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