We spent the first two years of our time in Malaysia living in the state of Sabah where we studied the Malay language and worked on a research project entitled, “Indigenous groups of Sabah: An annotated bibliography of linguistic and anthropological sources, revised and updated edition” (2 Volumes). In the year 1999, the Kenyah people of the neighbouring state Sarawak asked SIL to partner with them to facilitate Scripture translation for their language community. As an organisation we were not involved in Sarawak up to that time, so we saw this as an open door to come alongside the Kenyah people.

The Kenyah live in tropical rain forests in the interior of Sarawak and also across the border in Indonesia. They are subsistence farmers who still engage in slash and burn methods. They cultivate hill rice and vegetables on the steep slopes next to the main rivers and gather fruit from the forest. They hunt for meat with blowpipes and increasingly with shotguns. They still live a primitive life without the luxuries of electricity, communications and modern ways of transportation. Travel takes place in longboats powered by outboard engines.

At the moment there are about 40% protestant Christians among the Kenyah. They belong to a local indigenous church called the Sidang Injil Borneo (Borneo Evangelical Church) that was established as a result of the work of Australian missionaries between the years 1930 and 1970. There is a disconcerting number of Kenyah who still mix their traditional beliefs with a newly adopted Christian worldview. This leads to syncretistic practices, largely because they cannot read the Word of God in a language they understand well and consequently do not have access to the truth of the Gospel message.

Our German colleague and Hans undertook a dialect survey from April 2000 to May 2002 to try and understand the relationship among the thirty or more Kenyah dialects. We had to collect all the spoken sounds in all the dialects, document it by using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and analyse the phonemes (significant sounds) of every dialect. Together with this we held various workshops to create an awareness of the basis of good linguistic analysis before the process of Scripture translation could commence.

We moved to the oil town Miri in January 2001 in order to start building relationships with individuals in the Kenyah language community. We started to learn Kenyah and continued to analyse its phonemic system. We devised a comprehensive orthography that would suffice for all thirty dialects and held a number of workshops with representatives from most of the Kenyah dialects to explain the orthography and spelling conventions of the language. On 7 May 2001 the Kenyah Bible Translation (BT) committee was founded.

In October 2001 a speaker from the Berawan language group arrived in Miri and said that he had a vision to translate the Bible in his mother tongue. In March 2002 the Kenyah BT committee appointed Pastor Uchat Tusau as Mother Tongue Translator (MTT) for the Kenyah people. He and his family moved from the interior to Miri to be closer to the translation office. In the course of that year, Pastor Uchat started a process of hands-on training in the principles of translation.

In May 2002 both men started translating the book of Genesis into their heart language, eight years after we received the vision to be involved in the process of translating the Bible for minority languages. Simultaneously the translators worked on a dictionary in their respective languages.

We had to discontinue our involvement with the Berawan project at the end of September 2010 as a result of our inability to supervise the Berawan project from a distance. Fortunately, the newly formed Berawan Bible Translation committee has stepped in and is continuing the translation work independently.

Work is still going on in the Kenyah language and the translated Scriptures is being distributed among the Kenyah people as it is translated, checked and published. For more information on this process, please follow this link to our newsletters.