Joyce Trebilco

JOYCE ANNE TREBILCO, age 92, passed away peacefully in the early hours of Sunday, November 9, 2025 at the Spartanburg Medical Center, Mary Black Campus, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Joyce was born of Swedish stock in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 15, 1933 to Ernst Olaf Hedwall and Helen Evangeline Hedwall. She was third-born in a family that grew to seven: four girls and three boys. She grew up in Minneapolis and was an active member of First Covenant Church (the mother congregation of the Evangelical Covenant Church) in downtown Minneapolis where she came to embrace a personal faith in Jesus Christ as her Savior and Lord.
As a young woman, Joyce felt a call from God to serve as a foreign missionary and attended Bethany Fellowship Missionary Training Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. After graduating, she joined WEC International (Worldwide Evangelization for Christ), an interdenominational Evangelical mission whose American headquarters is located in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Joyce went out under WEC as a single missionary to Vietnam in 1959. There she met and married an Australian farmer-turned-missionary named Oliver Trebilco from Queensland, Australia in 1961.
In Vietnam together, Joyce and Oliver learned the Vietnamese language and culture, then proceeded to study the language of the Hre people, one of some 40 or 50 tribes in the highlands of Vietnam with a completely different language from the Vietnamese. The Hre people did not then have a written language. Joyce and Oliver, with training from the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators, created an alphabet for this yet unwritten language, then composed primers (which Joyce illustrated) to teach the Hre people how to read their own language. They then began the arduous task of translating the Bible into the Hre language, beginning with the Gospel of Mark. They also coordinated with a doctor to bring medical care to this rural part of Vietnam where there was no modern medicine. While they labored in these endeavors, the Vietnam War raged all around them (they spent the Tet Offensive of 1968 in a bunker!).
While in Vietnam, two daughters were born to Joyce and Oliver: Janice in 1963 and Jeanette in 1964. Tragically, Janice died in an accident in 1973 at the age of ten. While on a furlough to Minneapolis, their son Jonathan was born in 1974. The family returned to Vietnam but made arrangements to leave in 1975 as the American forces pulled out, and the North Vietnamese Communists took over South Vietnam. The week they were scheduled to leave, their infant son Jonathan contracted a gastral infection and nearly died, delaying their departure and forcing them to take one of the last flights available out of Da Nang, Vietnam. Sadly, they had not yet completed the translation of the Bible into the Hre language. Having to flee the country while their friends remained behind to suffer the consequences of a foreign invasion was deeply painful.
Following their time in Vietnam, Joyce and Oliver and their two children moved to Indonesia and learned the Indonesian language together. They lived in the city of Surabaya, on Java, then on the island of Madura north of Java where they worked with an evangelical church of ethnic Chinese Indonesians, helping to form a church, bring theological education to pastors and lay leaders, call a pastor, and secure a building for the congregation.
Upon returning stateside, the Trebilcos lived for just over a year in Minneapolis, before moving to Sacramento, California in 1982. There, they spent 25 years working with Southeast Asian immigrants who came by the thousands to California following the Vietnam War. They were effective in assisting the Vietnamese population since they were fluent in the language. But they also worked to assist Laotians, Cambodians, Mien, Hmong, and other groups fleeing the fallout from the Vietnam War. They taught ESL classes, they coordinated social events to connect Southeast Asians in their adopted homeland, they served as interpreters for Vietnamese people who needed assistance in government offices, acquiring employment, and going to court. They helped Vietnamese families who still had family members stranded in Vietnam to be granted asylum here in America and rejoin their families. They assisted immigrants in acquiring furniture, food, vehicles, and everything they needed to start a new life in a new land. They started a Bible study which became the nucleus of a Vietnamese church in south Sacramento. Joyce worked extensively with Vietnamese children, in Vacation Bible School programs, Sunday School classes, and Christian education.
With the dawn of the internet, Joyce and Oliver resumed their translation work for the Hre Bible which they had begun so many years before. The Trebilcos visited Vietnam in 2008, their first and last visit since they had left in 1975. They reestablished contact with old friends, gained new contacts, and decided to resume the Hre Bible translation project since the internet made international communication so easy. In the years that followed, Joyce and Oliver were able to complete the translation of the entire Bible into the Hre language. The Bible has been printed and is being used by Hre Christians (now over 10,000 in number) in Vietnam to this day.
Joyce and Oliver came to live near their son Jonathan, their daughter-in-law Sommer Bridges Trebilco, and their granddaughter Gabrielle (born 2016) in South Carolina in 2020. The joy of Joyce's life at this stage was to spend time with her granddaughter Gabrielle whom she spoiled terribly!
Joyce is survived by her husband Oliver, her daughter Jeanette, her son Jonathan, her granddaughter Gabrielle, and her brothers Gary, Philip, and Kenneth.
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