Chapter Nine
A New Door Opened
As a beginner in translation, I had so much to learn. Perhaps if I had known how much work was involved, I might have chosen another occupation. But God often calls us through a cloud to see if we will obey Him, then makes the pathway clearer to us over time.
Since we had no Scriptures in the Elimbari language yet, I thought maybe we could start reaching out through gospel tracts. A couple living in West New Britain Province named Ces and Jenny Burgess had started printing and distributing tracts in Melanesian Pidgin under the name of “Makim Rot Buk,” meaning ‘Showing the Way Books.’ I wrote to them to ask for copies of each tract they had so I could start translating them. They agreed for me to translate them offering to print them for me. They sent them to me, little knowing what would develop from that simple correspondence.
Ces and Jenny had also been missionaries when they first arrived in PNG, but later worked for the government in West New Britain Province. The island of New Britain was divided into two provinces known as East and West New Britain. Through our correspondence, Ces and Jenny pointed out that there were very few people who understood the Gospel, and no one was learning languages in those provinces. He asked why the New Tribes Mission had not yet sent missionaries to the island provinces. I passed their concerns on to the NTM leadership, and it seemed as if they hadn’t thought that would happen, or at least it wouldn’t happen soon. As a result, it was decided that a survey should be made in West New Britain Province. Because of my relationship with Ces and Jenny, it was decided that it would be good for me to accompany the NTM field director, Dean VanVliet, on the maiden survey to the areas.
I had great respect and admiration for Dean, but I didn’t know him well. We started working on a strategy for the survey. We mapped out places we would like to visit to get samples of the languages to compare with other languages in the province. We tried to get familiarized with the province generally by checking out the modes of travel, the condition of the roads, what vessels could be used, and much more. We would check populations and language borders in several locations, noting if there were churches, health facilities, and a government presence in each place. Finally, we notified Ces and Jenny about coming over, and they offered to host us when we were in their area and make their house our base camp. Maps were gathered, and excursions by motorbikes, trucks, ships, and walking were investigated. Our bags were packed, travel expenses procured and our departure date was set.
The first leg of our trip was a bus ride to the town of Madang. It was a rough eight-hour trip and had gotten dark before we reached our destination. We found our way to the wharf from which our ship would set off. The ship was originally designed and built for the inland seas of Japan and wasn’t ideal for deep-sea travel. It was brought to PNG to transport people who had been contracted by plantations. Their contracts were usually for two years and included room, board and travel arrangements. All the berths were full, but the captain allowed us to sleep on the floor of the dining room and he made sure we were fed. We finally departed in the wee hours of the morning. The first few hours were smooth sailing until we hit the open seas between the PNG mainland and the islands. The sea turned rough, and neither of us had been in conditions quite like that before.
We had spread our sleeping bags on the floor of the dining room, and after a short time, the ship started being tossed back and forth by the sea. Cupboard doors were flying open and slamming shut continuously. At the peak of the storm, the dining room tables crashed over causing the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowls to become flying missiles being shot to various destinations in the room. I must admit it was more than a little frightening for a landlubber like me. Being tossed around continued for several more hours until we arrived on the northern side of New Britain Island. By the time we reached the port of Kimbe, things were pretty smooth. We gathered our belongings and said farewell to the captain and the crew. We were glad to be back on solid ground.
We made our way from Kimbe to the small town of Hoskins. It was a small town as it consisted of an airport, a couple of stores, a high school, and a few other things. Ces and Jenny lived there with their two teenage boys and the whole family made us feel welcome. The next day, Dean and I wanted to go explore as far as we could on the road, which ended at a large river without a bridge. Ces loaned us his motorbike, and we stopped in many villages along the way.
At one place near the beach, we stopped to see some natural hot water pools. Some bush fowl (Melanesian Megapods) eggshells were laying near the hot pools. The bird would lay one egg each day, cover it with a bit of sand, and leave the eggs remaining there to be incubated by the heat from the hot springs. When the chicks hatched, they were on their own to find food and water. The eggs were a bit larger than duck eggs and the people often dug them up, put them into a net or leaf bag, and cooked them in the boiling water. It was like having a picnic. It didn’t matter to them if the eggs were fresh or ready to hatch, they were all edible. I once had one at the market in Kimbe, and the egg yolk got stuck in my throat, I had nothing to drink to try to dislodge it so I sat down thinking I could be dying. But finally, the yolk moved on down allowing me to breathe again. If the people found an abundance of eggs, they would dig them out to sell at the market. In areas of PNG without hot springs, the bush fowl would lay their eggs and cover them with leaves and small sticks, and the heat caused by the decomposition would hatch the eggs.
The hot springs were amazing. Steam was rising from them and the water was boiling in some sections. Later, Ces and Jenny told us we shouldn’t have gone there without a local guide because many people had broken through the thin crust of soil surrounding the water and had been scalded to death.
We visited the villagers along the way and asked questions about their language, population, etc. They would ask us if we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We assured them we weren’t, but we found out that motorbikes were their favorite mode of transportation. As a result, people were a bit suspicious of us. The road was fairly flat and came to an end at the large river bank. It was a great day to see the people, and their villages and try to understand their way of pronouncing Melanesian Pidgin. They seemed to speak super-fast compared to our part of the country. They easily recognized us as people from the highlands by our accents.
We returned to Ces and Jenny’s house and Dean went with the family to fly model airplanes. I stayed at the house and realized I was hungry and had no idea when they would return. I came up with the idea of cooking supper for them. I looked through the refrigerator and cupboards and found ingredients I could use to cook a Chinese dish. They were surprised to be greeted by the smell of the food and thanked me for cooking it. Later, Jenny asked me what meat I had used in the dish. I told her that I used some cooked chicken I had found. She chuckled and said it was delicious, but that chicken was the cat food for their two Siamese cats!! The chicken was sold in large cans for $2.00 each making it cheaper than cat food.
I wondered where their printshop was so they led me to their bedroom and I saw a printer set up there. They spent a lot of time, energy, and money to print up the tracts and also to pay for the postage to send them around the country. They were true selfless servants of Christ. Their burden for missionaries to come and teach the people in the Islands in their languages was a catalyst for challenging NTM to consider opening the island provinces.
We had met a German man who was the director of another mission organization. His family lived just outside of Hoskins and he invited us to come over one afternoon to discuss our survey plans with him and to stay for supper.
The day arrived, but the Burgess boys invited us for a swim in the ocean before going to the meeting. I was thinking, “We had agreed to go to the German man’s house early to discuss our survey. Why was Dean going for a swim which could make us late?” Dean thought he had plenty of time, and he swam out to the reef with the boys to check the reefs for sea shells. Did I mention Dean was a seashell freak? I learned about it that afternoon. Time was passing rapidly, and I realized we were going to be late for the meeting since Dean was still nowhere in sight. I was more than a little angry at Dean, but as he swam near us, he stood up and said in an exhausted whisper of a voice saying, “I nearly drowned out there!” Then, he fell flat on his face in the surf. He hadn’t been swimming in a long time and had no idea how far it was out to the reefs—all my bad attitudes melted by my compassion for him.
By the time he regained enough strength to get back to the house, shower, get dressed, and drive over for the meeting, we were quite late. But our host brushed it aside, and we had a great time discussing his ministry and our survey plans, as well as a great non-cat food-based supper!
We went to the town of Kimbe, the provincial headquarters, to let the police and government officials know that we were in the province to have a look around. We hadn’t booked appointments with anyone, but they were very friendly and had a high-interest in people coming to learn languages in the province. The islands were a hotbed for ‘Cargo Cult Movements.’ The government would attempt to squelch the movements and arrest their cult leaders. They knew that missionaries could help steer the people away from that cult.
Later, I was asked to teach some missionaries in Indonesia about the Cargo Cult. When I started investigating it, I was surprised that some forms of it stretched from the Hawaiian Islands going westward through Indonesia. The general story was that two brothers had a violent argument and one brother left and the other one remained. The story goes that when the departed brother returned, he would bring knowledge and wealth. The brother who remained behind had never developed so he still followed the ancestral customs. You can just imagine what the descendants of the brother who stayed behind thought when they saw their very first ship arrive with strange men of different races speaking different languages. They were so happy to see that the brother who had gone away for so long how now returned. Their hopes were dashed when the ‘brother’ didn’t share his knowledge or wealth with them. So, for decades cargo cults would rise with leaders who would try to teach their followers what they must do to see the cargo finally arrive. There were a lot of atrocities such as human sacrifices, beatings, and people being ostracized and sometimes banished for not following the new doctrines. The government battled with these cults for many years and were happy when missionaries moved into tribal areas and taught the people the truth.
Some people were working in the plantations of West New Britain who were from Chimbu Province, where our family had been living for about six years. As we mingled with people in town, we were happy to speak with a few people from Chimbu, not knowing the government officials were observing us. Sometimes they would nod at us with a smile saying, “Now we see what you were talking about. You have learned some PNG languages.” It helped persuade them to permit NTM to move into their province.
I was accustomed to living in a village so I bought a packet of rice and told Ces and Jenny that I was going to a village and taste some local food. They told me that they had gone to the village on several occasions, but no one had ever given them food. Not being deterred or doubting PNG hospitality, I bought a bag of rice and a packet of frozen chicken and headed to the closest village to Hoskins named Casia. I meandered into the village smiling, greeting the people, and telling them how I lived in a village to learn the language and culture there. I told them that I would love to learn some of their language and culture also. I had some culture shock there when the women would come and greet me while the men just sat around nonchalantly. I learned that the culture was matrilineal. The women owned all the land and married men from other places, and the men would move to their wives’ villages to plant food, develop cash crops, and raise their families.
I wasn’t disappointed in the Casia people as they said, “We are cooking some food and you are more than welcome to eat with us.” Yes! Way to go PNG! Eat your hearts out Ces and Jenny! I developed some relationships with families there and always went to visit them each time I returned to Hoskins on future visits. Eventually, they got to meet Kathy and our children too. The kids would play and swim together and top it off with a delicious meal. They were always amazed when we ate their food with them.
With Ces’ help, we found a small boat going down to Kandrian, a small government post on the south side of the province. We were able to book passage on the boat being ready for another adventure. The education department had organized a provincial sports day, and the boat we were to travel on had brought a large contingent of students from the Kandrian High School to compete. We had a small berth with bunk beds suspended by sturdy chains, but there were too many students to sleep in the berths, so they asked the captain to drop anchor in a beautiful lagoon near some small islands. Without hesitation, the kids jumped overboard and swam over to an island on which they would spend the night. Dean and I put our swimming trunks on and had a wonderful swim. The water was probably twenty feet deep there, but it was so clear that we could see to the bottom.
The island on which the students slept was uninhabited by anyone but pigs. I asked, “What do the pigs eat?” To which they answered, “They eat the coconuts.” Have you ever tried to get the shell off of a dry coconut? It is no easy task, but the pigs had learned not only how to remove the shell, but they would hit the coconuts on large rocks to split the coconuts and scrape out the meat with their teeth. The kids returned in the morning and we continued our voyage.
While we were heading down to Kandrian, the deckhands had two lines behind the boat with big fishing hooks tied on them. Can you guess what they used for bait? They used parts of white plastic shopping bags. They assured us the fish would think that the plastic was squid and would try to catch it. Just as they explained it to us, one of the lines went taut and one of the crew started pulling it in. I don’t know what kind of fish it was, but they caught several of them and the captain was our cook. They had a wood-burning stove on deck with a big pot of water in which to cook the fish. The flesh of the fish was snow white and tasted very delicious. But we didn’t know what we would face before we would get our next meal.
As our boat wove between the Arawe Islands, bad weather struck and we tried to secure a safe place. I was feeling sea-sick so I went to our berth, remembering what a sailor had told me. He said, “Keep your stomach dry. Don’t eat or drink liquids in a storm.” With that in mind, I had brought some crackers and I would eat a few to quell my nausea. The poor high school kids staying on the deck were heaving over the rails, and no one thought about eating. When the seas were at their roughest, I was lying on my bunk with one arm and one leg wrapped around the bunk’s supporting chains. At times I thought, “If this gets any worse, I won’t be able to hold on.”
Finally, the sea calmed down a bit, but it was still very choppy. As another boat approached our boat and their crew shouted, “We have an expectant mother who has been in labor for a long time. Can you take her to Kandrian?” Our captain agreed to take her, but it took quite a while to transfer from the deck of their boat to ours. With the choppy waves, the decks would go up and down but not in sync. They were holding her stretcher and attempted several times to transfer it over to our deck. After several failed attempts, both decks lined up enough to toss her over. I felt so bad for her. There she was in labor, wet, cold, and embarrassed. She was probably wondering what the future held for her and her baby. We made it safely to Kandrian, and she was taken by truck to the hospital. The next day we heard that she had not yet delivered the baby, so they were putting her on a small airplane to go to the hospital in Kimbe.
Dean and I went to notify the local government officer (Kiap) that we would be trekking around the area for a few days. He thanked us allowing us to sleep in the kiap house while we were there. The sun rose with nicer weather the next day, and we started exploring the area.
In one village we visited, the people were curious about the nature of our visit. We explained things to them and they were very hospitable. They were proud to have their very own stature of Mary sent from the Vatican for them. They bowed down before the statue in prayer three times a day. You may think they had a good understanding of God and His word, but as we expected they were animistic. According to Dictionary.com, it is defined as:
1: relating to or based on animism, the belief that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself have souls: Most of these groups, in a form of animistic shamanism, paid reverence to the primal spirits of the elements and the wilderness.
2: relating to the belief that natural objects have souls that can exist apart from their material bodies: The members of this animistic tribe hold that a flame has life and spirit, and fear the ghost of a flame that has suddenly been quenched.
Soon after that, I had another shock. Some men told me that they had the statue, but their real god was represented by a sacred mask hidden from the children and women except for circumcised boys. They took me to a small hut and shut the door. For a fleeting minute, I thought, “What are they going to do to me? But a young man scampered up into the rafters and brought down a bag in which the sacred mask was stored and he showed it to me. I had seen pictures of those types of masks which are referred to as “Duk-Duk” (pronounced duke duke).
That’s a classic example of what we call syncretism (Syncretism is the blending of cultures and ideas from different places). Unfortunately, many people think they have taught Christianity clearly, and they probably did, but they didn’t realize that their teaching would be mixed with many other beliefs.
That afternoon, Dean and I were walking near the beach and some pre-adolescent boys came and talked with us. They told us how they would take canoes out to the reef to look for food and sometimes they would swim from one island to another out in the bay. Anyway, Dean’s sea-shell syndrome kicked in and some boys agreed to row him out to the reef in search of more shells.
While they were out there the boys were telling me about their practice of circumcision. I had never heard about any PNG people practicing circumcision before, so it was enlightening. They said, “If your father has a pig to kill for the celebration, then you could be circumcised by one of your maternal uncles. Some of the boys were swimming naked and the particular boy explaining the ritual pointed to another boy and said, “His father had a pig to kill.” As I glanced in the boy’s direction, I saw he was circumcised.
While we were talking, we heard a commotion out near the reef, and glancing up we saw that the canoe that took Dean to the reef was drifting away. Dean was thinking, if one of these boys drowns, he would be liable, so he was swimming towards the canoe as it kept drifting further away. He finally caught up to it, and with his last bit of strength, hurled himself across the canoe, fracturing several of his ribs. He made it back to shore but he was quite sore for the rest of the survey.
Back at the kiap house, he wanted to put all of his shells into a container and pour warm water over them because somebody had told him that the creatures living inside the shells would back out of the shells and desert them. Wrong! Maybe the water was too hot and killed them. I don’t know, but what I do know was that they started rotting and gave off a horrible smell for the duration of our survey.
After we had gathered all the information we could during our limited time, we found a ship to take us back to the port of Lae on the mainland. It was a larger ship than the one we went over on, and the captain’s wife was traveling on this voyage. Her brother was the engineer and chief chef. He was an excellent cook. We even had air-conditioning in our cabin. I walked into our cabin and thought Dean must have passed wind because it smelled really bad in there. As time passed, I realized it was the odor of the sea shells. I went to the captain’s wife and asked her if I could put Dean’s sea shell stash out on the deck. She threw her hands in the air and said, “Is that what the horrible smell is going through the ship via the air conditioner? Please put them out on the deck.”
I went back to the room and timidly told Dean that his sea shells were stinking up the place and that the wife said I could put them out on the deck for him. He quietly replied, “Oh I didn’t know. I could never smell them.” Then I realized there was something worse than being a sea shell freak. It was being a sea shell freak who couldn’t smell his treasures!!
Another survey of West New Britain followed that one a year later. To our great joy, God opened the doors for some missionary families to move into that province in 1980.
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