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16 September, 2002
Letter 3
Hi! Let's see if we can catch up on some stories.
We spent about ten days on the tiny island of Makira for the
Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu annual General Assembly. It was
our first trip away from our home at Onesua, and we feel lucky
to have been able to experience village life so quickly. It gives
us a new perspective on living in Vanuatu, and we appreciate the
comparative comfort of our regular assignment. Makira is only
a little over one mile long, and about half as wide. The only
village has about 200 people living there, and this village hosted
about 400 delegates to the General Assembly and the Presbyterian
Women's Annual Conference. The villagers have been working for
over a year, starting with extra garden plantings to grow surplus
food for the visitors. They also built temporary shelters, shower
huts, and outhouses. Just the task of cooking for that many people
is mind-boggling to us, because of the wood that must be cut and
the fires that must be lit and tended. Bread for breakfast was
cooked in wood burning concrete ovens, rice was cooked in huge
pots brought from Onesua, taro and manioc was wrapped in leaves
and buried in pits lined with hot stones.
In keeping with its policy of using the General Assembly as part
of rural development, the church installed a new water supply
for the village and made the first donation to kick off the funding
for a new village church.
Along with three other families or couples, we were housed in
the chief's meeting house, a traditional thatched hut with bamboo
and cane walls. We slept on our foam mattresses, which we brought
rolled up like sleeping bags, on the floor of coral gravel. The
house was very dry when it rained, though we grew tired of the
noise of rats in the roof at night and we were surprised to startle
a chicken out of our room one morning. After a shy start, Kinsey
and Emily made friends with the village girls, who taught them
how to recognize and smash open several kinds of local nuts. They
were delicious! Kinsey and Emily also learned some basic weaving
with pandanus leaves and swam on the island's beautiful beach.
We played hooky from the assembly meeting one day and walked around
the island, accompanied by a young man who had volunteered to
answer our many questions and six or eight little girls who tagged
along for fun. We enjoyed the chance to eat fresh oranges off
the trees, to ask about traditions on Makira, and to savor the
extraordinary views of other islands in all directions.
The assembly was a great chance to refresh our knowledge of Bislama,
which was pretty rusty after eight years of no use. The first
couple of days were very tiring, but it got easier and easier
as the time went on. The issues facing the assembly came in two
batches: situations that were totally familiar, such as the difficulty
of finding volunteers to teach Sunday School or the need to keep
youth active in the church, and situations that are new and thought-provoking,
such as the role of pig killing in church ceremonies. Pigs have
always been important in Vanuatu culture, and the clubbing of
a pig is an expected and cherished part of any big celebration.
Having an important occasion here without killing a pig would
seem incomplete, sort of like a wedding without rings or a graduation
without a mortarboard. So we wrestled with the relationship between
the gospel and culture. It seems that the gospel must be incarnated
in a culture, and might be enriched by cultural insights, but
that any culture attempts to tame the gospel and shrink it to
fit local preconceptions. The tension between the two is fun to
ponder. When can the gospel be enlivened by the local culture,
whether that of the US or of Vanuatu, and when must it assume
a prophetic voice against some aspect of the culture?
One of the high points of the assembly for us was our presentation
of a communion chalice to the moderator of the assembly. It was
one of the earthenware cups used at our commissioning service
in Columbus, Ohio, last June, and it was used to serve wine at
the closing communion service on Makira. Bruce had carried that
cup somewhere close to 10,000 miles to bring it here as a token
of the connectedness of our churches, and it was fun to finally
hand it over to its new owners, who will use it at future assemblies.
Kinsey's six weeks in an arm cast were completed on Makira, and
the local health worker had quite a time confronting an American
cast. He tried to cut it with scissors, he tried to unwind it,
and he tried to soak it like you would with a normal plaster cast.
No luck. Michael, one of the maintenance workers here at Onesua,
found a hack saw blade, told Kinsey to scream if he cut her, and
proceeded to cut off the cast. We laughed about using appropriate
technology. Kinsey's thumb was stiff and sore for a few days,
but is now fully recovered.
The assembly closed the last night with a huge feast, complete
with traditional dancing and lots of singing. We all listened
to a lot of speeches thanking everyone for everything, and then
sat around on the ground and ate from huge bundles of leaf-wrapped
food. The most intriguing speech was given by an old man, who
recited from memory the list of all the teachers and pastors who
had come from Makira, and where they had served, since 1900. It
was strange to think of similar feasts, with similar oral genealogies,
taking place at exactly the same site centuries ago, with the
ancestors of these same villagers. We were glad to take part in
a song, where we joined the rest of the people from Efate Presbytery
in accepting torches as a symbol of passing the fire along for
the next assembly, which we will host at Onesua.
As the assembly wound down, the winds came up, and we were stranded
on Makira for two extra days. A volleyball tournament was organized,
and it was great to see the pastors and elders play like kids
and cheer for their region of the country. Southern Islands won!
At the end of the assembly, we took part in a dedication ceremony
for the site of the new church, including a pig clubbing, and
the villagers sang a farewell song which included the line, "It's
easy to say 'Hello,' but hard to say 'Goodbye.'" The delegates
lined up on the beach, and the villagers, from the oldest, wrinkly
grandmother to the smallest toddler, filed past and shook everyone's
hands. It was remarkable to reflect on the amount of hard work
that these people had done for us, and how they were genuinely
sad to see us go.
The boat ride home was beautiful and windswept and rough. We
were on a much faster boat this time, the Jackpot, which made
the trip in three and one-half hours instead of seven, but we
were totally soaked by spray! We could have gone inside, but we
chose instead to be up on the higher deck so we could see out.
Even with motion sickness medicine, we find it easier to look
ahead and see the horizon. Kinsey curled up under the bow rail,
which sheltered her from spray, and slept. The rest of us licked
salt off our lips and grinned. Four pastors started a card game,
but had to quit and watch the horizon like the rest of us. They
started singing hymns to give themselves something else to think
about, and we sang hymns all the way home at the top of our lungs.
We loved the passing islands and the whitecaps and flying fish,
but we were cold in the wind by the time we arrived in Vila and
our clothes were stiff with salt. We stayed overnight in Vila
and were grateful for hot showers. Wow! What a luxury!
Love and peace,
Lora and Bruce
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