The Next Leg of the Journey

Well, after saying our goodbyes in the second village and hiking 7 hours back to the first village (this time, after some intense rains, our hike involved wading through some waste-deep water) to rest a day and then catch a plane, we are back in the city. Fortunately, the summer and the internship are far from over.

Our next step is a three-week literacy course. One of the things that drew me to work with Pioneer Bible Translators was their willingness to do whatever is necessary to see the word of God transform lives – if that means translating the scriptures, they translate. However, that also means they are willing to teach literacy or plant churches or do anything else to insure that God’s word is able to be understood and able to reach people directly. So, although I am interested in translation, PBT also includes many missionaries whose role involves very little actual scripture translation.

This literacy course aims to provide curriculum and basic reading books for five different language groups in Papua New Guinea. Each intern will be working with a different language group, and we’ll be working (in Melanesian Pidgin) with nationals who have all traveled to the city to develop their vernacular-specific materials. From what I’ve gathered, we are going to be pretty busy (with fairly stressful, cross-cultural work) for the next three weeks. If all goes according to plan, after these three weeks, each language group will have a year-long literacy curriculum and 80 children’s story books (in the vernacular) to use throughout the year.

So, we would appreciate prayers for our work with the literacy course. We’re really excited about how much is going to be accomplished, but we know the work will be challenging and tiring. Pray that we will have energy and stamina to work, but also pray that we’ll have grace enough to maintain a sense of humor (or at least encouragement for each other). Also, pray for the language groups who are receiving these materials – that God will work through the gift of literacy to allow people to read and understand his precious word. As I sat in on a Bible study in the second village we visited and saw the children struggling to read the few scriptures that had been published in their language, I realized what an awesome gift it is to be able to pick up and read God’s word. At the same time, I also felt hope for all of the work that is being done (and is succeeding) to give that gift to other people.

One other note: I’ve changed the title of the blog to “Laik Bilong God.” One of the first phrases I learned in the bush was “Laik Bilong Yu,” which means (roughly), “Whatever you want” or “It’s up to you.” As people would ask me whether I was going to return to PNG after this summer, I had to answer that it was entirely up to God’s will – or, as I was taught to say, “Laik Bilong God.”

The Second Village

It’s hard to believe that we left the city – and with it, the internet and communication with the outside world – four weeks ago. And to be honest, that was probably the hardest part of bush living for me. I can go as long as I need to without hot showers or a real mattress, but it was a strange feeling to go longer than I ever have without communicating with any of my loved ones.

Fortunately, that feeling of separation wasn’t enough to keep me from having another wonderful experience in our second village. After a 6-hour hike through the jungle (through swamps and villages and over muddy ridges), we were welcomed into our second town (and our second language group – like the first village, they spoke Melanesian Pidgin, but they had an entirely different vernacular). Unlike our first village, we lived with an established missionary, so she was able to carefully explain all of the cultural happenings we didn’t understand (such as why a man would greet us with a “good morning” at three in the afternoon, or how two people were married during the middle of the day right under our noses without us realizing it). She was also able to set up for us different daily adventures with people in the village, which meant I was able to chop more sago, fish with poison vines, visit a larger bush market, take an overnight trip to visit a different village, dig yams in a garden, throw some kids into a river, and go on a pig hunt through the jungle at night. All the while, I was doing my best to continue language learning, which has actually gone really well. After coming to PNG knowing only three usable Pidgin phrases (the first being, “I’m trying to learn Pidgin”), I would estimate (based on an informal lexicon I’ve been creating) that my functional vocabulary is around 600 words.

The part of this village that I was most excited about was getting to sit in on the work of translation. Our missionary had a few different projects going on – first, a few Bible story books, and second, a rough draft of I Corinthians – and we got to watch her work with nationals to correct and clarify the translations. Each project was at a different stage in the development process, so for the story books she was checking the texts with a group of women. The missionary had many different techniques to check comprehension, using everything from asking questions to having the women act out the stories, and we were able to see her make changes. I Corinthians, on the other hand, was being checked by a group of men, and it was interesting (and always surprising) to see what in the text was misleading to their cultural background. As part of the internship, the missionary had asked each intern to check a section of an English back translation of the current draft of I Corinthians (mine was chs. 5-7) and discuss with her anything we thought was improperly translated. It was really exciting to attend the checking sessions with the nationals to see the missionary present our questions to the men and hear their feedback. More than a few of our suggestions were used and implemented into a new draft of I Corinthians, which was both an encouraging and intimidating feeling.

Much to my surprise, a lot of the learning I did during our time in the bush was not about Papua New Guinean culture or Pidgin; it was about some of the more mundane aspects of missionary life, such as cooking and cleaning. Once again, I was so thankful to get this opportunity to come to Papua New Guinea because there is so much I have gotten to experience – things like cleaning solar panels or pumping water from one tank to another or even seeing how to cook a variety of foods (such as coffee cakes or pumpkin pie) with very limited resources. Some of my best memories from the second village are my conversations with the missionary about how she deals with being separated from loved ones or what have been her greatest challenges and victories. I surely wouldn’t have expected it, but this summer has shown me that preparing to do missions involves much more than just learning language.

And one of the lessons that were harder for me to learn is that flexibility is absolutely necessary for any missionary (but especially one in PNG). As you may have realized, this blog update is coming later than I anticipated – our time in the bush was extended by five days due to unavoidable flight problems. On a smaller scale, we constantly saw plans change due to external circumstances, and I had to learn (with minor frustration) that any of a missionary’s plans must be taken with a grain of salt.

If I had ever feared that this summer wouldn’t be a “proper mission trip” or a “proper internship,” let me assure you that both fields have been fulfilled. You can’t have a short-term mission trip without some construction, and we built some large shelves for the missionary's house to provide more organization. You can’t have an internship without making coffee for people more important than you, and we were responsible for providing the translators with drinks and snacks during the translation sessions. Now that those requirements have both been met, I will be able to come home at peace :-).

For anyone wondering about what kinds of food I put into my body during our time in the bush, I’ve compiled as comprehensive of a list as I can remember. Many of our meals took place in the missionary houses, so we ate foods we had brought from the city (which were thus typical, like rice or peanut butter sandwiches). Whenever we were out for the day with nationals, however, or on special occasions, we ate bush food, which consisted of: lots and lots of yams (at one point, seven of us ate literally 17 bowls of yams to avoid offending the host), lots of sweet potatoes (and don’t picture the marshmallow-covered deserts you eat at Thanksgiving), bananas, greens (similar to spinach or collard greens), some taro, lots of sago, a few wild fowl eggs, a little fish, some bandicoot, some pig (including the liver), tapioca, pumpkin, coconuts, lots of papaya, a few cherry tomatoes, a little pineapple, and…the moment you’ve been waiting for…a handful of grub worms (lightly cooked, fresh from the tree they were eating).

Life in the bush includes getting used to a few things you probably shouldn’t get used to, such as coming out of the shower with spots of mud remaining on your body, watching flies dance across your open wounds, or eating two-year-old nonperishable foods left at the missionary house by the 2007 interns. But the truth is that going into the jungle for a month gave me an opportunity to do something I’ve never gotten to do before, and opportunity that few people get: to temporarily put my entire life on hold in exchange for an entirely different way of going about life. That is the kind of experience that changes you, and I’m still sorting through a lot of what I learned. In the second village, I stayed with a national in his house, which really helped to open my eyes to another way of understanding the world. It’s amazing how different my life is from his simply based on where we were born.

More than anything, I feel so intensely grateful to everyone who has supported my efforts to go on this internship. I am certainly in no position today to try and decide what my future ministry is going to be, but I can say that no one could ask for a better experience in missionary life than the one I have received. I have had more than a few moments to really think about what God is doing in my life, what (and who) is truly important to me, and just exactly who I am and what I can do. And for that, I am so thankful for all of the financial and prayer support I have received.

I’m sure I’ve done a terrible job of summarizing my time in the bush in these two blog posts, though I hope I’ve given you a peek into what we’ve experienced. I look forward to telling you stories and hearing yours when I return to the States.

In case you thought I didn't actually eat the grub worms, here's the proof. None of this "take a picture holding it in front of my mouth and then throw it away" business.

One of many yams we dug up

The "haus lotu" (church) of the village we visited for an overnight trip

The First Village

What a journey!

We had two primary goals for our time in the bush: language/culture learning (every village has a “Tok Place,” the regional vernacular language, but most people in the country are also fluent in Melanesian Pidgin, the trade language we’ve been trying to learn) and experiencing missionary life. Talking to missionaries can give you a pretty good picture of what it’s like to live in the jungle, but you really can’t ask for a truer experience than just moving out to the jungle yourself for a period of time.

The best way to learn language and culture is to just step out and interact with people, so the majority of our days were spent learning the PNG way of life with nationals. I spent time chopping sago trees, spear fishing, hunting for bandicoots, digging for wild bird eggs, playing soccer and playing cards, chopping up plants with my machete, digging in the garden, and just sitting around and talking. At the beginning of the week, I found myself looking for any excuse to stay in the house because it was much easier than stretching my brain to try and interact with people; but by the end of our stay, I was getting cabin fever and trying to squeeze in as much activity with people as I could. Language learning is exhausting, but it absolutely pays off. I can specifically remember the first afternoon when I felt like I was having a genuine conversation with one of my village friends – it was such a cool feeling to know that I was able to talk to someone from the other side of the world whose life experience was so very different from mine. It was the moment when the nationals stopped being, as they too often become to short-term visitors, “charming novelties” and started becoming peers and friends.

Fortunately, the people extended us a lot of grace as we got words wrong and made cultural blunders, and they did their best to help and take care of us. In PNG, relationships are everything, so the people would go out of their way to make sure we were safe and comfortable. This was a pro and a con – we never had to worry about our physical safety, but we also had to take all of the initiative in our interactions with people. If I was going to spend the day with someone, he was going to do only what I wanted to do. There was no way for me to ask, “Hey, can I just shadow you today while you do whatever you would normally do?” Instead, we had to ask specific individuals to do specific things with us. Fortunately, because they wanted relationships with us, they were happy to oblige.

I learned the lesson of just how much they wanted to please us the hard way on our first night in town. That morning, I had played soccer with a bunch of the little kids. In the afternoon, I was talking to some of the guys my age, and I joked about how I had played soccer but was really bad at it (anyone who has seen me play knows I have no business playing soccer). They quickly responded that I needed to train and get better, so we went out to the field to play more. Gradually, more guys showed up until there were about twenty of us playing. Now, as I said, I am no good at soccer, so I was just trying to avoid looking too stupid as the game went on and on. As it got later and the sun was setting, I was getting more and more tired; people were even beginning to remark that I looked tired, but I kept insisting that I was fine (because, regardless of how miserable I was, I didn’t want to quit while they were still going). Eventually, as it got so dark that I could barely see and I was thinking the game would never end, one of the guys came up to me and bluntly said, “You look tired. It’s totally okay if you want to go home.” Feeling dejected, I walked the long walk to the house and told my intern team how I had played so badly that they had asked me to leave. My intern coach promptly replied that, no, they weren’t kicking me out – they were just as ready to leave as I was and were going to play as long as I did because they thought I wanted to! As it turns out, this little “impromptu” soccer game wasn’t impromptu at all – even though the guys do enjoy soccer, they were only playing because I had said I was bad and needed practice. I looked outside, and, sure enough, everyone was headed home.

At the same time as I was trying to foster friendships and learn more Pidgin, God was doing incredible things in the city. This village has experienced much spiritual warfare, and there is currently no missionary living there. Gradually throughout the week, we learned that the village was in the middle of a serious conflict between the older Catholic church and the newer, smaller Protestant revival church, a conflict that had divided families. The leaders of the Protestant church happened to have the most history with PBT, so we spent most of our time with them during the week. On our second day in town, they asked us (as the resident missionaries) to give them a message about how to follow God and reach the village more effectively. Naturally, we felt completely unprepared to answer their question, but after a day of prayer and preparation, we were able to encourage them with passages of scripture and our very best Pidgin. Many other situations came up throughout the week (questions about Revelation, confusion about the Lord’s Supper, etc.) that had us praying hard and looking to God for guidance.

One of the coolest things to see was how the word of God really did speak directly to people and bridge gaps. We had brought this little device called the Proclaimer, a solar-powered digital audio player with the entire Pidgin New Testament on it, and some of the interns listened to it while doing laundry one afternoon. Some of the villagers heard it and asked to listen to more scripture, and by the end of the week we had dozens of people coming from surrounding villages to listen to multiple books of the Bible at a time. It was amazing to see the ways that certain passages spoke to the situations of the people, and more than once we noticed Catholics and Protestants sitting near each other (when they may have gone weeks without interacting).

Another highlight of the week was a nighttime worship service at one of the church leaders’ houses. One night, from our house, we heard singing, so a few of us went out to investigate. We discovered a small crowd of about twenty people singing their hearts out in joyful song underneath a small house. It was such an incredible feeling – here we were in the middle of a huge jungle, in a dark, tiny little village that nobody cares about, and these people were praising with everything they had. I realized that God sees and knows every single little language group in the jungle, and he loves and cares about them so much. Suddenly, the world seemed really big, but God seemed even bigger.

I appreciate everyone who has been praying over me throughout this time in the bush, as I simply would not have had enough energy to keep pushing myself to try and get out in the culture without God’s empowering. There were also moments of homesickness because I couldn’t communicate with anyone outside of the village, but God had grace enough for those moments of weakness as well. And it was always exciting to see what God was doing around us – his Spirit is clearly hard at work in the village. All in all, our week-and-a-half in the first village was an exhausting, exhilarating, and unforgettable time.

The missionary house in which we lived, situated on the side of the airstrip

Our first experience eating sago (which we chopped and washed ourselves) cooked in bamboo

At night, all of our activities were powered by kerosene lantern