Chapter 4 - My Missionary On-Line

One of the first things we learned about the culture was that the people freely help each other, especially with work, food and housing. But they did generally expect the recipients to reciprocate. Some things had to be returned of equal value or higher. Not knowing all the ins and outs of the ‘payback system’ my first day in the village left me more than a little rattled. My adoptive parents, Maki and Gorai, had notified people that I’d be moving into their house that day, and in response, many villagers came to give me various food items and open the way for good relationships in the future. I hardly knew anyone by name at that time. As a result, when each person handed me their gift, I would try to quickly describe the person and make a note of what they gave to me.

It didn’t take me long to realize that my system was inadequate for my records. I had things written down like, “A man in a red T-shirt gave me five sweet potatoes,” “A woman with a gap between her front teeth gave me a cabbage,” or “A bald man gave me five ears of corn,” etc. I don’t remember when it dawned on me that I would never know who was who and what they gave me but it was somewhere between the note saying, “Another man in a red T-shirt gave me more sweet potatoes” and “Another woman with a gap between her teeth gave me something.” You can laugh, but you’ll never know what confusion enveloped me that day, and confusion became my middle name for many years to come.

Greens and grubs

Maki, my village father, was probably in his late 50s and had learned how to build framed houses up on posts. He also had added a corrugated iron roof, a couple of windows and a door. Just about everything else he used to lay the floor and make the walls were out of local materials like bamboo and reeds. I had no idea what my obligations were as an adult adopted man, but I gradually learned. Neither one of my parents knew how to speak Melanesian Pidgin which helped me to speak pure language faster. My first few weeks, I stuck close to my parents, went everywhere they went and usually had something given to me for breakfast each morning and I was often told to meet my parents at their garden house for the evening meals. Nothing fancy, but adequate and generally healthy fresh food was prepared. They taught me so much about what I should do and what I should not do.

One example would be to greet any strangers who visited the village and who usually sat in front of the men’s dormitory known as the hausman. ‘Haus’ meant house and ‘man’ meant man so the dormitory was distinguished as a house for men. Some men had more than one wife, so they built a separate house for each wife, but the men slept in a dormitory for three main reasons.

They were frightened of having any contact with menstrual blood which may happen if they spent too much time with their wives. They believed that menstrual blood would kill their virility, making them weak and sickly.
In those days, there was a lot of tribal fighting so it was a good defense to have all the men in one place.
It helped to avoid jealousy between their wives. In the past, women were not allowed to enter the men’s dormitory so when they brought food for their husbands, sons and visitors, they would call for the recipients to come and get it outside of the door. The women didn’t all arrive at the same time so the evening meals could from 5:30 to 7:00. Each man who received food would share it with others, eating some himself. It was a great system to help make sure no one went hungry.

One day, some visitors came and they were seated in front of the men’s dormitory. The greeting for this type of visitor was not your average greeting given to someone along the road. The people who came were considered friends and treated with warmth and respect. Greeting the men sitting on the ground or short benches was done by squatting in front of or behind each man and hugging him around the chest and or shoulders. If you were greeted from the front, the people would usually put one hand above your knee and rub your leg up and down, while saying energetic words of greeting. They would make grasping motions towards your privates, which honoured you as someone special. Needless to say, I barely knew what to say or do, but the people were kind about helping the grown man who didn’t know much. On one such occasion, I was working my way down a long line of men saying, “Thank you for coming,” and giving them the proper hugs, but as I reached the last man, he said, “Look at my face! Do I look like a friend to you? I am from this village.” My list of embarrassments grew longer and longer.

Men greeting women was different. You would usually hug the woman from the side or if you were behind her, you would put your hands around her ribcage and gently shake her. There was one elderly woman in the village who was very short and when we met along the path, she simply bent over and kissed my navel along with the normal hugs. Another one of her friends took a liking to us and would bring visitors around almost every night for a kind of ‘Show and Tell.” She had gotten comfortable with us, but most of the visitors had never been close to a foreigner before so they were extremely shy. One of her lines to break the ice was to say to the visitors, “Go ahead and touch it. They don’t mind,” referring to our hair. The visitor would finally work up the nerve to touch our heads and would nearly always say, “Wow! You were right! It feels just like dog hair!” The people loved doing special things to build relationships with us.

So, I spent five days and five nights a week in the village and two days a week with Kathy and our three children. Why did I do that? I was trying to learn a new culture and language and it forced me to speak the local language because very few of them knew English. After a few months on that schedule, I felt like I was a stranger, but it was needed so I would be curious and driven enough to learn about them and finally get inside their heads and know what they would think if I said certain things or acted certain ways to them.

Many people have the false idea that you can preach the gospel to people without knowing their culture and language. They can try that, but I’ll guarantee that the hearers will probably not understand the message. Individuals and churches have poured untold amounts of money and support into missionaries who look good on the outside, but those missionaries have failed to communicate the truth to the people because they didn’t understand what their words meant to their audiences nor did they understand the culture of those hearing the messages. I had a veteran missionary say to me once, “You are wasting time learning culture and language. You just need to preach and let the Holy Spirit work in their hearts.” He was sadly misinformed about how to communicate with animistic people.

Many people in different parts of the world are Animists. They believe that powerful spirits rule their worlds and if they do the rituals, chants and sacrifices that are required, then their world will be disaster-free. Generally, when animists hear about the Triune God, their minds are desperate to know what rituals, chants and sacrifices are required of them to keep God happy. Ignorantly, missionaries who do not know the local culture will just try to communicate the best they can. They think the people want to know Christ, but most of the people will mix what they hear from the missionaries with their belief system. This is called syncretism. They may regard church attendance, going forward to ask for help, praying, reading the Bible, attending services, giving offerings, baptism, and communion all as rituals or demands they must follow so God will allow them to live in peace. Unfortunately, when the missionaries leave, their efforts in trying to convey the truth to the people simply leave the people trying to follow the laws or demands of the church, but never truly understanding that they are sinners and enemies of God who need to understand God’s way of making sinners clean through the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ.

God the Father put the sins of all the people from all generations on Christ as he hung on the cross. People could never do enough to take away their sins so Christ came to make the payment for the sins of the whole world. He was God’s Son and was born without sin so he was a holy sacrifice to pay for the sins of all of mankind. God extends grace to us because he loves us. We don’t deserve it. The forgiveness of sin is God’s gift to all who believe Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world. Salvation by grace alone is a foreign concept to all religions of the world except for Christianity.

Our efforts to bond with the villagers were not wasted. Little did we know at the time, but being adopted locally put us in a family, sub-clan and clan in the area. Any of my father’s brothers were my fathers. Their sons and daughters were my brothers and sisters. It was a huge help since I didn’t know many of their names in the early days. Being part of village life took away some of the negative feelings of being away from America and my family. God allowed me to be part of another group and gave me a deep affection for them.

In the village of Keu Mangiram, my new family tried to make me feel at home. It really helped that I first lived in my parents’ house, drinking water from the public water hole, bathing in the chilled water flowing down from the mountain above, using the toilet in the coffee patch near the house, going with different people to help pick coffee or prepare the soil for planting, visiting new villages, attending weddings, funerals, and various community events, splitting firewood and carrying it home. All these things helped in establishing my role in the community.

Eating with the people was a major ice-breaker wherever we went. The people were always pleased and amazed when we would eat with them. They often gave us large bowls of food to eat or food wrapped up in banana leaves to take home with us. Probably most cultures in the world use hospitality as a way of accepting people into their communities.

People from back in America thought it strange that we could enjoy the local people and love some of them deeply through the years. We thanked God for all those who accepted us and loved on us through the years.

There were also days of sadness as we were separated from our local church, friends and relatives in America. I remember one day when most of the villagers went to their gardens or other places, leaving the village nearly empty. I walked down to the edge of the village and looked out over the valley below, imagining what events must have taken place down there through the years such as tribal fights, killing, raping, burning down houses, etc. My thoughts switched to my location realizing that no one in America even knew our exact location, nor did our mission leaders know where I lived in the tribe. It gave me a strange wave of insecurity, but God whispered something to me that has helped me all of my life. He quietly said, “Jim, I know where you are.” What a wonderful word of assurance and truth. In the big picture, we were serving the Lord and not our mission board, our home church, or anyone else. God always knew where we were and in what circumstances we would find ourselves. We were so honoured to serve such a faithful, loving God.

One of my heaviest burdens was being among unbelievers for three years without anyone in the village with whom to fellowship and pray together. When I went home on the weekends, I would be with Kathy and our children as well as our co-workers and we would worship together which helped me to face the next week.

At one period, I missed English so much. Hardly anyone in the village knew English and I only had my Bible and a few anthropological books to read in English. In those days, people would buy used newspapers from Australia in local stores and use them to roll their own cigarettes. They grew their own tobacco, but could also buy it from the stores or local markets. I knew I was missing English when a person would take out his roll of newspaper to tear a piece off to make a cigarette, and I would ask him to let me hold his paper. I would read everything I could from the newspapers. News articles, advertisements, etc. Another symptom I had during that time was reading labels on cans, boxes, etc. We came to know those times as suffering for a purpose. So much suffering can cause people to quit working in difficult situations trying to escape suffering and then they don’t get to see the fruit of their suffering, and the local people never hear about the sufferings of Christ on their behalf. Sometimes I would get depressed during those early years and would find myself lying in a fetal position while taking naps, trying to lessen my confusion and loneliness.

People as a whole often think that illiterate people live a very simple lifestyle and that they live happy uncomplicated lives. Through the years, anthropologists have proclaimed that people are happy the way they are so we should leave them alone. Anyone who has ever said that has not lived among the people enough to experience their misery, suffering and fears. I will list some of the things that make life difficult for those people tucked away in the hard-to-reach places of Papua New Guinea:

Lack of education.
Lack of medical facilities.
Lack of Law and Order.
Lack of police protection.
The role of women.
Dominant male society.
Fear of offended spirits who can strike without warning.
Fears of sorcery and witchcraft.
Fears of tribal fighting and death.
Isolation.
Living with disinformation.
Resistance to change.
Lack of roads (transportation).
Lack of communication, although cell phones are a part of many of their lives now.

One day, it dawned on me that the people were not very empathetic to my struggles to learn their language and culture. I would walk down to the government station each Friday with a group of men from my village. It was a great bonding time as we walked the six miles each way.

As we were about halfway there on one trip, a man yelled a greeting up the hill to me. As soon as I yelled my response to him, I knew I had said the wrong thing and completely out of nowhere, a heavy hand hit me right upside of my head which shocked me. But his comment to me hurt me more. He said, “Your head is like a pumpkin! You will never learn our language!” My own fear was voiced out loud. “I will never learn the language!” But I knew God sent us to minister to the Elimbari people so our dependence was on Him to see the job become a reality.

Just as learning culture and language was to be of major importance so was building relationships and that took us into many unexpected areas where our everyday experiences had never before taken us. Being an adult in size and maturity, but having only the knowledge and ability of a small child were hard on our egos. We were treated with pity and misgivings from the beginning, and rightfully so. But with the technical skills that we had been taught during our mission training, we did have advantages over a small child. We could reduce the language learning process by writing words in a phonetic alphabet that we could read and be understood by most. But as a child, we had to try saying things and accept corrections from those who listened. I had to laugh at myself as they did. As individuals saw us trying to master their language, they kept teaching and correcting us more frequently. We also had tape recorders on which we could get people speaking at normal speeds and then we could memorize the
utterances and try to say them as quickly and accurately as the people.

I remember memorizing a dialogue about my daily routine in a nutshell. It went something like this, “I got up this morning, got dressed, ate some food, walked to the market and returned.” That method helped me to speak more naturally, learning their intonation and stress patterns as well as speaking at a normal speed. After I memorized the dialogue and could say it up to speed, I would quote it to everyone I met that day. I must say they were impressed with my fluency, but it created another problem. After hearing me, they would spit out a dialogue of their own using vocabulary I had not yet learned. My regular reply would be to say, “I don’t know your language. I’m still learning it.” That didn’t make sense to them since they’d just heard me speak their language in a natural way.

The tape recorder was also a great help in learning culture. For instance, I could ask a person to tell me about his involvement in a tribal fight and record his dialogue. I would then get some help defining each word and get a translation for each phrase. It helped me to understand more and more speech in its cultural setting. I studied different aspects of their culture like gardening, harvesting, making fences, food preparation, etc. I followed an outline that would eventually take me beyond physical things to hear what they said they believed about sickness, healing, death, burial, spiritual beliefs, etc. It had a snowball effect which grew, but it was hard to know what I could already understand and say and what things I still needed to tackle. That is where more experienced missionaries with a desire to help us newbies lent us a hand by teaching us through their experiences and skills. These good-hearted people eventually formed a group which was called Concom, short for the Consultants Committee of which I eventually became a member and was trained in how to help new missionaries in their culture and language acquisition. Later, other fields around the world developed similar committees and as a result, they gave good advice and guidance in each step of the new missionaries’ skill development.

As a result, there was an orientation course specially designed to help new people learn Melanesian Pidgin, basic cultural beliefs, development of relationships, and dos and don’ts in their new country. Added to that was helping the missionaries with orthography (developing an alphabet), literacy to teach the locals how to read and write their languages, Bible lesson development, Scripture translation, church planting, and developing church leaders and
teachers. Thank God for all of those special people who were making disciples along the way.

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