The big trip to the city started with us heading to Goroka with four men from Wabuku to attend a team translation workshop. The guys would receive training from a national man involved in the translation process and church planting in a tribe in the Islands region of Papua New Guinea. We white skins sat in classes every morning and then applied what we learned in the morning to our own translations in the afternoons. We translated the prodigal son story from Luke – taking it through all the steps so that my coworkers could see how they would/could be involved in the process. It’s not just one person that sees a translation come to fruition. It’s a team effort. My coworkers will be involved in the comprehension checking and content checking – making sure that what I translated actually means what it’s supposed to mean to the people and then making sure that I haven’t added to or taken away from the original content.Anyway….four of our guys went with us and it was a whole new world for them! One of our guys had flown before but not the other three. They’d all been out to the nearest town to our village, Vanimo, but they all commented on how big Wewak was compared to Vanimo….and Goroka is even bigger than Wewak so their world just kept getting bigger! Some were more overwhelmed by all this than others.
Albert, by far, dealt with the most culture shock – people that looked like him but so many people that he didn’t know – so many buildings and things happening that he’d never experienced before. He sat on the plane next to Jimi on the first flight and just about held onto his leg or pant leg the whole way! He was smiling and said he was fine anytime I asked him, but there was definitely some fear with it! He looked the most shell-shocked in town – just sort of staring off into space as he tried to process all the people, cars and stores. They saw the ocean and things that they’d really not seen before.
Because of changes to plans, we ended up in Wewak for a couple of hours before our next flight up to Goroka. Since we’d be late in arriving in Goroka, we went shopping for shoes for our guys. The Interface campus where we were headed is in the highlands region of PNG – a mile above sea level and quite a bit cooler than our swamp village. The highlands doesn’t have sago palm trees – they get coconuts from a coastal town as opposed to even seeing coconut trees around their villages. It’s a much cooler temperature – mid 80’s during the day and down to the 60’s even at night. (It got down to 45 F one night when I lived up there.) Anyway far too cold for our Sepik guys to be running around with no shoes on. So off we went to the local Walmart, aka Papindo’s, to buy shoes. They each picked out a pair and tried them on….then we had to stand in a different line in order to get the shoe strings for them (a loss prevention tactic).
Actually, before we started shopping, we stopped for lunch. There’s a little fish shop right near
town that sells a pretty good plate of fried fish and French fries (chips) or roast chicken and fries. Most of us got the fish but Albert decided on chicken. He was definitely still in the overwhelmed state of things as he sat there. I kept looking over at him – to see if he was doing ok and most of the time he was eating the fries. The last time I remember seeing the chicken, he still hadn’t touched it. A few minutes later, no kidding, I looked over and his entire plate was empty – the garnish, the chicken, fries, everything – including the chicken bones! They gave him a wing and breast portion so it definitely had bones…..but not when he was done with them! He ate everything, bones included! It was so funny – one minute it was there, the next minute, none of it was!
We got on a bigger plane and they all did fine – enjoying the sight from above. Another one of our guys, Paetrik, was like a kid in a candy store. He was a little nervous but so excited. He giggled more than anything! We got to Goroka and they were able to go around town a couple times – amazed at all that was available in town and the huge numbers of people. We went to the Goroka veggie market and two of the guys didn’t even get out of the vehicle! They were too overwhelmed by the huge mass of people selling things to venture out on their own – or even with us. It was great for challenging their world – enlarging the size of it in huge proportions.
Their teacher, this guy from the Islands, is a mature believer who challenged them with questions that they couldn’t answer from their world view. He didn’t give them the answer to his questions although he told them that he knew the answers because the answers were in the Bible. He really got them thinking and started challenging their world view – a perfect pre-evangelism tool! We’re so thankful for the training they received from this guy – in the classroom and outside of it.
