We had pitched our tent amongst stone crevasses near some massive pine trees. It was decided that we would cut down two of them and mill them on location. Being among strangers made us a little watchful of our chainsaws, tools, and timber. People would come and talk to us during the daytime, but we never had visitors after dark. Later, I asked someone why none of them came to visit at night, and I was told why. The place on which we slept was an old burial ground, and because of their fear of the departed spirits, they would never come near us at night. They also believed the spirits liked to stay near streams so the people would never go to have a bath or fill up their water containers after dark.
Culture note: This is a good place to mention again that most people thought that we were resurrected from among their ancestors. In their minds, there were only two places where people lived, the earth and the world of the dead. Those from the Elimbari people group lived on earth and had rituals and sacrifices that had to be made to keep their world running smoothly. The people planted and tended their gardens, cooked and ate, built houses, and raised pigs, and that was their world. They had no fossil fuels, metal, glass or any of the myriads of other things that were brought into their world by foreigners. Foreigners were not from their known world so in their minds, the only other place where they could be from was the world of the dead. So, we were often told things like. “You are from under the water, you were once one of us, but death changed you, and you came back looking foreign.” No matter how many times we tried to explain to them that we were from the earth, they thought we were lying to them.
I was trained as a color matcher and color shader in vinyl and paints. Needless to say, my expert training rarely helped me with sawmilling or most of the other jobs I faced. However, I was young and an eager student.
Not being very mechanical, I’ll try to describe the sawmill setup. It was a Volkswagen engine that had to be carried by several strong men from the truck into the forest and then mounted on a frame that spun the large saw blade. Tracks were made and put down so that the large slabs of wood could be pushed over the saw table to be cut lengthwise. Then the remaining slab would be shoved back over the table and lined up for the next cut. To create the lumber, we had a chainsaw that hung down with the handle at the top. The saw slowly worked its way down following a rail that kept it straight and at the desired thickness. It was loud and I remember that the noise would attract large iridescent colored beetles.
Milling was a hard, slow, noisy process that took us about six weeks to complete. We had lots of help, and as each piece of timber was cut, villagers would carry the timber to the road about forty minutes’ walk away, to be loaded onto a trailer and taken up to our fenced property. It always amazed me how much weight the people could carry. Some of the young boys could carry more than I could.
Finally, that phase of the work was done, and we decided to move our families from Sinasina over to the property rather than being separated any longer. A small hut had been built on the land to house the Beam family, and we had a 9’x18’ tent to call home for several weeks.
My building experience was just about nil. When we were in training, I was assigned to a building crew, and after a few days of bending nails, I was assigned to sweep the chapel instead. I was given the nickname of ‘Chief Bent Nail.’ Soon, the Beams’ two oldest children would be coming home from the mission boarding school on holidays so we started building the Beams’ house first. At first, we had a couple of volunteers helping us with various jobs, so all of the men and boys slept in the tent, and the ladies and girls slept in the small hut. When the volunteers left, the Beams lived in the hut and we lived in our tent. Those were rough times, but we were so happy to be with our families again that we took it in stride.
The first building built after the hut was an outdoor toilet. There was no water on the property, so we would load up fifty-five-gallon drums on the truck and drive them up to a spring nearby and fill them up. The altitude was about 6,000 feet above sea level so we didn’t love taking our baths in the icy-cold spring water, but that had to do for the time. The Beams had an old Maytag wringer washer with a Briggs and Stratton gas engine so the ladies would do the laundry in that and hang it on ropes strung on trees for a clothesline. We often chuckled at seeing a large gas bottle outside the hut, but it was a huge help in preparing meals on the gas stove rather than an open fire for many weeks.
Beams moved out of the hut when their house was livable, and we used the hut for cooking and food storage and started building our house. PNG doesn’t have four seasons a year, just rainy and dry seasons. The rainy season had set in and it made life more challenging. We had to build a temporary roof over the tent and elevate the tent on a wooden platform to keep it dry. But the day came when our house was livable, although not completely finished. It sure beat the hut and tent. We had purchased a secondhand bed in Lae in 1970 so we finally got to use it, and the bed served us for many years in several different houses, and we finally donated it to be used in a guest house, and to our knowledge it is still being used. We didn’t have enough money to build a house, but we started gathering building materials early and we were thrilled when there was a government auction and we were able to buy metal corrugated roofing and sheets of siding for a fraction of the price. The house cost us about $1,500 to get framed up and the floor laid. A stranger to us heard that we needed a water tank in which to store the rain off the roof for drinking and bathing so he sent the money to buy a used one for us. Thank you, Lord! The Beams were our co-workers for seventeen years, and knowing we had a low income, they kept an eye on us and showed their love through many tangible ways.
Our houses had no insulation, no electricity, no refrigeration, and no indoor toilets during our first few years. But we did have a used gas stove and later a wood stove to heat the house, cook, and keep water hot for our showers. When expatriates from different countries saw our houses, they would define them as simple sub-standard housing, but compared to the village houses, they were large and clean. As we finished each house, we allowed the villagers to come in and inspect them. They were so amazed to have permanent houses in the village.
When the people living in Danei village (pronounced Dah-nay) agreed to allow missionaries to live on their land, they expected us to become part of their clan. From the start, they were eager to teach us their language and culture. For instance: when they came to visit us, they always brought something for us, like a piece of firewood, some vegetables or fruit, etc. In their minds, giving things to us was to open the door for a personal relationship. They would expect us to reciprocate whenever we visited with them. They often brought large bowls of cooked food for us. Eating together was important too. Many foreign workers around the country didn’t understand the local culture and would not participate in building good cultural relationships.
During our entire first term on the field, we had a very low income, so we appreciated the people sharing their food with us. They also gave us garden plots and taught us how to plant local foods, and we introduced some new foods to them. I planted a row of corn in one of my first gardens, and my neighbour and friend laughed me to scorn. I always hated their laughs but had to learn to laugh along with them. My neighbour told me point blank, “That corn will not produce because you planted it in rows.” To which I quipped, “It will grow. Americans plant corn in rows all the time you know!” It didn’t get higher than my knees and needless to say, it didn’t produce corn. “Humble yourself Jim, and it will get easier.” I often said to myself. Have you ever planted banana trees, sugar cane, taro, yams or native greens? It was a good learning experience and allowed us to eat many meals and to share food with others.
The villagers were into animal husbandry with chickens, cats, dogs, goats, cassowary birds, and later cattle. Needless to say, my experience was almost nil. Have you been getting the picture that there was hardly anything I was good at doing? The local people wondered how an adult could have so few important skills.
Being a city boy left me with a large learning curve not only in gardening but also in looking after pigs and chickens through the years. You may wonder why a missionary would even care about such things. I have heard different people say, “Pigs are like our kings.” They demand a place of importance in our lives because they are similar to having a bank account with extra money to use for things. You cannot have a wedding without pigs to buy a bride, nor the return feast for the wedding, nor any major food transactions between clans like birthday celebrations, or coming of age feasts for girls having their first “being struck by the moon=first period.” Pigs are also used to pay someone with white magic to come to heal a family member of their sickness. People with white magic are usually the good guys who can heal people from curses put on them by sorcery. Last, but not least, pigs are needed for funerals.
Because pigs are such a part of their culture and everyday living, it was important for us to know the vocabulary regarding pigs and their importance. One of the great feasts they had every seven to ten years was to kill pigs, catch their blood, and use the blood to do chants and ask the recently deceased people to help them and protect them from any harm. Months before the days of dressing up in all of their village finery, the men would gather the sacred flutes that women were forbidden to see from their places of concealment.
After dark, the men would blow the flutes in different locations where the departed spirits could be rounded up for the great feast. The flutes represented the only way to get the attention of the ancestors and to bring them to the pig feasts which they would attend, eat the spirit of the food, accept the blood offerings and keep the world running smoothly until the next great feast. People hearing the flutes being blown knew that it was time to get their gardens prepared to produce the food needed to feed all of those coming to the dances and to notify the people who would come and collect the slaughtered pigs as repayment for the pigs they had killed and given away at the last great feast.
For weeks in advance, people would gather stones and firewood to use to cook the pigs and food for the feasting. There were make-shift tables around covered with food to be cooked with the pork, and stacks of firewood to be used to heat the stones, which would heat the food just as a pressure cooker does under the pile of leaves and earth covering the large steam ovens.
Butchering each pig would take hours of work for each one. They had to kill the pigs (usually with a hardwood club with direct blows to the foreheads). Then they would singe the hair off which caused a terrible odor. Men would volunteer to do the butchering and had their knives, axes and machetes ready to assist them. Occasionally, I was asked to butcher, but I didn’t butcher the same way they did, so I would use a simple phrase that I had learned to say in such circumstances, “I can’t butcher because my wife is pregnant”. That usually got a few giggles out of the men, because they never tell anyone when their wives are pregnant, and everyone knew it was an idiom used when someone didn’t want to butcher that day.
When things weren’t going well for the villagers, they would gather together and discuss what might have upset the ancestors and caused them to send them warnings. When they nailed down who or what had caused the warnings, they would set a time to gather for food and to give a sacrifice to appease the offended spirit(s). I attended one of those early in my culture and language study days. They had substituted a chicken instead of a pig for the sacrifice that day. After long discussions, they decided that the warnings came from a disgruntled departed father. His wrath was recognized when he struck a large tree with lightning in the garden. He was upset with them because he had killed one of his pigs for the family to eat, but they had never repaid him for the pork. One man was the spokesman for the family and he started by folding his hands as if in prayer, calling the name of the man who had butchered the pig for them and told him how thankful they all were for his generosity and how good it had tasted. Then the spokesman added that they were thankful and were planning to repay the pork, but he had died before they got around to it. He repeated that they were so sorry and begged him to come and eat the food they had prepared for him. After a short while, they divided up the food for all who attended and rejoiced that they had avoided a possible disaster.
I remarked to the man in charge of the offering and speech that he told the deceased father to come and eat the food, yet none of it was eaten. He gave me that look, which said how can a grown man be so stupid? He went on to explain that the father was no longer in a physical state but was a spirit so he came and ate the spirit of the food and was satisfied. Yep, another stupid question from the ignorant missionary.
One of the earliest believers in Christ in the Elimbari People Group was Diau Wiom. He was older than I and had been working in a small medical clinic for twenty-five years. He was on a “Long Service Leave” which meant the government was paying him for a year’s vacation. He had lots of time on his hands, but more than that he was educated in Melanesian Pidgin and a mother-tongue speaker of Elimbari. He helped me so much to understand the language and culture of his people. One night after a Bible study together, he asked me to pray for his pig. I was stunned and had to stifle a giggle. “Whoever prayed for a pig,” I thought. Some prayers give us doubts even before we ask them. This was one of those prayers for me. The next day, we walked up to his garden house, where his pigs slept. As we approached, a big pig was ripping around chasing the other pigs away from the food he would quickly devour. Diau was just as astonished as I was.
This was the pig who hadn’t eaten anything for four days and the one we had prayed for the night before. Before you even think about it, the incident did not lead me into a ministry of healing. But as the story unfolded, it became evident how important the whole matter was to Diau and his family. You see, that pig was huge and they had raised it to kill for their eldest daughter’s wedding ceremony. But even more important was that Diau’s father, Wiom, was a healer and had practiced rituals through the years to help others, his own family and their animals to stay well and safe from the angry spirits. Losing that pig would have been a financial setback for them. Perhaps a more important reason why God answered our prayers was that Diau had told his dad thank you for looking after him, the family and the animals through the years, but now he belonged to God and so told his dad not to do any healing rituals for them anymore. He told him everything he had now belonged to God and he would take care of them. I was so glad that I hadn’t mocked Diau or belittled him for asking me to pray for his pig. It was the tip of the iceberg for a much larger step of faith for Diau to depend on God to look after him and his family.
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