A Valued People!

by Robert Hunt   

When our family arrived in Panganan village (Mindanao Island, Philippines) in 1989 we were excited about being a part of giving the 20,000 or so Matigsalug people the Word of God in their own language.  But nobody had warned us that this people group might not like their own language—in face they despised it!

How did this come about?  The Matigsalug people were ‘discovered’ in the mid-1970s when a logging road was bulldozed into the southern ranges of the Bukidnon province.  They had originally lived near the mouth of the Salug river—known these days as the Davao river—but were driven up into the hills as newer immigrants started to take over the coastal regions.  They had then become hillside farmers: clearing a plot by felling and burning the trees and then planting mountain rice, sweet potato, and other crops.  These crops were supplemented by wild deer, pigs and other animals also living in the forest.

However, as the forest they lived in succumbed to chainsaws, outsiders began to use the logging roads to move into the area in search of land.  The Matigsalugs had always believed that there were man-eating giants stationed around the edge of the flat earth.  Since the school-teachers who moved into the area were taller and looked different, the elders believed they must be the children of the giants who had come to befriend the Matigsalug children and then take them home to be eaten.  So the Matigsalug elders decided it was safer not to let their children attend school.

Fast forward to the 1980s: two logging roads from opposite sides of the ranges now meet in the middle and traffic can work its way right through the area.  Buses began to come through, and many of the passengers laughed at what they called the ‘ignorant’ Matigsalug people walking barefoot and in single file along the road, being accustomed to narrow forest trails.  Sometimes Matigsalug passengers on the bus heard these unfortunate comments, and they soon came to realise how they were despised by the lighter-skinned, lowland people. They became very self-conscious about their looks, and their language which outsiders described as monkeys babbling.

So when we arrived there in 1989, they just said, “We hate our language.  Just teach us English.”  We were confused about why God had so clearly sent us to this people group.  After two years of language learning, we decided that we would persevere enough to translate at least four books of the Bible into the Matigsalug language.  But this took us longer than the ten years we expected - since we started to get involved in community development and literacy programmes.  Mean-while, we taught the people about the origin of the various language groups at Babel and how God created diversity and loves every individual no matter how they look.  We also wrote papers about the complex Matigsalug sound system and grammar, and created a computer dictionary with over 5,000 root-word entries.  Then we started to teach the people about the beauty of their own language.

To our great amazement, after twelve years or so, some of the Matigsalug people started to believe that they weren’t inferior to everyone else.  And then the pastors and Christian leaders started to tell us that they required the entire New Testament to be translated—not just a few books.  So we were persuaded to stay around and help finish the New Testament.  By now the next generation had realised the importance of education, and so we were able to train young high-school leavers and help some of them obtain university degrees.  We ended up with three Matigsalug mother-tongue translators who soon took over most of the translation work, and we functioned as facilitators and consultants.  This also greatly improved the fluency of the Matigsalug Bible translation.

Early on we encouraged them to set up their own association to both oversee and ‘own the work’, which proved to be a very effective approach.  Over the years we have seen them grow in their faith and love for their own culture and language; so much so that we had very little input into the New Testament dedication on 21st July 2011—we were simply participants in the comprehensive day of activities and celebrations—colleagues amongst colleagues.