Christmas...in PNG

The Sunday School children singing "Away in a Manger", and for the pidgin speakers, "Long Ples bilong Sipsip, na ol Bulmakau".

We have just enjoyed our third Christmas here in PNG. It seems much of the nostalgia around Christmas experienced in Canada is somehow stripped away here. The sun is far too hot and the culture far too removed from a Canadian Christmas. In fact, living here forces us to see Christmas festivities from another lens, maybe, a less glamorized, commercialized, and even sanitized end. We see it amidst poverty. We see it amidst people who probably have to go to their gardens on Christmas day to cover for their evening meal. We see it through the lens of people, many of whom can’t afford gifts for their children, let alone the bare essentials to be healthy during the season of Christmas. Reflecting on all of this, makes one realize that in many ways Christ came into a world much like this. There were colonies of lepers, there were the very poor that had no real national social blanket to fall back on, there were the sick and the lame immobilized and placed by the roadside for the next benevolent traveler. Sadly, in the West many don’t think they need Christ for they have much of what He came to do—“to preach good news to the poor…to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” And yet the truth is, both worlds--the West and the other, the North and the South, are in desperate need of this. They are in desperate need of the one thing that no money can buy, no insurance plan can cover, no festive experience can resurrect, and that is peace with God through Christ. We thank God that we know this peace and have opportunity to proclaim it to a hurting people. This is Christmas.

Visitors from down under!

We do accept visitors you know, that’s just for the record. Well, this past weekend we were blessed to have Dean and Natalie Huizinga and their precocious son, Clive here for a few days. (For some of you who might remember the Huizingas when Rev Huizinga served in Hamilton, Dean is their third born). Natalie finds her roots in Australia and experienced PNG before with a three month village experience close to Port Moresby. But for Dean and Clive this was all very new. We think they enjoyed their short stint here, visiting the areas that we work, eating mumus and enjoying some swimming at a local hotel. They left us on Monday to return to their good friends and ours in Port Moresby, Wayne and Cheronne Vanderheide.

For Dean and Natalie, thanks for going the extra mile to visit the Lae field. It was a blessing and a pleasure to get to know you and your active, smiley and passionate little man, Clive. May God bless you!

The Mumu

It all began when we brought 4 live chickens and some lamb chops over to our friends, Wayne and Fina and family. We came back the next day and were greeted by this—-the mumu. This is not the same as some cows bawling (or is that baying, or neither?), rather, and especially in the highlands of PNG, this is a traditional way of cooking. Here’s how it works: first, you get a hot fire going which heats the stones under it; once the stones are near red with heat you cover them with banana leaves and lay on the food. The food is PNG cuisine: sweet potato, cooking bananas, cabbage, chicken, lamb chops, leafy greens called kumu. All of this uncooked food is covered again with banana leaves. Like a big green present! It is then that some 10 gallons of water are poured over the leaves. And then the steam. The steam is so strong that leaves begin to lift so you then have to cover these leaves usually with stones, but with modernization and all, a tarpaulin and an iron mesh will do. Those are modern additions to this ancient procedure! The steam cooks the food to tender-perfection and some 3 hours later, we eat…and eat…and eat!

Warning: we don’t recommend you try this at home, we would hate for you to become part of the mumu—-talk about bawling.

2 Kina (70 cents) for a day's work

(Brother Robert Jerry, married with three boys)

"So how did you do today?" I asked Robert as he sauntered up to our house. "Not too great, I sold about 2 Kinas worth of peanuts, em tasol--that's it." My mind then began to do the math. How could he support his family with that? Impossible. In fact, for him to get to and from the market was a two Kina fare. Two Kina is about 70 cents Canadian. Not much at all. These peanuts were brought to him from his village, some 13 hours by car. He would have to share the profits with his brother who took them down. He has been frequenting the main market in town which houses some 400-500 vendors. Many of them also barely scraping enough profits to get home. This two kina would have been understandable if he had sat there for 10 minutes or so. But he was there for some six hours or so under the hot tropical sun because most of the market is exposed to its relentless heat. My heart breaks to know the burden that he carries to look after his family and the near impossible walls to climb to do that.

We are thankful for Robert. He has been a faithful member of one of our new churches for some 3 years. He is the deacon/treasurer of the church's funds and has been scrupulous in maintaining them. He has so little and yet is not bent on garnering the little he has with the church's collections. We praise God for men like that, but we worry about the poverty he and his family face.

Speaking of faces, his youngest son a few months older than Karlyn has the deep lines of illness and malnutrition etched into his face. He has what you would call an old face already. Please pray with us for Robert, his wife Julie, and their three boys that the Lord will provide for this faithful workman of God. They moved to the Tent City settlement for the education of their children..but education isn't free here. Life is harsh, very harsh. This is poverty.

Facing lies...

(The Church--the pillar and foundation of the truth. This is the front of one of our churches in an area called Kamkumung).

One of the more difficult aspects of living here is dealing with lies. It seems we face lying each day. In fact we hear some people almost fatalistically say, ‘this is just the way things are in PNG.’ As if to say, we can’t help it, we are born to lie.

Barring technical language, the most common type of lie that we experience we coined as ‘relational’ lies. That is, in order to protect the relationship we have to lie. This is not as noble as one might think. It is not like the lies of the midwives of Exodus who lied to Pharaoh to protect the children of Israel. Neither is the lie in the context of war. It was Winston Churchill who captured this nicely stating that the truth is so precious that it has to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. Yet, the idea in PNG is that until the relationship is firmly established it may have to be protected in lies. That is, a young relationship can’t handle the truth. So people lie about who they are, or what they’ve done, or what they want to do. There is another reason for lying and that we say is to protect oneself from being ashamed. Some have classified PNG as a shame culture, the idea is that you have to lie to protect yourself from shame. In the end you could say, lying serves to protect a relationship in its infancy from shame. Coming from the West, this is difficult to handle. Lying in a relationship—at whatever stage—we feel undermines the integrity of the relationship. ‘How do you build a solid relationship on the quicksand of lies?’ we might ask.

There are of course more sinister lies that we face. Some of these are indeed induced by poverty, we feel. People stealing something and stating very matter-of-factly that they know nothing; even leaders in the church lying to garner their own income, wants and desires. People fabricating traumatic stories, just to gain some extra spending money. We've been told that they've lost their child to malaria, their wife to giving birth and they have to bring a dead body to their village—all of which we learn later is not true.

The difficulty that we face as bearers of the truth is to show the transcendent, eternal, God-given value of the truth in a shame and poverty stricken country. The truth is indeed one of the most precious attributes of God that we have been given. Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life.” He is Truth incarnate. The only way we can effectively address the lies is to point people to the TRUTH. That is, point to Christ and model how He lived it. We learn in Scripture that the keeper of the truth is His Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth. We praise God that the head of the Church is Christ and He commands us, barring no cost to self, to speak the truth in love!