Vivian's story: Sing & Share

Lillian's story: Speech at Tboli Bible dedication

SING AND SHARE

June 25, 2006

(Vivian Van Wynen)

 
            When Frank Robins asked me to tell the Tboli story, I don’t think he remembered that we had worked 53 years with the Tboli – which makes for a very long story! But there is a story to be told about every language group where God chose to allocate each one of us gathered here tonight who are Bible translators. My story is about what God has done and is doing among the Tboli living in the mountains of southwestern Mindanao, Philippines, a group of about 100,000 people. Way back in 1953, when our director Dr. Richard Pittman assigned Alice Lindguist/Maryott and me to the Tboli. God chose the place where we should live, even putting us among certain families that He would be using in His plans in the years to come. Then while we were always so busy, busy, busy learning and working and working and learning, he very quietly saw to it that His Word bore fruit almost without our help, sometimes even in spite of us! Isn’t that your story also?

            Many years before we ever arrived there, God had already prepared the way. An old man had dreamed that there would be white people coming to live among them, and that they would be making books, and that the Tboli were to listen to what was written in those books, and they were to obey them. It seems like that dream had been told far and wide. When the datù/leader in our area would introduce us to people from different areas, he would always say, “They have come to make the books for us that will take the darkness out of our thinking.” But we never heard about the dream until after we had lived there for many years.

            Howard McKaughan had found this area for us to live in, and he had suggested to the datù that maybe he could have someone start building a house for us, a house just like their houses, because we would be arriving there in July. But when we arrived, the house hadn’t been started. So the datù suggested we live in one end of the schoolhouse where grades 1-3 were being taught. The school had lots of big windows, but no shutters, and a big doorway, but no door. Chickens roosted in the rafters every night, and a horse with her colt was used to sleeping in there at night also. We would put some desks across the doorways, but the horse very easily got inside. We lived in the schoolhouse until our house was built, and the horse and her colt slept with us every night. No one thought it odd at all – that’s where she always slept. She would never come in until we had turned out the light. But often they would be standing in the doorway waiting for the lights to go out. And often when we woke up during the middle of the night, the two of them would be standing close by our sleeping net. But they were always gone before we got up in the morning.

            The Philippines is probably one of the easiest countries in the world to live in. Houses are built maybe 4 or 5 feet or more up off the ground. Floors are made of split bamboo, walls are made of flattened bamboo, roofs are made of a tall grass called cogon. The houses were airy and so easy to keep clean. As soon as we moved into our house, the datù brought two little girls over to live with us. He told us that they were to cook for us and wash our clothes at the river, and skate the floors to keep them clean. And we were to pay their school expenses. (We were told later that he put children with us so that it wouldn’t look as if we were prostitutes – two single women living in a house by themselves.) A few days later he suggested that we let some little boys from the mountains live with us so they could go to school. They were to plant a garden for us, carry water from the spring, keep us supplied with firewood, and keep the grass cut in our yard. And we were to pay their school expenses. That set the pattern for all the years to come and probably was the key to our being accepted in the community. The mothers of these children – and all the other mothers – brought us rice and sweet potatoes and corn and vegetables. We in turn always had a sack of salt in the house, a box of laundry soap, and a can of kerosene so that we could give them what they needed in exchange for whatever they brought to us.

            Then we always had medicine. Because of my experience after Jungle Camp of living with Joyce Jenkins, Vola Grist and Katherine Voightlander among the Otomi, I knew what medicines to bring with me to the Philippines. Our front porch was always our clinic, the busiest place in the house. At one time there were four of us assigned to the Tboli, and three of us were nurses. We would each take a week at a time to be responsible for the medical work, but on market days we all helped. Most of the Tboli coming for medicine were from the mountains, from a distance. So it wasn’t long before we had a room built in the open space under our house so they could stay as long as they needed to, and that room was seldom empty. We did medical work until the 1980’s when the Tboli Municipality was formed and government clinic was set up at the Municipality. But the medical personnel working there used the National Language, which in those days was hardly even known in our area, so we always had Tboli stopping in on their way home showing us their medicine, asking us what it was for and how they were to take it – and should they take it? Down through the years when we were still doing medical work, we always had an underlying feeling that we were spending too much time on it. But when I came back to the Tboli to start working on the OT after our allocation had been closed for about five years, when the Tboli would reminisce about the former days when we lived among them, what they remembered was almost always about their sicknesses: “Do you remember when so-and-so was sick – my mother, my baby, my husband, etc??” It was not about literacy classes, not about church services – it was always about sicknesses. One old woman said, “If you hadn’t been here, we would all be dead by now.”

            Getting back to the boys that the datù brought over to our house, one of them especially was a tremendous help to us in learning the language. He learned the phonetic alphabet we were using the first week we were there, and was often correcting our spelling. He had the patience to keep answering questions repeatedly until we could hand in several of those papers we were all required to write before we could begin translation.

            The first book we ever translated was the book of Luke. By this time all the first boys the datù brought to us were studying in a Christian high school in a town about three hours away. When they would come home on the weekends, we would always have some portion of Luke for them to teach in their homes on Sunday morning. Saturday morning was always spent studying it. First they would all practice reading it. Then we would go over it with them, verse by verse, then they would practice teaching it back to us in the same way. Then we would all discuss what could be learned from it. There were always lots of questions, lots of discussion. Saturday mornings always flew by. Then Saturday afternoons they scattered to their homes in the mountains. One always stayed back to teach the people in the area where we lived. This was considered a hardship, not being able to go home, so they took turns doing this.

            It took us over two years to get through the book of Luke, but when it was ready for the consultant check, it had been taught from beginning to end. The two very practical things they learned from the book of Luke were (1) that Jesus had power to heal sicknesses; and (2) that Jesus had power over the evil spirits, and they had to obey him. The boys were asked to read these portions over and over again. It wasn’t long before the people gathering together on Sundays were coming back on Sunday mornings telling their teachers that in Jesus name, sicknesses were being healed, and that in Jesus name, the evil spirits had to obey them, too, and leave. Teaching about the power Jesus had to forgive sin took much longer to become important to them.

            It was during this time when the boys were attending the Christian High School that for the first time in their lives they began learning hymns and choruses. Here again the one boy who had been such a help to us started translating them into Tboli. He would come home every weekend with one or two, sometimes even three. “So we can teach them on Sunday,” he would say. We never went to bed on Friday nights before we had at least one of his songs ready to teach the next day. That was part of the Saturday morning study, too – learning the new song. While this one boy concentrated all week on translating a song into Tboli, the others concentrated on learning it in English. So Saturday morning was always an interesting morning – learning to lead a song, learning scripture.

            This set the pattern for all the books that were translated in the years to come. Most all of them were taught through from beginning to end. When the first boys went on to college (or got married), there were their younger brothers and nephews and cousins who took their places. It was many years before there were Bible Schools and official pastors.

            Before those first boys graduated from high school, we had made a primer based on the phonics method. For one of their summer vacations we had printed each lesson on large sheets of cartilina. There were six boys, so we made six sets. Each week we taught them how to teach the one lesson they were bringing with them, and they scattered to six different areas. We told them to limit each class to ten adults – but everybody came in every area – there was no holding them back! When the boys came home on the following Saturday, they always had so many suggestions: more words to be added, some words to be deleted, sentences to be added to the little stories, questions to be asked. That primer that was finalized that summer and handed in to the Literacy Consultant and approved is the same primer that is being used to this day. We’ve estimated that since then – the 1960’s – maybe 10,000 people have learned how to read from that primer, all taught by Tboli.

            In the early 1970’s, we got help from CIDA for five years. That’s when we started in earnest to train Tboli to be literacy teachers. Because hardly a single adult Tboli knew how to read, every area wanted the classes. And this continued for many years after the CIDA program was over. It wasn’t long before we realized that literacy classes were the best evangelistic tool we had. Classes were most always in areas where there were no churches. Each class started by learning to sing hymns. Then the teacher always read scripture to them, maybe only one verse, maybe two or three verses. And each week the whole class was to memorize some scripture. Then there was always time for prayers: how had God been helping them? And what requests did they have? The aim was that each person in the classes learn how to pray out loud. After all that, the class began. Before a literacy class ended (usually four or five months) a church had been built, and Sunday morning services were being held, and there were Wednesday morning prayer meetings at 5:00 o’clock in the morning, some even earlier. Different ones led the singing, or read the scripture, or led the praying, or taught. In their praying, everybody prayed all at one time out loud, and until now that is what is always done in the churches. At first this was hard for me, but I got so I loved it! (When everyone prayed together, I didn’t have to worry if I said everything just exactly right – I could just concentrate on praying!) One time an Alliance missionary told us that they had over 100 churches in what was known as Zone 5, and all but one had started with a literacy class.

            Our first NT was dedicated in 1979, then 20 years later we revised it, and it was reprinted in 1999. By this time just about every denomination that worked in the Philippines had started a work among the Tboli. Two of them had started Bible Schools specifically for Tboli and were asking for the OT. So after working in the Translation Department for one term, I went back to the Tboli, and we started working on the OT. But our roles were changed. For our first NT, we translators drafted every chapter of every book, and the Tboli reworked them to make them sound more natural. With the OT, we had educated Tboli who did the drafting, and I was their consultant. And we started out right from Genesis to have a Review Committee of about 10 or 12 pastors, from different areas, from different denominations, men and women alike. I would make a set of questions for each book, and that’s what they used during the week of Review Committee. At the end of the week, each one of them would want a copy of the questions, each one would want a copy of the book! They all wanted to start teaching from each book right away. It was very easy for them to relate to the happenings of the OT.

            But the OT is a very long book!! When someone in our Branch found in one of the old Bible Translator magazines an abridgment that the United Bible Society had put out long ago, we decided right off to follow it! So the Tboli OT is only about 2/3 as long as the original. But for every chapter or section that was not translated, we have included a summary of that. We are hoping that when the Bible is printed next year that these summaries can be boxed off so that there no mistaking what is scripture and what are summaries. We have also included an introduction to each book and an outline of the contents. One thing that has helped us greatly in the translation of the OT was that we were assigned a consultant, Ronald Krueger, our Hebrew expert in the Philippine Branch. That has made it so easy for us – to have one person checking everything from start to finish. What a great help he has been to us!

            It was while we were working on the OT that a group of men visited us from an area we had never before had any contact with. They were from the range of mountains that runs all along the southwestern coast of Mindanao, the highest mountains in Tboli area. They came to ask us if we could send literacy teachers to them, but they specified that they wanted literacy teachers that knew God, so that they could teach them to know God. All we had ever known about that area they came from was that if a Tboli stole a carabao or an oxen or a wife, or if anyone killed someone, they all ran to that area and never came back, because police never went up there. As far as the people in our area knew, it was a mountain populated by outlaws. But I promised this little delegation of men that we would send someone. But none of the literacy teachers wanted to go – not one of the supervisors, not any of the teachers. They had all kinds of stories to tell about people living in those mountains.

            About two years later after God had kept nudging one of the literacy teachers for a long time that he ought to be the one to go, he came to us and said he would go, but he wouldn’t take his wife. And we were all supposed to pray every day for him. For all he knew about the area, maybe someone would try to kill him up there. A literacy supervisor went with him, but just stayed two or three days. When he returned and reported to the church, all he could talk about was that no matter what house you went into up in those mountains, everyone in it had a goiter. Even little kids that looked only four or five years old, already they had the beginnings of a goiter.

            The literacy teacher held classes for about two months before he came down and reported to the church. And what a story he had to tell us. He told us that when he started teaching the class, one of the men suggested to him that he use the first week just to teach them about God, teach them how to pray to God, teach them what God said in his book. The man said, “Once we know God, it will be easier for us to learn how to read.” So that’s what they did, and the teacher said they just about wore him out – from early morning until late at night. He told us how one night he was lying face down on his mat all by himself in a little room, and suddenly he started to cry. He said he completely repented to God, because even though he had been a Christian since he had attended a literacy class when he was 12 years old, he had never in his life felt so hungry to know God as these people felt. “Imagine,” he said to us, weeping as he told his story, “the people I considered outlaws are the ones God used to bring me to repent.” He said he had never ever taught anyone so eager to learn about God, so eager to learn to read. It took longer for them to learn to read, because half of the men had to look for food one day, then the next day the other half went looking for food.

            The story of literacy classes repeated itself up there: a church was built, they learned how to conduct services and how to get together to pray, but one new thing was added. The day after their graduation program, they had a baptism service. And that has been the pattern that has been followed for almost every literacy class in those mountains – until today. We have promised to help them with literacy classes for three more years. And now with every class, they are training one or two from each area to teach. That’s the only way the job will ever be finished. The government estimates that there could be 10,000 people scattered throughout those mountains.

            The literacy teachers kept reporting huge goiters such as we Americans had never seen. So finally through people at Waxhaw we were put in contact with Medical Ministries International, a group of doctors and nurse who spend their vacations helping with medical/surgical needs in other countries. Since 1999 they have been coming to a hospital in our area, and they have done hundreds and hundreds of thyroidectomies. These Tboli with the huge goiters who have never ever been down to the lowlands before have been trusting their literacy teachers enough to come down with them and have surgery! The literacy teachers stay with them night and day both before and after surgery. Now MMI is hoping to implement a big program of giving Lipiodol injections to every woman and child in those mountains. (or they will be doing surgery until Jesus comes!!!) But what is needed is enough Lipiodol injections to be able to go from one area to another injecting the people. This medicine is made only one place in the whole world, and that is in France. The doctors have tried repeatedly to get that Laboratory in France to give us a reduction in the price of the injections – to no avail. They have not even given a 10% discount.

            Now I’ve come to the end of my report. But I’d like to tell you one more little story. Years ago an old Tboli man got up during testimony time and gave a testimony I have never forgotten. He had just come back from a distant mountain where he had been visiting relatives he hadn’t seen for a long time. And his testimony went something like this: “Imagine my surprise when I arrived at their place on such-and-such a mountain, and there I saw a very nice church building, and I learned that someone from that very place was teaching them every Sunday, and that the people from almost every house in their place were attending the meetings on Sunday mornings.” The old man said, “It seemed very wonderful to me, so far from our place where the Word of God had started. And I began to think that the Word of God is very much like a field of sweet potato plants. No matter how often you pick sweet potatoes there, if you are careful to replant the vine, it just keeps spreading and spreading.” Then he asked the people sitting around him there, “Is there any place you know among us where there are no believers? Is there any place that doesn’t have a church?” Then everyone started talking all at the same time, agreeing with him, telling their experiences much like his. It was a wonderful time!

            I would like to end my report right there. But I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t tell you that since then, electricity has come into many, many areas where Tboli live. When we heard that it was coming, we all thought how wonderful to have electricity in our homes, in the churches. And it has been. But along with the electricity came so many other things that were completely had brought in by the larger lowland community. When we have asked the Tboli why they allowed such things in their communities, they say, “But we are not the owners of those things.”

            My prayer request for the Tboli is that the Lord will send to all believers a spirit of discernment, and that He will raise up someone – or several – to be His spokesmen who will have the courage to speak out loud and clear against all such evil. Sometimes I feel that maybe we need a Nehemiah who pulled out some hair and beards to get the leaders to listen and start obeying! We don’t know what God will do, but his promise still stands:

Be still, and know that I am God.

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted in the earth.

Psalms 46.10

 Lillian's Speech at Tboli Bible Dedication

 (Lillian Underwood)

Governor of South Cotabato and vice Governor together with board member, Mayor of Tboli together with their councilors, pastors of all Tboli churches, all visitors and honored guests, good morning! I am so glad you are here.

Hands up, all of you who are under 55 years of age. Raise your hand again if you are under 49 years of age. Vivian & I have lived in Tboli land longer than you!

In 1953, Vivian Forsberg & Alice Maryott arrived in Tboli and Datu Piang took responsibility for them. The CMA had invited SIL to translate the Scripture in Tboli. They had planted churches before WWII but they realized that without the Word in their language, they did not mature in their faith.

Those first months, Viv and Alice lived in one end of the bamboo school house which was quite open. A horse & some chickens kept them company at night. It was also the first school in the area of upper Sinolon – now Edwards.

Transportation was much different. Viv & Alice arrived on a cargo truck. They got their mail from Banga by horseback.

When I came it was a weaponed carrier that made a trip to Banga over a day. The trip took two hours one way.

Language learning was writing down what was said and stories told, then figuring out the alphabet & grammar.

In 1959, Alice married. I took her place. In 1964, Doris Porter & Nancy Howison joined us. Nancy married in 1968 and then Marge Moran joined us in 1969.

In 1979, the first edition of Tboli N.T. finished.

In 1960, we prepared literacy materials and taught as many as would be taught. I remember trying to get people interested in learning to read. The response was “How much will you pay me to come to class?” They had to find food for their family.

In 1972, ten years later, we began literacy teacher trainings. Fifteen years later, attitude changed. Knowing how to read became a community value and people paid their teacher.

In 1985, there were 2 literacy coordinators, 13 supervisors and 120 active literacy teachers. By 1995, more than 20,000 had graduated from basic literacy classes.

Language learning was hard for me because I was shy. Thankful that we had Tboli boys from the mountains living at our house so they could attend school. They patiently corrected my Tboli and taught me many lessons.

I remember asking one of them to get me some onions from the garden one day.  He said, “That’s what you told me to do.” I had used the wrong focus marker, naken (get all of something) instead of mahi (get some of it).

Medical work

We did lots of it. No medical help availably in the area, so our front porch was a dispensary. Until Ethel Moorehouse arrived, she took over for us. Thus evolved the TBEC.

Translation

As we translated scripture, we also taught the boys what we translated. They in turn taught it to their families & friends in the mountains.

When I came in 1959, there were 4 young boys at our house attending elementary and 6 older boys going to high school in marlul that we were helping. 17 in all over the years.

How many of you are here today?

At that time, most of the Tboli lived in the mountains, not many homes in the area. In 1974, Tboli municipality was inaugurated thanks to PANAMIN.

Many times, I have felt like quitting. But I knew God had sent me here. Just before my first trip home after 5 years here, I was considering staying at home.

Bedurg’s father thanked me for coming. He said, “We used to think you girls were looking for land or husbands, but now we know that you are bringing us God’s word, and now that we know Jesus. We don’t have to fear the spirit anymore.” That brought me back and I’m so thankful I never quit.

God’s word changed my life. I know many of your lives have been changed by it too. It’s simple. To read and study it every day. It is God’s textbook for salvation and life. The book of John is a good place to start.

How many pastors here today? Put up your hands. One day when I was praying about the distribution of this book, it was as if God spoke to me and said, “What about all those pastors in Tboli? They can be the ones to distribute it.”

We had 10,000 copies printed. There are 500 boxes with 20 books in a box. I understand that there are 500 pastors in Tboli. So, if each pastor was responsible for taking one box to his congregation, all the books would be distributed! Are you willing?

I challenge you to take on this responsibility, even 10, 15 or 20 books! The problem is we only have 275 boxes here and the rest are at Nasuli. The price today is 100 peso per book. After today, 110 peso per book.

Acts 20:32

We serve a God whose word is able to strengthen us in our faith and give us a wonderful inheritance.