Christmas Comes in a New Way to Isnags of Northern Philippines
Luke Video in Their Language Shows Them Christ
For more information, contact:
Arthur Lightbody
JAARS Media Relations Officer
1-704-843-6048
arthur_lightbody@sil.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WAXHAW, N.C. — December 13, 1999 — Filipino Wycliffe Bible Translators Rudy Barlaan and Nard Pugyao helicoptered into Dibagat, Apayao, on November 17. They brought precious cargo—video projection equipment and a four-hour dramatized videotape of the Gospel of Luke. What was special about this video was that the audio had been dubbed with the Isnag language.
Upon their arrival, another Wycliffe translator trained the Isnag Video Ministries Team to show the video, and a new program was launched. The ministry team will show the Luke video to several thousand of the more than 35,000 Isnag speaking people this Christmas season.
Dibagat Bible Church Pugyao himself is an Isnag from Dibagat. He came to know Christ as a child through reading the Gospel of Mark, translated by Wycliffe’s Dick Roe. After one of the initial six nightly video showings in the little Dibagat Bible Church, a grade school friend of Pugyao stood up and told the group, “One of the things that touched me the most in this video was the cruelty of men against the Son of God, the way they nailed Him on that cross. His sufferings made me think, ‘Why on earth would he do that for me?’ It strengthened my love for Him.”
Pugyao says, “Yes! This is what it’s all about! We wanted the video project to help people grow in the Lord.”
He adds that a goal of the video ministry is to get people reading Scripture. “The video ministries team is selling copies of the Isnag New Testament along with showing the videos.” Barlaan plans to soon oversee the revision of the New Testament and completion of more Old Testament translation.
Pugyao says the video ministry and Scripture use promotion is to encourage continued growth in Christ, bringing unity among all the Dibagat people. He reports that a person who watched the video realized she was selfish in claiming the land the church was on. She said, “This video shows me how much the Lord really means to me and I now know that the land where the church is sitting belongs to God.” She ended a long dispute by signing over a deed of the land to the church.
Churches and schools throughout the whole municipality of Kabugao, of which Dibagat is part, and surrounding villages have begun showing the video. It is even being shown on a local cable television network in town.
A Filipino missionary couple in the region told Pugyao, “This is the perfect timing to bring this video here, to help the people to be united in Christ, and to grow in their love for him.”
Pugyao left the Philippines in 1971 to get aviation training. He joined Wycliffe in 1977, and returned to his native Philippines to assist in Bible translation as a pilot.
On June 24, 1982, Pugyao piloted a short-take-off-and-landing Helio Courier airplane onto a grass airstrip in remote Dibagat. That day, he brought another precious cargo, the completed New Testament in the Isnag language.
Currently, in addition to activities related to the Dibagat video ministry, Pugyao is on speaking assignment with Wycliffe and JAARS Inc., sharing the impact of the Bible in the heart language.
The Luke four-hour video was produced by the Genesis Project, Inc., and is the video from which the popular “Jesus Film” was taken. It is one option of many that mission agencies and local churches can use to carry the Bible’s message to sometimes isolated language groups. Wycliffe Bible Translators provides consulting and hands-on video training for language programs at the JAARS Center in Waxhaw, North Carolina.
As part of the Wycliffe Bible Translators’ family of organizations, JAARS provides worldwide coordination and training for technical services to aid Bible translation. In addition to vernacular media, services include aviation, computing and communications, construction and maintenance, purchasing and shipping, and materials transportation.
Leonardo “Nard” Pugyao Biography
From Hookey to Helicopters
Nard's sister Emma, brother Conrado, Nard and sister Benita Lenardo “Nard” Pugyao, was only seven years old in 1956 when a white foreigner walked into Dibagat, his village in the mountains of Northern Luzon, Philippines. By his own admission, Pugyao was ornery as a kid, rolling his own cigars at age five and having to repeat the first grade because of playing hookey so often.
The foreigner, Dick Roe, with Wycliffe Bible Translators, had come to learn Pugyao’s Isnag language and to help provide the Isnags with Scripture in their own language. Pugyao, suspicious and curious, watched the tall, athletic missionary as he struggled to learn the language.
Roe won over Pugyao by taking a personal interest in him and other hookey-playing children. He visited, hiked, and joked with them as the children helped him learn their language. Nard observed that Roe was not like another foreigner in the area who didn’t seem to care about them, just telling them to get back to school.
Pugyao was 12 years old when Roe went on furlough, leaving behind copies of the Gospel of Mark. Pugyao read it from cover to cover several times and met Christ. Nard called it “The stepping stone to what God had shown me in my life.”
Having proved to be a good student after all, and able to read in English, Tagalog, and the local trade language Ilocano, Pugyao longed to leave his village to attend high school. Unable to see himself as a farmer, he prayed for the finances to make high school possible, asking God, “Prove to me you’re real.”
His prayers were answered when Roe came to him and said he needed to go to Mindanao and serve as the supervisor of the Wycliffe translators in Mindanao. He asked Pugyao if he would go with him to attend high school and help him with the Isnag translation.
While living at the translation center, Nasuli, Pugyao developed a real love for airplanes. He hung out at the hangar with his new friend, 6’3" pilot Bill Foster. He liked Foster, and he liked mechanical things. Foster and other pilots taught him how the airplane worked, and Pugyao dreamed of flying.
One day Foster said, “Nard, one of these days we won’t be around here any longer. You’ll have to fly these planes. You’d better start learning how to do these things if the translators are going to get the job done.”
“I thought he was nuts!” Pugyao later said.
While a senior in high school, Pugyao told Roe of his desire to fly. Again Pugyao was encouraged to pursue his dream as Roe said, “Let’s dream big.”
But Pugyao was feeling pressured to go to Bible school and help finish the Bible translation in his own language, despite his love for more mechanical things. After attending school in Manila, a technical school for two years, and Bible school for one year, it became clear Bible translation was not for him. Sitting in school, and sitting with Roe in order to help on the Isnag dictionary, convinced him of that.
Not cut out for sitting at a desk, he left in 1971 to go to the United States to study aviation at LeTourneau University. He later transferred to Moody Bible Institute and graduated in 1975.
While taking orientation at JAARS in Waxhaw, North Carolina, he met Wycliffe “missionary kid” Sandy Neumann. They were married and together they joined Wycliffe in 1977.
After taking further Wycliffe field training, they went to the Northern Philippines in 1979 for a four-year term. From the translation center in Bagabag, Nueva Vizcaya, Pugyao flew the short-take-off-and-landing Helio Courier to remote villages.
Pugyao says, “The highlight of that four-year assignment was flying the completed Isnag New Testament into my village, Dibagat.” (Wycliffe translator Rudy Barlaan had joined Dick Roe and helped him finish the New Testament translation.)
After helicopter training back in the U.S., a years’ term flying helicopters in the Philippines, and assignments teaching aviation at Moody Aviation in Elizabethton, Tennessee, Pugyao has made himself available for extensive speaking engagements. Now living in Waxhaw, North Carolina, he is trusting God to call more pilots and Bible translation personnel to bring God’s Word to other “Dibagats” around the world.
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