Hearing old and new ideas

One of the recommendations I received for the last few weeks before my speaking test is to work on a Bible knowledge quiz. The Wantakia team, a team elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, provided me with a list of around 60 questions that they asked their people as they studied their culture and began thinking about how to teach evangelistic Bible lessons.

A big focus of mine over the last two years has been asking interview questions to the Kovol people. I feel like I’ve covered everything and coming up with my own questions gets harder and harder. It’s great to receive questions that someone else thought up. I translated them into Kovol and have been asking:

• How was the world made?
• Was everything good in the beginning?
• What happens to the souls of people who die?
• What work did God give the angels in the beginning?
• How can we stop sinning?
• Why did God create the world?
• How did people deal with sin before Jesus came?
• Is all sin the same, or is some bigger than others?
• Who made God?
• Where is God?

And so on. Many of these questions I’ve asked before, but some I hadn’t. I hadn’t asked about what people in the Old Testament did to remove sin. One of the people I asked responded by saying that he knew they sacrificed animals. I’ve learned then that there’s at least an awareness of the OT sacrificial system.

The great thing about asking all these questions again is that I learn new things and grow in my confidence that I understood some things correctly before. As I hear for the tenth time that people who do good things go to heaven and people who do bad things, like stealing, go to hell, I’m growing in my certainty that the Kovol people operate under a works-based system where it’s all about doing enough good to outweigh your bad deeds. A short while ago, I had no idea, then I got an idea of what people were thinking, and hearing it again, I’m starting to feel like I’ve understood correctly.

Other questions are helping me refine what I thought. The question “How many Gods are there?” was an interesting one. “Many. God is in us people,” was the response, right alongside “There’s just one God.” I’ve been noticing the vocabulary of God being in people. God is either said to be “isim” (in between), which means everywhere, or that He’s in people. Being in people though seems to bring the concept of plurality. The missing piece of the puzzle came when an old man responded that before, the grandfathers thought that God lived in them; now we know that He is everywhere.
The ancestral myths I’ve heard of spirits entering man to cause him to become alive tie in here. It seems that in the past, there was this idea of spirits indwelling and animating people — the gods being inside people. Christianity came into the mix about 60 years ago, and the Genesis account of God breathing the breath of life into man and ideas of an indwelling Holy Spirit overlaid this ancestral thinking. I don’t think I’ve fully grasped it yet, but I’m starting to see that we’ll have to be quite deliberate with our vocabulary when we talk about where God is, the creation of man, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Old ideas and patterns of speech that convey a different idea are still in use and can be used to explain the Biblical God.

A project I’ve started work on is to gather together in one place all the Bible stories the village elder has told me over the years. As I’ve been asking questions, he’s retold many different parts of Genesis. This will be invaluable later when it comes to lesson preparation and translation. This elder was taught in Tok Pisin long ago and translates the stories into the natural Kovol language. We can mine these recordings for vocabulary and phrases for our own drafts of these passages later.

As I was working through the account he gave me of the creation of man, I noticed something I hadn’t caught at the time. Playing and replaying the audio, I made a discovery. When God formed Adam’s body from the dust of the ground, he also formed Eve’s body. He intended to breathe life into both of them. It seems God took a smoke break and accidentally breathed life into the man, and he came alive early! The man awoke and saw that the animals were male and female, but he was alone. Thus, it was necessary for God to create Eve from his rib. I was stunned to find this detail in there! I’ll need to check that I’ve understood it correctly, but the idea was developed over 5-6 sentences, so it wasn’t just a throwaway comment. So God can make mistakes? That’s an idea I’ll have to keep an ear out for to see if that comes up again.

It’s tiring work. One of the sessions where I asked this elder a third of the questions ran 58 minutes long. It took me about 3 hours today to listen through it all and note his answers to the questions in English. An hour-long recording is super intimidating and likely to never be listened to again. If the recording is broken up into individual questions with the answers annotated it becomes accessible for me and others later. It was a long session, but I’m sure I learned something, right? I must have.

Alongside this work, I’m drafting and checking some literacy readers. I had a session today talking about camels and how they store fat in their humps so they can survive in the desert. I’ve never tried to explain that before of course! These literacy books stretch my language skills and force me to try and say what is written. When speaking myself, it’s easy to avoid things like that and just stick to simpler sentences.

In other news, Oscar is back to school this week. He’s started year 2. On the whole, I think he’s enjoying it, but it does mean Alice and Millie need to learn to entertain themselves while Mum is teaching.