According to Unus Walilo, pastor of the church in Apahapsili, a village high in the mountains, the Yali people ‘didn’t know anything about the outside world.
‘We lived in the Stone Age, killing each other, eating our enemies. We didn’t know any other life’, said Unus.
All this changed in 1965 after some Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilots discovered the much-feared cannibalistic community during an aerial survey flight. Unus remembers the day they arrived.
The initial contact began a decades-long process of learning the Yali culture and language, followed by a joint effort between the missionaries and the Yali people to translate the Bible into their language.
The New Testament was completed in 1988, and the complete Bible by 2018. The process required collaboration between Bible translators Siegfried Zoellner and Friedrich Tometten and a team of Yali translators who were experts in their own language.
The word of God eventually transformed the Yali, who now teach their children to read and write rather than become warriors. Instead of joining together to fight their enemies, the community clubbed together to construct the building where they now worship Christ.
For the Yali, the story of the Bible is ‘our story. It is the story of God looking for us. It is His love seeking us.’
When MAF personnel recently landed, they were greeted with an elaborate display of dancing and singing that explained the Yali’s history. The presentation told how, having been found by God, the Yali laid their arrows and spears down, devouring the word rather than eating their enemies, and living in peace with God and man.
Thanks to God’s grace, a once-violent and vengeful people has bowed the knee to Christ and can now lead a faithful, peaceful, God-honouring life.
