Laik Bilong God: 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.