Serving the Coatzospan Mixtec people of Mexico with Wycliffe Bible Translators

Dates To Remember
Birthday: July 9th

Contact:
pris_small@sil.org

Sending Agency Wycliffe Bible Translators
Box 628200
Orlando, FL 32862-8200

Designate "for Priscilla Small"

For 43 years, Priscilla Small and her coworker Janet Turner have immersed themselves in the Coatzospan Mixtec language and culture in order to provide the Bible in their own language to the people of San Juan Coatzospan in the mountains of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. As a result of their work, the Coatzospan Mixtec New Testament was dedicated to the Lord on June 21, 2003.

The path to San Juan started when Pris gave her heart to the Lord at the age of 7, through a children's radio program at Burlingame Baptist Church. During high school in the 1950's, she attended PBC with her family, where Ray and Elaine Stedman, Bob Smith, Bud Lewis, Ted and Joanne Stone, Kathryn Herriott, Charlotte Mersereau, Luis Palau and others had a significant impact on her life.

In her school years Pris was crazy about languages and tennis. She studied Spanish, French and Latin and loved English grammar. At age 13 she and her doubles partner reached the 13-and-under finals of the National Hardcourt tournament.

Pris first heard of Wycliffe through a home Bible study in Hillsborough. She met Bob and Lois Schneider, who were working with Trique, a tone language that is closely related to Mixtec. As her desire to serve the Lord meshed with her love of languages, she began to think seriously of linguistic and translation work. She attended Whitworth College, where she won the women's singles her senior year, and attended the Summer Institute of Linguistics and became a member of Wycliffe in the same year, 1961.

Priscilla met Janet Turner, a nurse from Modesto, during the 1961 SIL training at the University of Washington, and the following summer in Norman, OK, they were assigned to work as partners in Mexico. In 1963 Pris graduated from UC Berkeley with an MA in linguistics. In 1964 Jan and Pris arrived in San Juan and began learning the Mixtec language. Their early years included a lot of medical ministry to the people.

One particular family often invited Pris and Jan in for a cup of coffee. During these visits, Pris and Jan got to know the family's oldest daughter, Gabriela, who was then a teenager.

Pris invited Gabriela to a workshop in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo. Shortly after they began praying together at the workshop, Gabriela told Pris that she wanted to give her life to the Lord. She has since led most of her extended family to the Lord, and there are now several hundred Mixtec believers.

Gabriela married and was later widowed. Jan and Pris helped her build a home for her and her three children in Puebla. She and Jan and Pris continue working as a team with Santiago, Pedro and others from San Juan to teach the Mixtec people to read God's Word in their own language and have recently done a "talking Bible" recording of the New Testament and dubbed videos of Luke, and continue to translate an Old Testament summary and compile a Mixtec-Spanish dictionary.

Pris has spent many summers teaching phonetics to potential missionary candidates, both in the US and, for the past 15 summers, in Puebla.