At first, Solar Players were only available in English and were distributed in English-speaking nations in Africa. Since those early days, the entire content of the Solar Player has been made available in both Spanish and Portuguese. Now, Solar Players are also available in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; in Creole, the language of Haiti; and in Middle Eastern Arabic. Currently, translation is being conducted in Telugu (India), Urdu (Pakistan), French, Chinese, and other languages.

The Solar Players are distributed to qualified leaders who speak the local dialect and one of the languages available on the Solar Players. The Solar Player has a pause/play button that allows a preacher or teacher to use the device to play a phrase, push the pause button, and then translate that phrase into another language.

This is a comprehensive mission project and involves much more than the solar device, which serves as an important tool in the project. The hardware is the least expensive part of the project. The rest of the cost is the expense of providing an audio Bible and hundreds of hours of Bible teaching, which must be converted into a format compatible with the unit; considerable staff and contract labor cost in preparing, formatting, loading, and handling; recording a spoken menu for each course and each lesson in each course; and testing each player prior to distribution. Translation of the hundreds of hours of biblical teaching on the Solar Player into other languages is also a considerable expense.

Another major expense of the Solar Mission is delivery and training. We don’t mail these units; they would never get to the right people in the remote villages. We have distribution/teaching teams who hand-deliver the units to predetermined geographic areas of the target nation. Key brethren are invited to seminars conducted by both visiting teachers and local leaders, who demonstrate the units and teach recipients how to use them effectively for evangelism, church planting, leadership training, Sunday preaching, and public school Bible courses. The content and care of the unit and materials are explained, and then the recipients are sent back to the villages to use the material provided in the solar-powered unit. Remember, counting the Old and New Testaments, WBS courses, the complete SIBI curriculum, several hours of singing, and a one-hour study on how to become a Christian, the completed units contain more than 430 hours of Bible and Bible teaching.

While similar electronic devices are available for public use, we are unaware of anything that approaches the quality and volume of biblical material of the Solar Players. We are also unaware of any other resource that provides the same personal care in delivery and education. The economics of this project are simple. For a $500 one-time cost, a teaching tool equivalent to an entire preaching school curriculum and more, providing as much as 8–10 years of biblical teaching, with no need for external electrical power sources, can be put into the hands of a preacher, a church leader, or a leader in a remote village. That is a fraction of what it would cost to send a missionary or even a native preacher. Even if thousands of preachers could be trained, sent, and supported in all the remote areas of the world, Solar Players would still be needed to help multiply their efforts.

SIBI Solar Players are not for sale. We give them away to qualified people around the world. If you need one for yourself or for your congregation, we simply ask that you donate to the Solar Mission to help us get another player to someone in another nation who needs the gospel. However, the SIBI Bible teaching materials loaded on the Solar Players are available for purchase from our bookstore in both print and digital format for both personal and congregational study.

Packed into the box with each Solar Player is a printed menu of the exhaustive content. Each course and section is identified with a number. A user may find a desired course or lesson by pressing the forward or backward buttons the number of times corresponding to the number of that course or lesson. The same procedure can be used to advance or reverse to a specific Bible book or a specific chapter in that book. During the training seminars, users are taught how to find all of the material on the Solar Player and how to use the material to the greatest advantage.

The SIBI Solar Player is designed for simplicity, durability, and protection from the possibly harsh weather conditions of remote village life. It is a sealed unit with a long-life rechargeable battery designed to last 10 years under normal charging conditions. It has a water- and dust-resistant speaker designed to be loud enough to be heard in a hut or outdoor group of up to 50 people. And, of course, it is solar powered so that it can be used in the thousands of villages around the world that have no electricity. While it may not be “cutting-edge smart technology” in America, it is both innovative and effective in the remote village setting for which it is designed.

While Solar Players have proven to be durable, it is possible for any electronic instrument to fail. There is a reset button that solves most failures, but when necessary, we will replace defective Solar Players. Because we have partner preacher training schools in most of the areas where Solar Players are distributed, we have supplies of them available for replacement.

We normally plan Solar Player distributions to a specific set of countries each year. Within those countries, we distribute Solar Players to a number of specific preachers, missionaries, congregations, schools, orphanages, and others who are sponsored by those who are giving to the project. We are glad to respond to donor suggestions for specific recipients within our target nations because we want the Solar Players to get to the people who will use them most fruitfully. Special requests beyond our annual target nations are sometimes possible because we are in contact with missionaries, ministries, schools, and congregations all over the world.