Reflections on Papua New Guinea

It's hard for me to believe that this picture was taken exactly two weeks ago, when I was stepping off of the plane in Houston to be received by my parents and brother (who had to take the picture). My travel home couldn't have gone any better, including our overnight stay in Australia. Australia was actually great for helping us get over any reverse culture shock quickly; because it was a national holiday, the streets were filled with nicely dressed 20-somethings headed to parties in downtown Brisbane, and that provided all of the contrast we needed to shake us out of third-world-country mode and prepare us to re-enter the United States.

We landed in Dallas on Thursday, and we spent two days there debriefing, sharing pictures, sleeping, and replacing any extra pounds we may have lost during our time in the bush. We even took one last hike through the forest as a team, but the lack of helpful nationals, skirts (in favor of pants) on the girls, and my machete were all reminders that we were indeed no longer in PNG. I made it home on Saturday, and, in addition to catering to all of my food cravings, my family was gracious enough to sit through literally 1,000 pictures (which I had edited down from the exactly 2,001 that I took over the summer) and probably just as many stories. The time I shared with my family and with my home church, the Kingwood Church of Christ, was sweet but all-too-brief. On the way back to Abilene on Monday, I spent the night in Austin with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece, who had grown considerably since I saw her last! I've since moved into my new house in Abilene, started classes, and begun my new internship with the Southern Hills campus ministry.

It has been very interesting to see which parts of PNG's culture have been the hardest for me to let go. There are a few Pidgin phrases that I can't seem to shake out of my vocabulary—"maski," which means "forget, drop, nix," as in "Maski that idea, since it won't work,"; and "laik bilong yu," which you probably know means "it's up to you." To my dismay, I have discovered that, as far as I can tell, I may be the only person at Abilene Christian University who has any knowledge of Melanesian Pidgin. I've also had trouble shaking one of PNG's biggest cultural taboos: stepping over things. In PNG, you never step over anything, especially if you are a female wearing a skirt, and especially if the thing you are stepping over is any part of another person's body (like legs)—it's considered rude and disgusting. So, more than once, I have found myself unknowingly going out of my way to avoid stepping over someone's legs in the hallway (much to their confusion). Fortunately, my friends are gracious, and they make room for my cultural confusions.

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Now that I've had a few weeks to decompress (and now that my sleep schedule has almost returned to normal), I think it is important for me to reflect on the time I spent in PNG. I also think that it is important for me to share how I saw God at work; to, as it is written in Psalm 105, "Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done...tell of all his wonderful acts."

More than anything, I believe that this summer allowed me to catch a glimpse of God's heart for every single person in this world—and that includes the small, insignificant people. As I've written earlier on this blog, one of the most significant moments of the summer was flying over the bush on our way to the first village—I was struck with how incredibly small and remote all of the villages were. How could anyone ever know—much less care about—all of these different people? PNG alone has 850 different languages spread among about six million people. However, the next day, as I attended a small worship gathering underneath a house, I was similarly struck with the assurance that God DOES know, DOES care about, and, yes, DID send his son to die for these insignificant, unknown people. Psalm 33:13-15 became a bit of a theme verse for me (emphasis added):

"From heaven the LORD looks down and sees all mankind;
from his dwelling place he watches all who live on earth—
he who forms the hearts of all, who considers everything they do."

How often our ministry projects and goals in the United States focus on big results and big numbers, but in PNG I spent a significant amount of time with missionaries whose lives are dedicated to serving small, forgotten groups of people. The truth is that Bible translation takes a long time in PNG because of levels of education and other cultural factors, but I was humbled by servants who have given literally decades to the work of ensuring that even these small groups of people learn that God loves them specifically. That is a lesson that I can carry regardless of what my future ministry looks like—I can look for the insignificant people on the margins of society and realize that working with them, regardless of whether the work seems to have huge results, reflects the heart of God and is so incredibly valuable.

This summer was also an important time for teaching me about what it means to rely on God fully and allow him to work. We prayed hard that God would use us for more than just language learning in the first village, and he absolutely paved the way for us to have an impact by creating in the people a craving for scripture and answers to many biblical questions. Plans change frequently in Papua New Guinea, which initially caused me stress; but as the summer went on, I learned that the helpful phrase "laik bilong God" is just as applicable for travel plans and healing wounds as it is for my unknown future career. I frequently wonder if we in the States have lost a true understanding of what it means to depend on God because so much is predictable and controlled; in a society in which your ability to eat depends on a good harvest, however, you are forced to pray in submission with the knowledge that your very survival may depend on God's will. So often, and so frustratingly, we were reminded that we simply cannot change hearts or change lives; we must simply petition God to do the work and ready ourselves to be used as we are called. On the other hand, what a glorious moment it is when you see a change in a person or in a community and realize that only God himself could have orchestrated the transformation.

Especially during our time in the bush, when I was unable to communicate with anyone, I was forced to consider what is truly important in life. As a college student, I'm constantly devoting time and energy to things that seem so important in the moment: things like football games and Greek tests. However, when I was completely separated from that culture, I began to realize just how insignificant my GPA and my Facebook friend count really are, and, as I've come back home, it's been tough to try and convince myself that they are as important as I once made them.

As I'm sure that anyone who has spent a significant amount of time out of country will tell you, the experience opens your eyes to the global society in which we live and gives you a glimpse of how much God is at work without the help of white people. It's always encouraging to see evidence of spiritual growth in communities that lack a missionary, and we heard many stories of how God's word has transformed lives. The experience of living in a different culture and developing genuine relationships with people in that culture forced me to ask lots of uncomfortable questions that I still don't have answers for—questions about why I should be able to take daily malaria drugs when people die of malaria every day in PNG, or whether "love your neighbor" even means loving your neighbors in PNG since our world is so connected, or whether the way we do things here really is the right or even best way of doing things.

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I wish that I had a better answer to the questions I've received dozens of times: whether I want to do Bible translation as a career and whether I would want to work in PNG. The truth is that this summer confirmed to me more than I ever expected it would that I could and would be happy doing the work of Bible translation in Papua New Guinea. Although I acknowledge that I didn't spend enough time in the country to really get past the "honeymoon stage" of cultural interaction, I really did love the country, and I believe I could be happy living there. The work of translation is still fascinating and challenging to me, and getting to experience the work first-hand was an unforgettable confirmation that I can see myself doing it.

Nevertheless, I do not think I am ready to give a committed "yes" to Bible translation. Even if I did make such a decision, the soonest I would be able to arrive in country would be about four years from now. It's incredible how much of my life in the States really was left in the States this summer, how the lives of the nationals of PNG and the work of translation became my life and consumed my prayers and mattered more than anything. It's been a bit jarring to re-enter the States and encounter those things in the States about which I am passionate; it's been a bit like reuniting with friends and family. Over the last two years, I feel like my relationship with God has been growing and changing rapidly; along the way, I've devoted significant amounts of time to questions of materialism, of Christian community, of purity, and of other matters. All of these questions were completely shelved over the summer, and to be honest, I haven't decided whether that's a good thing. In other words, I'm still not sure what God has planned for my life, but I can see myself committing wholly to the life and work of a translator.

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I simply cannot express my gratitude for this summer, which truly was the opportunity of a lifetime. As I think back on all of the financial support I received, all of the encouragement I was given, and even all of the letters I received in PNG, I am completely overwhelmed by the support I was shown. And I may never know how many prayers were offered on my account, though even those I do know about are enough to humble me. There was never a doubt in my mind this summer that I was completely enveloped in prayer.

All I can do in response is give the glory to God: the God who is absolutely, perfectly faithful to his children regardless of circumstances; the God whose heart loves the insignificant, forgotten people of this world; the God who considers and knows and loves the thousands of language groups on this planet; the God who answers prayers in his time for his glory; the God who created the universe and acts throughout it still; the God who heals the sick and repairs relationships and restores communities; and the God whose word has the power to transform lives.

With that, I am going to close out this summer blog. If you want to keep up with me during the school year, I encourage you to look me up at http://brentbailey.blogspot.com. Otherwise, I want to thank you so much for reading—I hope you have gotten a glimpse of God's goodness and his activity in Papua New Guinea this summer.

Packing Up

Counting down the days has become counting down the hours!

For our last week-and-a-half, we decided to squeeze in as much variety as we could find on this island. On Sunday, we drove out to a small bush village right outside of the city (squeezing about twelve people into the front and back of a truck on some very bumpy roads) with a missionary to lead a church service for the small community. The missionary, who lives in the bush, makes it a habit to go out to this village whenever she’s in town to lead church because many of the residents speak the same vernacular as the village in which she lives. It was a joy to see her reading a vernacular Bible story book and seeing the people (especially the children) respond to what she was saying.

On Tuesday, I faced what very well may have been my most intimidating challenge all summer – babysitting. We interns had volunteered to watch the four children of one PBT family who was going through a rough time, and when the three kids of another PBT family next door to us saw the fun, they ran over as well. So, I spent a good while chasing after seven kids in the front yard, squirting hand sanitizer everywhere because the frogs that the kids were trying to catch were the kind that secretes poison when it gets too spooked.

Finally, on the next Sunday, we got to join a family on a trip to the local prison to pass out cold water and give an encouraging message to the people there. You can probably imagine the conditions of a third-world country’s prison – the water was well received – but we were impressed by how polite and receptive the men were.

And in between, of course, we had mounds and mounds of literacy work to get through. This week was crunch week as the deadline grew ever nearer, and everyone – interns and nationals both – was putting in plenty of overtime to get as much done as we could. In the end, the language group I was working with finished the EP (kindergarten) curriculum, corrected and re-printed about 15 books for that curriculum that were missing or flawed, and translated about 40 books for the E1 (first grade) curriculum. Yesterday, we had a big dedication service, recognizing the work of the nationals and celebrating all of the materials that were produced. It was a wonderful feeling to celebrate with the guys (and mounds of food) and say our goodbyes as we finished laminating key word cards and binding the edges of books.

Now, “Goodbye” seems to be the word of the day. On the one hand, there have slowly been more and more signs that the intern team is ready to go home – making hamburgers and French fries for dinner, spending a little more time reading letters from family, or starting to pack just a few days early. But on the other hand, it just feels strange to know that, in only a few days, I’ll be waking up in the United States surrounded by English-speaking Americans. My mom recently asked me what I’m most looking forward to about being home (other than people) and what I’m most going to miss, and my answer to the first question was easy: Wal-Mart, being able to drive myself around, and being able to walk around outside alone/exercise.

The second question, however, was more difficult – I never know what exactly is going to hit me the hardest about leaving a place until I’m gone. To be sure, I’ll miss the fresh produce available at the market down the street, the ocean view that greets us every morning on our way to work, and the ability to go a few days without a shower without anyone caring. I’ll miss learning (and speaking) Melanesian Pidgin, navigating conversations with cultural sensitivity, and those brief feelings of victory when I do get something right and hear an “Em nau.”

But most of all – and I don’t imagine this will come as a surprise to anyone – I’m going to miss the relationships. More than I ever imagined I would, I have come to appreciate and admire certain individuals on this island. It’s incredible how much grace I’ve received from people as I’ve accidentally crushed yams while trying to dig them up in the garden, dragged friends down into the mud with me as I fell and they tried to catch me, or stumbled through awful Pidgin phrases and sentences in an effort to communicate. The hard thing about doing missions in a country like this is that I can’t exactly get on Facebook and send a message to the people whom I met in the bush; there are only two ways to communicate with many of my friends, and the first would be to pass a message through about three different missionaries and hope it gets there.

The other option, of course, is much more terrifying: I could come back here long-term. In the past week alone, I have had two conversations with nationals who asked me if I was coming back to translate for them and then told me they would be praying that I would. My default answer has become “Laik bilong God,” which you may remember means something to the effect of, “I’m leaving it up to the will of God.”

Soon after I’ve made it home, I’m planning to write one final post on this blog reflecting on the summer as a whole, and hopefully I’ll be able to provide a more satisfying answer to that question: will I come back? In the meantime, however, my mind is being pulled in a hundred different directions. I petition your prayers for the next seven days, when I’ve got to pack (how does my stuff always expand over the course of any trip?), squeeze through Australia’s tough customs, deal with a 15-hour time change, close off the internship in Dallas, spend about three days at home with my family and home church, and then move into my new house in Abilene to start the fall semester (whew!). I still haven’t entirely wrapped my mind around the fact that we’re going to land in Los Angeles three hours before we depart Brisbane and fly for thirteen hours, but the trip over here taught me that I should just trust the pilot and go to sleep.

I sincerely hope that I will have a chance to spend time with you and hear your stories in the next few weeks!

A notebook full of translation drafts ready for me to enter into the computer (click on the picture to enlarge it)

Spending hours and hours on taping, laminating, and hole punching

Celebrating in style!

The Girl and the Frog

Wanpela de wanpela liklik meri i wokabaut long rot. Em i pilai wantaim muli na tromoi i go antap, i kam daun na wokabaut i go. Long rot i gat wanpela bikpela hap i gat tais. Em i abrus na muli i pundaun i go long tais we em i no inap lukim. Em wari tru na em i krai, na wanpela rokrok i kam na askim em, “Yu krai long wanem?” Em i tok, “Mi krai long muli bilong mi i pundaun insait long tais.” “Ai,” rokrok i tok, “Noken wari, bai mi kalap i go insait long painim ol.” Na rokrok i kalap i go insait long tais na kisim muli bilong em i kam. Na liklik meri tok, “Tenkyu, poro bilong mi.”

This, my friends, is the kind of stuff I have been working with for the last week and a half. As valuable as the ministry of Bible translation is, it is completely useless if the people group for whom you are translating can’t read. That’s why the intern team, a few PNG missionaries, and 13 nationals representing five different language groups are working together every day from 8:30-4:30 to develop literacy materials, including a year’s worth of curriculum and (up to) 66 children’s books (including the one that opened up this blog post).

I wondered how I would be useful doing literacy work for languages I don’t know, but it’s amazing how far a high school diploma and computer skills can take you outside of the United States. Although we dove into this course with little confidence in our ability to provide any help, we have been working hard and developing relationships with the nationals in order to help them accomplish their goals for the 3-week course. As is usually the case with internships no matter where you’re working or whom you’re working for, this internship has given me lots of work for which I am probably overqualified (tracing over hand-drawn illustrations with a marker so that they can be scanned into books) and some for which I am definitely under-qualified (helping my language group decide how the word “cat” is going to be spelled in their language…that is, the way it will be spelled forever). Mainly, my role is to connect the dots to make sure that everything gets accomplished in good quality.

For the most part, my time is split between working on curriculum and books. My particular language group is very fortunate because our curriculum was almost completed before the course started, thanks to the hard work of one individual. We’ve mostly been polishing the current draft, checking on comprehension questions and insuring that all of the books used in the curriculum actually exist (some of them don’t, but they will!). Other interns haven’t been so fortunate – one group was basically starting from scratch.

Working on books, however, has been a different story. Let me explain: the curriculum we’re working on is for “Elementary Prep,” the equivalent of kindergarten (it teaches shape recognition, the alphabet, basic math skills, etc.). The books for this curriculum were all developed last year by the PBT interns in a similar literacy course. This year, the books we’re developing are for “Elementary 1,” the equivalent of first grade. A “shell book” is a simple book with pictures and text that can be easily translated and printed into any language. Our goal is to translate 66 different books, which would be all of the books that would be used in “Elementary 1.” Since I have no business translating from Melanesian Pidgin into various vernaculars, my role in the shell book process is to handle typing and formatting as the nationals do all of the hard stuff. It’s really interesting to see the cultural differences expressed in these books – how the subject matter concerns pigs stealing your food or paddling a canoe, for example.

In case these paragraphs have made the work sound tedious or boring, let me assure you that is not the case. I’ve had a lot of fun getting to know the three guys with whom I’m working as well as all of the other nationals in the course. Another goal of the course is to help the nationals who will be teaching this curriculum learn how to use it. That means teaching them how to teach skills like writing and reading, but it also means teaching them how to sing songs like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in Pidgin. If you can imagine a room full of full-grown Papua New Guinean bush men singing “10 Liklik Kumul” to the tune of “10 Little Indians,” complete with hand motions, you can understand why the course has also included lots of laughter (both from us and the nationals). Just the other morning, I was trying to sneak up and steal a jar of peanut butter from behind one guy in a game called “Pik Stelim Kaikai,” or “Pig Steals Food.”

I must confess that I didn’t have the best attitude coming into the literacy course. PBT is made up of missionaries doing translation, literacy, church planting, and all kinds of other roles, but I am most interested in translation. So, while I was still excited to still be in PNG interacting with nationals in Pidgin, I wasn’t completely thrilled to be finishing the summer with busy literacy work. However, God has really been working on me – especially through my time reading Acts – to show me how very desperately he wants his good news to reach all people. If that means we need to translate the Bible, then we should translate it. But if that means we need to take the time to teach people how to read first, then we should teach them to read. And to be honest, this work is still giving me valuable experience for translation – working with nationals, translating children’s stories, understanding more about the culture, etc.

Continued prayers would be greatly appreciated by everyone here. We’ve had a good first half of the course, but with a week and a half left, we still have a lot to do. I’m seeing more and more how important this work is, and I’m eager to produce as much material as possible before I have to get on the plane.

And speaking of the plane, it’s hard to believe that in twelve days (more or less, with the time difference), I’ll be getting off a plane in Dallas. I hope to make the best of my remaining time!

For those who are curious, here is my best effort to translate the story that opened this blog post, followed by a few pictures:

One day, a little girl was walking down the road. She was playing with oranges, throwing them up and down while she was walking. The road had a big mud puddle. Accidentally, she dropped her oranges into the mud where she couldn’t see them. She was very worried and started to cry when a frog came and asked her, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I’m crying because my oranges fell down into the mud puddle.” “Oh,” said the frog, “Don’t worry, I’ll jump in and find them.” The frog jumped into the puddle and got her oranges back. The girl said, “Thank you, my friend.”

Hard at work translating a story with two of my teammates

This afternoon, as we were shopping in the market, we saw a group of dancers in full tribal attire putting on an exhibition to honor traditional PNG values