Tyob, my main helper reading his Bible portions

Late Night Village Argument…

 

It had to have been 9:30 or 10pm when I first heard the voices.  I heard the mumblings of other voices but overpowering all the rest, I could hear Tyob’s ‘code red’ level voice. He was not happy!  There had been a village meeting the week before where voices got heated and a teenager even stripped down to his tshirt in his anger.  There was talk of his sister, Akusta, his marriage exchange being given to his half-brother as his marriage exchange and Timoti was not happy about it!  Anyway, with the number of voices and the bits and pieces I could hear from my house, I figured it was another conversation about potential marriages and exchanges – nothing gets the whole crowd hot so fast as the talk about women – or money!  It was late enough that I decided I didn’t need to head over to find out what the problem was – I’d hear the next day all about it anyway.  But I started praying right away because I know Tyob well enough to know that if he was really upset, his frustration tends to overpower every other thought.  This could keep him from hearing God’s Word taught the next morning – and it probably meant that he wouldn’t help me finish up the taping of Acts that next afternoon either.  So I prayed.  The enemy will use all kinds of distractions to keep them from hearing God’s Word, and Tyob has been tracking really well.  As a main part of the translation process, he has heard every Scripture that’s been translated up until now – all of the phase one and two teaching portions that are in print as well as the entire book of Acts, save this last chapter at that point.  So I doubt that our enemy is going to leave him alone! 

 

But the next morning, the teaching started with a smaller crowd than usual.  It wasn’t just Tyob that was upset the night before!  Tyob came late and sat at a distance but he came.  He voiced a question at the end to shame everyone else basically but he had his say.  Then I gave him the ‘out’, knowing instinctively that he would have not been any good at translation that day so I approached him first and gave him the out.  His voice was hoarse from all the screaming the night before.  He seemed thankful that I approached him and promised to help me the next day if his stomach cooled down basically.

 

One of the single boys had written a letter asking for a certain girl in marriage, but he doesn’t have an exchange for that girl.  The tricky part is that Tyob is the girl’s uncle and has a say in who she marries, he also has been basically taking care of this single guy too.  This single guy, Aendru really wants to be married and has been sort of going about it in all the wrong way!  The meeting the week before had to do with him sort of  enticing another young girl to inappropriate behavior.  He’s at that age – and pretty much all of the single teens are doing this, he just keeps getting caught.  The thing is, if Aendru would go through the proper channels and yield to what Tyob says, Tyob would really go to bat for him and get him a wife.  But he’s impulsive and certainly lets his emotions drive his actions – a norm for this culture so he keeps ticking the very people off that could help him the most!  So Tyob was mad at Aendru and Aendru was mad too so he didn’t come to the teaching.  He came after everyone else had left and told us to remove the pictures that were attached to the siding so he could remove his siding (sago palm fronds) from the teaching house.  Matt sort of talked him down and he didn’t do it but his frustration was high too from the night before.  Both he and Tyob were trying to get us in the middle to declare that what the other person did was wrong – and not acceptable in God’s eyes.  We managed to stay out of it but we definitely need His wisdom to do just that! 

 

Tensions were high in the village that day.  It wasn’t just Aendru and Tyob that were involved in the heated discussions the night before but another couple of young teens that want to marry each other were caught fooling around and the boy had taken off for fear of reprisals.  So that marriage was being discussed, although Tyekob doesn’t have an exchange so not sure what’s going to pan out there.  That’s really why it got to heated.  Her brother, Terens, wouldn’t be getting a wife in the deal if his exchange is given freely to Tyekob.  So it’s rather a tricky situation for them.  If the adults don’t settle it soon, it could very well be that Tyekob and Dina will run off together and basically elope culturally here – then money will need to be paid, but it will also make the family lines easy prey for sorcery.  It gets very complicated and hard to put into a short paragraph here – let’s just say that marriage talks are often some of the most heated!  Not everyone is happy at the end of those discussions! 

 

I heard the tree gong being hit that night around 6pm but was busy doing something else and didn’t go down.  So then it was Wednesday.  They’d decided the night before that there was going to be a village meeting after the teaching that day.  So even though the crowd was there that morning, it was a subdued crowd, knowing that there was more to come after – and it might not be so pleasant.  So the teaching ended, Tyob disappeared and we all thought we were having a big meeting.  I stood with one crowd of ladies who are on one side of the equation and they were chattering about the meeting and what might happen.  Then I stood with a few ladies that are on the other side and they were even telling Dina to run away and hide if it looked like they might hit her during the meeting.  The tree gong was hit once, but without a lot of authority.  I eventually made my way that direction, only to be stopped by Tyob.  He asked me what time it was and what time we were going to start working.  Huh?  I asked about the village meeting and he told me that they weren’t having it.  So we marked a time and he went to get a fishing hook from someone and then came back awhile later, ready to help me.  I was actually praising the Lord because I knew that He was answering prayer and intervening here.  So we finished taping the last chapter of Acts and worked on a few other little things.  He seemed rather tired as we worked so I asked him if he’d not slept well the night before.  He told me that he woke up at 3am when his 4 week old daughter woke up and stayed up the rest of the night reading his Bible and thinking about this trouble that had come to him.  He didn’t go into specifics but somewhere in there he decided not to ask for the village meeting.  The fact that he could actually help me showed me that the Lord had helped him and he was able to concentrate on other things besides the dispute- very unusual for him!  Praise the Lord!  We see the Lord working in Tyob’s life.  He’s not got it all figured out quite yet but he is hungry and he is responding to truth.  So keep praying!  This topic will come up again – and the enemy may continue to attempt to distract them with this stuff.  But it seems to us that we’re seeing God’s little victories in it too!