July 4, 2003

Letter 13

Hello to all of you! It has been more than a month since I wrote. June was full of laughter and wonder, but we ignored correspondence quite a bit. The email inbox is pretty full. If one of the letters there belongs to you, please be assured that we intend to catch up soon.

We entertained our first visitors from the United States this past month. Bridget, our eldest daughter, age 22, and her friend Nickie came and stayed for nearly all of June. We were so pleased to see Bridget, and to meet Nickie for the first time, that the time just flew by. They stayed with Caroline, the volunteer teacher from Australia, since she has a spare bedroom. "Chez Caroline" is actually our old house, from ten years ago, and was built with funds from the PC(USA). Now it serves as a sort of informal bed and breakfast for visitors to the campus. Bridget just graduated from the University of Montana (Please forgive a fatherly pride moment here!) as the top student in creative writing, so this was partly graduation celebration, partly birthday celebration, and partly family reunion. It was so nice to show them the beaches, to snorkel with them on the reef, and to talk at length about all sorts of things! The serious discussions we started can take place via email, and will probably continue for months or years, but what I enjoyed most were the things that cannot be emailed: playing cards together, the cookout we had in our garden, complete with charred meat and soft dough roasted on sticks, singing old songs to the guitar in the tropical darkness, the chance to see Bridget's reactions as I read some creative writing aloud, the hugs.

Starting June 22, Onesua celebrated its golden jubilee for a week. Sunday worship service was the big kickoff event, and it was impressive. Visitors gathered down by the front gate, and were led on a winding path in a long parade. First came a group of traditional dancers from the neighboring village of Ebule, chanting and singing and drumming with sticks slapped together. Then came the head boy and head girl, holding a banner. Then came the visiting dignitaries, including five previous principals and one member of the first class at Onesua. I had the chance to talk with him, and he remembers working as one of the original twelve students, clearing the brush and planting the coconut trees that still feed us. The parade wound through an area close to the ocean, where the foundations of the first buildings are. The buildings are long gone now, crumpled by storm surges, and the campus has stretched back from the sea as more land has been cleared over the years, but the old concrete slabs are still used as volleyball and basketball courts. The parade continued past the chapel, built in the 1960s. In front of the Jubilee Hall, the dancers were replaced by a string band, which led the guests into the hall to the thump of a bass string-on-a-box and the twang of guitars. The worship service was full of joy and song, and concluded with the cutting of a huge birthday cake. A new mural, completed the day before, was revealed from behind its curtain, and the week-long celebration began. Each morning, classes were held as normal, but the students became more and more tired as the week went on. So did the teachers!

Monday was a fun afternoon, with silly races such as the waiter relay, where teams of students carried trays with glasses of water on them, or the getting dressed relay, where students had to struggle into outfits including skirts (even for the boys!) and cardboard hats. Tuesday was a treasure hunt, but instead of looking for things the students searched for clues hidden all over the campus. Just who was the first head boy? Who was the first girl to graduate from Onesua and go on to study overseas (in this case, New Zealand)? Wednesday was sports day, including an indoor soccer game with a small ball in the Jubilee Hall, and Thursday was tradition day, where the students grouped together according to their different cultures from different islands. Some of the costumes were quite authentic, with the boys wearing pig tusk necklaces and leaf belts and penis wrappers, but most of them made concessions to modern modesty, especially the girls' costumes. The students demonstrated traditional dancing, sang in their local languages, and presented chiefs or representatives of local villages with traditional gifts such as mats, root crops, and small pigs.

Each evening there were presentations from different villages, with dances and songs. Tuesday night was Onesua Night, where we entertained the surrounding villages instead of the other way around. As part of the series of skits and songs, our family was invited to sing something from the United States. We all sang "America the Beautiful," Kinsey and Emily sang "One Little Candle," a sweet duet that they learned in Roundup's choir program (Thank you, Mona McKown!), and then I asked the audience to sing "Happy Birthday" to Bridget. She was surprised to have about 600 people share her birthday party. We closed with "Day is Done" by Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) and had the audience join in on the chorus. It was a lot of fun! The girls also danced in a Japanese dance with Maki, the Japanese volunteer physical education teacher. They all wore authentic kimonos (hot costumes in this climate!) and looked very cute.

The week ended with Onesua Sunday on the 29th, when teams of students and staff went to neighboring villages to lead Sunday worship services. We went to Lelepa, an offshore island. After a short boat ride across an astonishingly blue sea, we walked up a short path to the village. Caroline conducted the service and joined Lora, Kinsey, Bridget, and Emily in a song. Robert, the Scot/Canadian physics teacher, accompanied them on his guitar and also played the offertory. Students led prayers and hymns, and read a letter from the principal of Onesua. I gave the children's sermon, using one of the traditional stories from our translation project as an illustration, and the sermon, talking about the jubilee. At the end of the service there was a short ceremony where the pastor, who had been at the celebration on Thursday, presented a woven, pandanus leaf mat to the chief of the village. The pastor had accepted the mat, on behalf of the chief, from a delegation of students from Ambrym, an island in the north of Vanuatu. When the chief accepted the mat, a ceremonial relationship was established between the village on Lelepa and students attending Onesua from Ambrym. From now on, students who find themselves with no place to spend holidays will be welcomed into the village on Lelepa. It was thought-provoking for us to see how the Ni-Vanuatu, who are already so good at connecting themselves into a web of relationships, took advantage of this celebration to weave some new bonds for themselves. Some of the students here leave their home island to begin seventh grade, and then do not see their families for four years. Now every student from the outer islands has a home away from home close to the campus. It might be an interesting project for churches in the United States to consider: how can we reach out to students from far away places who spend holidays alone on our campuses?

Predictably, I have been reflecting on the theme of jubilee lately. As originally conceived, in Leviticus 25, it's not just a fiftieth birthday party. It is a time for freedom for slaves, for forgiveness of debts, and for the redistribution of wealth. The basic idea is of a Sabbath, a time to start over, a time to say goodbye to the inequalities that have accumulated over time in the society. It's a concept that bears thinking about, especially for those of us who take the Bible seriously. Are we free to ignore the message that a society should not be based on an ever-increasing inequality of wealth? On this Independence Day, I would ask you to consider the implications of this call. How can we as a society free ourselves from the increasing concentration of resources in larger and larger corporations, controlled by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population? The United States has the greatest economic inequality of any society in the West, though there are many nations, Latin American dictatorships for example, which are even more unequal. Is this the kind of praise we want for our nation: "We are not as unequal as some countries in South America?" That's pretty faint praise! I suggest, even in this time when voices of dissent seem to have been stifled as “unpatriotic,” that there is room in our birthday celebrations as a nation for some serious starting over. What praise would we like to earn for our nation over the next fifty years?

In the introduction to our singing at the jubilee celebration, I remarked that we would not be singing our national anthem. I explained to the audience that it had lots of "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" and is really violent, especially compared to Vanuatu's national song, which contains lines like "God gives this place to us, we are grateful to Him" and "We know that there is plenty of work to do." One verse reads:

There are many traditions from the past,
and many traditions today,
but all the same we are all one.
This is our tradition today.

I think that would make a very nice anthem for the whole world.

This evening I went for a walk to the beach, just at dusk. The tide was low, and the breakers quiet, and the wind was still enough for fireflies to wander. They traced quiet journeys across the beach, mysteries of life and light, soft and silent fireworks. Happy Independence Day!

We have been here in Vanuatu almost a year, now, and Bridget and Nickie's visit was important for us to reconnect with our families. We look forward to other visitors, maybe some of you who are reading this letter, and can hardly wait to show you the sights and people and culture that have become part of our lives.

We said goodbye to Bridget and Nickie at the airport in Vila on the last day of June and have thrown ourselves back into work. I have added an extra math review course for any year nine or ten students who wish to come. Yesterday there were about forty kids playing with exponent problems. I have also accepted an invitation to lead a Bible study at the Rural Training Center near Onesua. That will give me a chance to get to know kids who have been pushed out of the academic part of the education system. There is plenty of work to do.

We wish you hugs, walks that reveal the wonders of nature, connections with the past and with each other, and a willingness to shape a society worthy of our loyalty.

Love and peace,

Bruce

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 191