I was twenty-two years old when I told my Mama that I felt called of God to leave America and go make my home among a thousand tribes in Papua New Guinea... she was hesitant at first to release me to journey halfway across the world and interrogated me throughly as to whether or not I had truly been called to PNG. She was apprehensive and rather fearful of cutting the cord of closeness that had held us bound together since my birth. But I remember one night when in prayer she received Divine confirmation of my predestined rendezvous with #PNG and came to me to give her full blessing saying, Moses mother had to place her only son in a basket and release him down the river into the unknown trusting that God would guard his life and lift him up... I must do the same for you. But despite the blessing of release, it literally broke my heart to leave my family, and most of all my mother, and follow a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night for first time all alone. One Friday afternoon, after I had been in PNG for almost a year, I had just finished shopping for groceries at a supermarket in Lae, the provincial capital of Morobe. As I stood waiting for the bus to return to my home at 2 mile, the sole foreign Caucasian in a sea of asples Highlands and Coastal humanity jostling for a better position in the nonexistent cue to board the bus, two rascal (criminal) street boys started to pick my pockets taking my phone and wallet. I quickly dropped the plastic bags and somehow wrestled both my phone and wallet back from them and jumped up into the safety of the bus while other kindhearted people helped to gather up my shopping bags and bring them onto the bus. Shaking I went and sat down at the very back of the bus next to a open window and attempted to regain my composure while my fellow passengers clucked their tongues and whispered in condemnation of what the boys had done... as I was replying to a question from a lady seated next to me I felt the sharp pain of a cut on my left hand and turned my head just in time to receive a mouth, nose, and eye full of thick dark Morobe mud mixed with Betelnut spit, a few small stones, and what certainly smelled like urine that one of the boys who had attempted to rob me had scoped up in his cap that had fallen into a rain filled pothole during our altercation and come alongside the bus and flung through the open window into my face. He was yelling at me, Bai mi killim yu! while the lady next to me franticly yelled to the driver, Go!!!! Disla white Mangi em wokman blo Papa God yah! Go! After the bus had departed top town, during the ride to 2 mile, even though I was a grown man, all that kept running through my heart and mind was this recurring anthem, I wish Mom was here... everything would be ok if Mom was here. I stepped off the bus and walked the rest of the way home still shaken and embarrassed because my face was covered in a mixture of dark mud and bright red buai spit and my hand was bleeding from the small cut which was attracting far more attention then even I was accustomed to generating. I was ashamed because I had worked so hard to be accepted and adopted.... I didnt want to different, I didnt want to be pitied or viewed as weak by my asples neighbors. I remember feeling such an all-consuming wave of loneliness and homesickness swelling over me in that moment. I wanted my Mama. As I turned the corner and came within sight of the banis of my Haus I glimpsed three women standing at my gate through the haze of hot tears clouding my vision. When they saw the state I was in they came running for me.... it was three of my lewa Lotu mamas. My Simbu mama washed my face while my mama from New Ireland cleaned the cut on my hand... my Papuan mama prayed over me and took me by the hands saying, Rev, dont allow what happened today to cause bitterness within you for our people... You have come to this nation for my children and my childrens children! In that moment, eight years ago, I desperately yearned for the familiar embrace of my Mama who was 9,000 miles removed from me... but my God sent me not one but three altogether lovely Papua New Guinean mothers who made everything alright and all things new.
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 05:34:00 +0000
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