they were very friendly, they just didn't give us a call back and so but then other opportunities that we're going to have opened up in that regard. Edgar went to a conference in California where at John MacArthur's church for Spanish pastors or the church that's associated that's right next to Grace's community in California. So there was a brother from that church in California named Redolfo, he drives two hours every Sunday in order to get to church. So he, so everybody in the west side don't feel like you drive a long ways. It's not a burden for him, it's a joy for him that in California to drive two hours, he's a very joyful, zealous brother. He has family who had a Bible study in Guatemala and so we were in the west, south side of the city, a poorer area and so we were able to go there and preach the gospel to a Bible study of people there. We were able to preach the gospel at field rolls. We've been able to preach the gospel at there's somebody, Jeffrey Johnson knows, if you remember Jeffrey Johnson, a pastor who came to conference on Islam, he knows somebody who's Guatemalan who lives in Kansas and so she's been inviting all her family and all her friends to come. Some people have come to the church and visited from her friends and so her family, God willing when we come back, her family has a Bible study and then we're gonna visit that Bible study for another synagogue of Angelism. There's also a, you saw the video of a couple named Joshua and Monica. They've been coming to the church, very committed to the church, very joyful, thankful to be following the Lord. They believe they've become believers in the past couple of years and so his father has been a Pentecostal, somebody's of God, pastor and so he's had the opportunity in a very small church to be able to have a regular time to preach there and so when he started to come to the church, he said, well this is what I've been doing, I've been doing this, going to this church for some personal reasons, his father is not qualified to be running that church anymore so he's trying to step out by March, he's trying to get out of this group so he's trying to get his son to take it over and so his son is saying what should I do and so I said, well you should come to our church and be disciple and then try and change the time for that service so he was able to do that, he's able to come to our church in the morning, we don't have an evening service at this time so he's able to change that group to be the evening service time on the north side of the city, we were meeting on the south side of the city so he's able to come to church with us and then still be able to preach at this group so how that went before we started was I was saying, okay we're gonna go, I'm gonna disciple you in this, I'm gonna help you learn how to preach but this is how it's gonna go. Watch in the Bible with synagogue evangelism. What happens? It separates, separates, it divides when the message is very clear then by God's grace some people believe and other people don't so as we started there, I got the opportunity to go and preach at that place and so I preach on the beatitudes and what is a true Christian, what is not? Someone who's not, how do you know from how Christ describes what a true Christian is and so afterwards people were like, you remember with Ezekiel, in Ezekiel people said, oh that's a beautiful song, yeah it's the way you preach it sounds very, so afterwards it was like that, people were going oh thank you for that word, it seemed that way, like they said, oh that, what you're preaching was a beautiful song but they don't go and do what or examine themselves or test themselves so afterwards Joshua was like, oh it seemed like it went well, I was like, smile and nod, just smile and nod Mark and we'll wait to see how it goes so he, Joshua's dad wanted Joshua to preach and not so much me to regularly preach so him and his dad were then taking turns so we would just go the weeks that Joshua was preaching and we were trying to make it known to him that this is a evangelistic time, that should be our focus, don't think of it as a church, think of it as an evangelistic time and so afterwards the Rousses and we would go and afterwards we'd have conversations with people and we'd try and help him grow in his preaching. Within a few times of preaching and a few conversations afterwards, for example one, the guy who owns the building that they meet in, the name is Pedro, Lee would continue to have conversations with him and Pedro is very religious, he's maybe a man about 50 years old, 55 and he likes the book of Revelation, he likes to talk about the Bible and Lee would come up to him and say, how do you know, what's the gospel, how does somebody go to heaven when you die and Pedro would talk about Revelation and many religious things and he'll have many words about the Bible but wouldn't answer about the basic question about what's the gospel, how do you go to heaven when you die, how do you have your sins forgiven, so Lee would kindly ask the same question in a different way and then he kindly asked the same question in a different way and he'd say ask the same question in another way and then he would plainly say, Pedro, you don't know the gospel, this is the gospel, what Jesus Christ has done, he's died on the cross for us, he's the only way we'd have our sins forgiven, we need to repent and believe in this good news and so the next week Lee would come back and do the same thing, Pedro, how did somebody go to heaven, did you understand from the message, how did somebody go to heaven when they die and Pedro wouldn't be able to, didn't have eyes to see, didn't have ears to hear but instead he was kind to Lee's face but and then later on he was asking that we wouldn't come back anymore so those doors are beginning to close, we preach the gospel to most people there, there's only two families left and so instead of continuing to go there, we're gonna try and focus on those two families that we haven't talked with, otherwise we've had personal conversations with everybody else one on one and preach the gospel to them and so it's an example of synagogue evangelism that it's a great joy to have these opportunities, I was saying to one brother earlier this week that I used to think here when I preach at Crane's Rouge, something, if only people would stop and listen, people just, so many people would just go by, if they would just stop and listen or you hand them the track, if they would just read the track, so few people would read the track in Guatemala, many people would read the track, many people would get the track and while you're handing out tracks and they read it there right in front of you, they sit down and they read the whole thing and you watch them reading the whole thing on the street corner and or many people hear the gospel and it makes me think of the gospels where many thousands heard Jesus Christ himself explaining the gospel, who could do it more lovingly, who could do it more clearly, who could do it more boldly than Jesus Christ, perfectly preaching the gospel and it makes me more and more of a Calvinist that the one who has ears to hear, let him hear, you have eyes to see, right? So we see more and more that conversion is a miracle. Conversion is a miracle and that it's a work of God. It's a work of God and that's what makes it last too. So it makes it last that it's a work of God and so that's what we pray for, we long for and we have faith that the Lord will use these many opportunities and many different doors. So the city is full of evangelistic opportunity. Now I'm gonna pick up the pace a little bit to cover the other aspects of the ministry. So we have many opportunities for evangelism and then discipleship is something what we really wanna focus in on. We have a small group of people in the church, some relatives from Pastor Victor from Miami. If he's come before for a marriage conference last year and he's a good brother with a good church there and some of his family comes to the church. There's an Argentinian brother who's a very encouraging named Ricardo Pablo, there's Joshua and Monica and then there's a Rousses and us and then there's people who've come from evangelism. There's also people who are interested in the church but they're thinking about whether they're gonna move from the US, a couple that's living in Texas, they heard about us from the website. When you look for a Reformed Baptist Church in Guatemala, we are the only ones for sure, we're the only ones. So having a website that talks about how a Reformed Baptist has been a very great help because how do people come to our church? They come to our church by the preaching of the gospel. Either they hear online, somebody preaching the gospel, Paul Washer, Miguel Nunez, who held Michelin, some of these Reformed Spanish preachers, they hear on the gospel on the internet or they hear the gospel from us in the street. That's how people are gonna end up coming to the church and remaining with us. People who come looking for a show or looking to be served, just like here, the people who have come here from driving by the church and they're like, oh, I'm gonna try that out. They're very often the ones who walk out before the service ends. The people who stay here are the people who are being having the gospel preached to them, understanding the difference, whether it's the gospel preached to another church or online or another place, or whether they've heard it from us preach the gospel. So it's the same there in Guatemala. And so I'm very thankful for this group of believers. We're very excited. I'm wanting to disciple them and it's a great blessing to be able to do that. And it's a great blessing to be able to, for me as a pastor to spend, personally spend time with each of the men in the church. That's something I only could have dreamed of here and I would have desired to do. But there, it's a great joy and blessing of the dynamic of being able to disciple each guy. So with Joshua, the guy in the video, young guy in the video, I've been able to disciple him on how to read his Bible. After hearing him preach, I thought, well, the place to start is he needs to learn how to read his Bible. How to make observations, how to make interpretation, how to make an application. And so I've seen him grow and have a great hunger for the word of God through these basic things. And it was very encouraging to see him grow and just learning how to read his Bible. Him and his wife, they would do that together. And with Ricardo Paolo, another good brother, he's been a Christian for about four years, I believe, and he knows a lot of theology. He's the one who's the most theologically astute in our church, besides Lee. And he reads, has a great appetite to read and to read good literature. And so we went through this trial of Saint of Vine with him, that's a book on disciple making and how everyone is to be a disciple maker. And that that's how healthy churches are developed and how they're able to raise up pastors from within the midst. That's the ideal. That's the ideal for what a church should be is to be able to have like Pastor Michael and Pastor Dale, where we've known them for many years and they're raised up among us. And we're able to recognize their lives and their doctrine and their abilities. And so how does that, how do things like that happen? Well, it happens by everyone understanding that everyone has a responsibility to be a disciple maker. And so Ricardo Paolo, a good brother who's been hearing good preaching, reading great books on his own, but on his own, not within a good church, what does he need to grow in? He needs to grow in humble service in the local church, the nitty gritty local church and getting his hands dirty, learning to sacrifice for others and learning how to be discipled and to disciple others, how to be poured into and how to pour your life into others. And that that is how the commandments of Christ are passed on. And what it means to follow Christ is passed on. So that's been a great joy, great blessing. We are now switching to focusing on Deuteronomy. We're studying Deuteronomy and how to study our Bibles. And it's a great joy to me to see how the people in the church are so studious with their studies in Deuteronomy, that come back with their inductive sheet, like how Pastor Rick makes an inductive Bible study sheet when you're going through a book. And then they come back and have that all filled out with all the different notes and have them hungry with like a fork and knife ready to be taught, the word, as extremely encouraging as a pastor to see them put in the effort to know God's word. So the, now as a church plant, some of the things that we are focusing in on is I'm taking Spanish classes, that's necessary for the church plant. And necessary, I'm not able to preach yet. I'm teaching in Spanglish. So Lee, I'm trying to teach classes in Spanish. And it's rough, it's rough. Lee helps me out. And sometimes the ladies are like, have been, and Lee have been like, it's just better if you teach in English for now. Keep growing, keep going to classes. And it's clearer if we just translate for now. So I'm working on it, please pray for me. I want to be humble and be corrected. It's a great opportunity for me to grow in humility, to be constantly corrected by everyone in the church on my Spanish pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary, everything. So it is growing, and then it's necessary. But I would have the goal of wanting to be able to preach simple sermons by October or something like that. I would want to have the goal of teaching by something in the summertime on my own. So we'll see how that goes. And please keep that in prayer. We're going through the book of Mark, verse by verse, Sunday mornings. We're going through Sunday school. What we have in our church is, we focus on small group time on Sunday mornings as opposed to the weekday. Because in Guatemala, it's more difficult to make it during a midweek service. Because of a number of people, maybe they have a car, they don't have a car, so they're riding the bus. And traffic there is on another level. It's another level of, I imagine everywhere's like I-4. All the side streets like I-4 during traffic time. Edgar knows he's driven where it takes an hour and a half, two hours, what time we're trying to get across the city during rush hour. And that's not unusual. So in order to have, having a midweek service, and when we're also, we're spread out too. Having a biblical church is not unusual to have the people spread out. Because it's rare for someone to have eyes to see and ears to hear. And when they do, then they see it's worth the distance to be able to drive to it. So we're like cornerstone in that respect that we're relatively spread out. So the point is, we have our small group time at Sunday school in order to try and help that and make those essential times for a member of the church to be Sunday school and the Sunday service that morning time. So that's when we do our accountability, our prayer together, and we do our studies through Strange Fire. And then in the midweek study, if you're able to make that, then we focus in on study and deuteronomy, the inductive study. We're looking for a central church location. And so please keep us in prayer with that. We were supposed to be moving forward to a central location, but it didn't work out the, they were having meetings and it doesn't look like it's gonna work out that location. So we're, that's a continual thing that I'm doing on the side is looking for a place that's gonna be an area that's not too rich or not too poor, so that all different demographics of the people can be able to come. A place that has access by the bus. A place that is central to the city.  So all those factors, it's difficult to find a place that fits all of those things. So I've been working on that for some months. So that, because during our evangelism, a lot of people were a ways out from the city where we're meeting now in one of the homes of the brothers. It's better to have a central location starting out. So that's some of the things that we're doing with evangelism, discipleship and the church plant.  But there's so many times, so many conversations, so many shepherding issues where I can look back at what I've learned here and how I was discipled here and how a blessing has been to me.  That in Guatemala, it is a great blessing to be preached to. And I just wanna express my thankfulness and your providing. Most of the majority, there's other churches that pray for us and support us, but most of the financial support has been from you all. And I often tell the people there that look at how we haven't come and asked you for money and you don't have the burden of trying to pay for me to preach to you all because of other brothers who've sacrificed and other brothers who have been generous and kind in another place so that you could hear the gospel and they have expressed the thankfulness like Joshua and Monica in that video. That's the other brothers are thankful like that for your sacrifice to be able to send us there. And so I know that that, like Philippians four, I know that you're receiving a great blessing out of seeing the fruit of that ministry. And I'm not doing that, they asked for more support.  Our needs are provided for. I'm just wanting to express thanks, that's all. So things to pray for. Oh, and one thing I wanna express thanks to is, I don't know if Lee and Gabby are watching, but they probably are having to leave now for church. But often we eat breakfast and we watch Sunday school. And right around this time, we're running out the door right at, and they need to close the laptop with Pastor Rick's face in it, just as he's closing. But I asked my wife, what's the one thing if you would say you're most thankful for for our time in Guatemala? And she said to the Rousses, Lee and Gabby have been, it's been such a blessing to be able to serve with them. And so I would want to give thanks to God for the work that he's done in them. And I know you would do the same.  Not just doctorly, but in practice. That to have so many conversations with somebody, and then with Lee and then to walk away and I'm thinking one thing, but I'm wanting to hear his opinion first, and he has the same exact opinion about what the person need to hear about the gospel or what it's shepherding issue or whatever. It's so encouraging to be so like-minded and for them to be sacrificing, for them to be serving faithfully with us and the joy be able to see. When you live with somebody, you know there's a phrase in Guatemala, you wanna know somebody live with them. It's a common phrase there. And so it is a great joy to be able to live with them, see them, pastor their sons, see them in their faithfulness with us. So things to pray for. Things to pray for. If you wanna write this down, please pray that Lord will provide us with a church location. That would be providing and praying for a church location at this point in the church plant is kind of like you're praying for somebody to marry. You're like, you don't know all that you, you don't even know how to pray for all that you need when the Lord provides you with a spouse. You know that the Lord has to do that. The Lord has to do that, right? It's got like that with a church location. Because in the church location, there's so much impact and so much, it's gonna happen from that because that's gonna be a center for evangelism. There's gonna be people that are gonna hear the gospel as a result of where that church is that wouldn't otherwise. And so we're asking for the Lord would guide us and provide for us in that church location. So that's one. Two, please pray for laborers for the harvest. It's exciting to be able to see some of the brothers be discipled in evangelism with us like Ricardo now and in Joshua and some of the ladies. But please pray for more laborers for the harvest. The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few in Guatemala. You just, when you go to like a central park and you see hundreds and thousands of people pass by and you see that there's no way to reach this four million people on your own. So there's a great need for laborers for the harvest. So church location, laborers for the harvest, excuse me. And then Ephesians one versus 15 to 23. And Ephesians one versus 15 to 23. Paul prays for the believers in Ephesus and the region in Laodicea there that they would grow in an understanding of the hope they have in their calling in Christ. That they would grow in their joy for the inheritance they have in Christ and that they would grow in the understanding of the power that they've received in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I remember that by the acronym HIP. Are you HIP? Hope, inheritance, power. So that those, the way Paul prays for the believers there, are you HIP? To pray for those things. Hope, inheritance, power. That you pray that the church there would grow in understanding of those things and in that Ephesians one, you can see how Paul is been faithful and so I also express my great thankfulness to you all for your faithfulness and prayers. Church is a new, Reform Baptist Church in New Jersey. Spanish speaking is praying for us regular basis. There's a church in Costa Rica that's a Reform Baptist Church. They are praying for us on a regular basis. The church in Miami is with Pastor Victor. They're praying for us on a regular basis and I know you all are praying for us on a regular basis and so all the good things that have happened have been, I see them as a result of the Lord working through prayer. So I plead and ask that you would continue to pray for us. So thank you for hearing this update in Guatemala. I'm looking forward to answering your questions in the hallway or tonight if you're able to come. They will be a joy. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for the blessing of being back here with family. Thank you for being able to worship you together. Thank you for, I pray that you would have helped them to grow in an understanding of the inheritance that they have received in the gospel. I pray that you would help them to take greater joy and have greater faith in the hope of their calling. I pray that you would help them to grow and be confident and apply the truths of your power in salvation. So I pray, Lord, that you would bless Cornish and bring them, have them to have more laborers for the harvest and help them to grow and persevere here in this city. Amen.