Jessie's House of Needles

by John Algate

  ‘We want a missionary. We want someone to teach us,’ has been the plea of the people around Soba, near Ninia, for the last few months. Now, because we have no one to fill their desire they have walked to Wamena, the nearest government station, to ask the Catholic mission if they will help them. Please pray that they will not become confused as to what is ‘The Truth’. Pray too, that someone may feel called to fill in the gap in this needy place to teach the people about the Lord Jesus. (October 1969)

  While the western missionaries played a critical role in opening up and developing West Papua their numbers remained small. In the foreword to Torches of Joy Don Richardson places it in perspective.

  ‘It was into this latter field (West Papua) that RMBU placed John and Helen Dekker among the Danis of Kanggime (1960), Stan and Pat Dale among the Yali (1961), Carol and me among the Sawi (1962), Phil and Phyliss Masters among the Kimyal (1964) Costas and Alky Macris among the Lakes Plain people (1967), not to mention dozens of other labourers among these and other tribes.’

  All of these pioneers would play a part in Jessie’s life, some more than others, and many became life-long friends. Missionaries kept coming: John and Gloria Wilson (1971), Les and Wapke Henson (1977), Orin and Rosa Kidd (1977), Sue Trenier (1978), and Paul and Kathryn Kline who first met Jessie in Karubaga before settling in the Sela Valley for nine years from 1980-89.

  By 1972 mission work was expanding on a massive scale as trained Dani evangelists and work gangs moved further and further afield. Jessie’s prayer letter of October that year graphically reported the expansion.

  We are just 20 minutes flying time from the Lakes Plain area where Frank Clarke and Costa Macris are opening up airstrips to try and reach those who have never heard the Gospel. As they have contact with these new areas, more and more villages are asking for teachers to come in and teach them the Gospel. The need for more workers in this vast new area becomes more and more pronounced.

  Almost every week we have sent at least one plane load (about five or six men) of workers down to this area where they stay and work for six months and then return. In the past few weeks Costa has been sending his problem medical cases back to me. Fair exchange I guess! Pray for the safety of the workers in this new area as the Dani folk are working in a very different situation to what they are used to here in the mountains. The Lakes Plain is very flat with many lakes, rivers and swamps. Costa has 500 workers down there organised in building new airstrips and teaching the word of God. One airstrip which is 10 minutes flying will save him 14-days canoe travel.

  This was not just the Bible encroaching on Papua on a massive and unprecedented scale. This was modernity crashing in on traditional cultures. Once converted, the Dani embraced their new faith with considerable zest and vigour particularly relishing the chance to celebrate significant milestones in the development of their local churches.

  ‘Hurry, hurry, or we’ll be late,’ shouted a group of men as they rushed past my house carrying wood, banana leaves and vine. What’s the big excitement all about? Today is the Swart Valley Church Conference and they are organising the big feast. All the elders and pastors from Mamit, Kanggime and Karubaga churches come in for a spiritual conference, fellowship and get together. Some 70 churches are involved so that means quite a number of people.

  After discussion, a message and sorting out of some church problems everyone gathers together for a feast. The Danis never consider anything is special unless they have a feast to celebrate it. The women folk have been busy all morning preparing it whilst the men sat and talked! (March 1974)

  ‘Quickly bring the potatoes, corn and potato vine leaves’ – people running here and there and all intent on the business in hand to get the food in the pits (holes in the ground) with the red hot stones. Men carefully cutting the pig into the right size pieces to fit on top of the piles of vegetables already sitting in leaves amongst the hot rocks. Children carrying in more fern and banana leaves to cover the top before they are sealed tight and covered again with hot rocks.

  What is the special occasion for a feast? - The dedication of the new Karubaga church last weekend. It has been a long-awaited event after working many months hand pit-sawing timber on the mountain sides and carrying it down piece by piece for the framing walls, and selling their pigs and chickens so they would have enough money to buy an aluminium roof for their church.

  How many of us would be willing to give a half or quarter of what we possess to put a roof on our church? These folk have done so joyfully and willingly. It is surely a lesson to us to question our priorities on how we spend our money.

  Sunday morning saw us all squeezed into the church with about 400 other people for the first service. Looking around one couldn’t but be amazed at what these folk had accomplished with just a few basic tools and lots of arduous labour. (March 1976)

  Sue Trenier found her friend Jessie completely at home with mission work:

  ‘Jessie was very much called to be a mission nurse. All her nursing, whether it was locals or expats, had a mission to it. She saw it as all part of the whole. In fact she is probably the most holistic person I have ever met. She wouldn’t write books about it, but it was a way of life to her and a very effective way because she didn’t question, she did, and often reminded me of something my father used to say: ‘Christianity is better felt than telt’.’

  8. Medical evangelism

  They brought in a lady with an arrow in her tummy. She needed a major op. Her bowels were poked in quite a few places. She was amazed to wake up from the op still alive!

  She is from a heathen area and this is the first time any of them have come out for medical help. We are praying that whilst she and her relatives are here they might see the difference in our Dani folk since they have trusted the Lord. (June 1975)

  While Jessie was a very capable nurse she was also an evangelist, as intent on saving souls as she was on saving lives. Nor was she ignorant of the powerful effect western medicine and exposure to Christian caring could have in the battle for converts. The local animist leaders – witch doctors to Jessie – linked their whole world, including the health and wellbeing of their communities, to their religious practices and beliefs. When western medicine succeeded where local medicine, customs and beliefs had failed, it undermined the traditional belief system and made people more receptive to Christian teaching.

  The flipside of such evangelism was the risk medical failure posed for local clinic workers being trained in basic western medicine when they returned to their villages.

  Some will be working amongst villagers where there has been no response to the Gospel and the people can become very dangerous if someone dies. It is a very big responsibility and they will need much prayer. In the past we have found our medical work has been the spearhead which has opened up people’s hearts and doors to the Gospel when they realise that we really care about them. Do pray that the clinic workers will use their position to be a witness to their faith. There are many who are totally committed to their witchcraft and payback system. (June 1980)

  Tomorrow will be a very special day for one of my patients as she leaves here after three months of treatment. She was brought in from an area some two-days walk from here, with a badly burnt foot. It was a mess. I had to amputate four toes. The side of her foot was gone and the smell!! Ugh! We have just found out that the day she put her foot in the fire she also burnt her baby alive as a sacrifice to the demon who told her to burn her foot. She felt no pain. Whilst here, she listened to the Gospel and accepted the Lord as her Saviour.

  Do pray for Weini as she returns home that she will be able to share her new faith with her family and village who are all non-believers, and very bound up in witchcraft. It has been a thrill to see the change in her over the past weeks. (March 1987)

  While Jessie may have initially baulked at being a missionary because she was ‘too ordinary’ and lacked the necessary gifts, time in the field mellowed those views as this extract from her August 1977 prayer
letter shows when she shares a quote from Eternity Magazine:

  ‘The nonsense that missionaries are a special people with special strength and unusual devotions has caused enough harm. I’ve never met a missionary that believes this myth, but there seems to be hardly a church member who does not. Does this mean that people at home are praying for a missionary that doesn’t exist? To pray for the strong is only to push a rolling stone, but to pray for the weak is to share in his struggle.’

  9. Oubiyo’s story

  ‘Selamat pagi,’ (Good Morning) chirped a spindly legged little eight-year-old one morning as I approached the hospital. What a transformation had taken place in the face of this youngster who stepped from the plane, obviously terrified, some two weeks previously.

  We all have certain incidents, people or events that touch us in a special way and stay with us forever. Oubiyo was one of those people in Jessie’s life. His tragic circumstances, healing and Christian conversion encapsulated so much of what Jessie and her missionary colleagues wished to achieve in West Papua.

  The story clearly had a great impact on Jessie. It may also have had an impact on many other people around the world. When I casually mentioned at a dinner party that I had started reading and editing Jessie’s newsletters it prompted an immediate and vivid account of Oubiyo’s story – or at least one remarkably like it - from another dinner guest. While he didn’t remember Oubiyo’s name, he clearly recalled hearing the story and seeing photographs of Oubiyo’s terrible injuries at the South African church he attended as a teenager in 1972.

  Jessie’s account of her interaction with Oubiyo well demonstrates the causal link between good medical treatment and care and Christian evangelism. There were two versions of this story in Jessie’s writings. The reflective version written years later was more complete and better drafted, but it lacked the immediacy of the earlier version banged out on Jess’s trusty old typewriter in December 1971.

  An orphan from one of the Eastern Highlands stations, Oubiyo had been threatened, kicked and very often gone without food because no one cared for him. He was brought to the missionary in a very sad state with all the fingers of one hand gangrenous and dropping off, and the other hand a weeping mass with all fingers curled up and stuck together. Whatever had happened we wondered.

  Then the story unfolded – one of the witches in the village said he had a demon and she was going to burn it out of him. So she forcibly held his little hands over the flames of a fire until she was satisfied. One month later he was brought into the mission station by someone who took pity on him.

  ‘Where do we start?’ said Dr Cousens as we looked at the smelling, rotten flesh with pieces of bone protruding through where the flesh had disappeared. After much care and skin grafts he will have some use of the fingers left on the one hand, and with physiotherapy on the wrist of the other, it will become useable again, but all the fingers are gone.

  But the biggest joy was watching the transformation in him. The fear and distrust are gone. Pray that the love of Christ may be fully understood by him as he lives amongst us here. There are so many in this land like him, held in bondage by Satan and needing Christ to set them free.

  Jess also recounted a sequel to this story.

  In the particular area that Oubiyo had come from the witch doctor had repeatedly told the people that if they listened to the missionary’s word the pigs would get sick, their potato crops would die and their children would become skinny. This of course discouraged the people from coming to any services that the missionaries held to explain God loved them,

  Several months after Oubiyo had been at Karubaga there was a big war at his home village and the witch doctor’s wife was impaled with a large spear in her abdomen. The witch doctor knew that he could not help her and asked the missionaries if they could send her to our hospital. This was the first time he had allowed anyone to leave on the plane with his permission. They agreed and called the MAF plane to pick her up and take her to Karubaga. She duly arrived and we operated on her to repair the internal damage done by the spear. She survived the surgery and stayed in one of the hospital huts.

  The little boy Oubiyo with his burnt hands looked after her. He was able to explain the routine in the little hospital and how people cared and how he had asked Jesus into his heart and become one of the ‘sky father’s family’. She could see for herself that the pigs in Karubaga were big and fat. The children were healthy. The sweet potato gardens flourished and she realised that her husband had been telling her lies all those years.

  After she recovered from her surgery she and Oubiyo went back to their home village, Naltja. On her return to her people she told them the truth about the way her husband had been deluding them and the fact the people in Karubaga had many fat pigs, many children and lots of sweet potatoes. As a result of these revelations many people began attending the little services that the missionaries held to share the Gospel.

  She became one of the first villagers to become a Christian. Some years later the missionary wrote to me to share the fact that the return of the witch doctor’s wife to the village changed the attitude of the people and the whole area became open to listen to the Gospel. Many people became Christians and the church began to grow.

  10. Death and ‘coincidence’

  Conclusive evidence that both men have been killed by this cannibal tribe in a small gorge and the bodies carried to a higher grassy slope.

  West Papua could be a dangerous and violent place. Missionaries, both the expatriates and their National converts, were threatening local custom and belief and undermining traditional power structures. Inevitably there was a backlash. Most often it was the local converts and their pastors who suffered intimidation and violence from fellow villagers defending the old ways. Few of these attacks, ambushes and murders were widely reported outside West Papua, but it was a different story when expatriates were attacked or killed.

  Just days after Jessie’s arrival at Karubaga she had been a member of the surgical team that helped save the life of Australian missionary Stan Dale after he was shot five times by Yali bowmen. The event, and Jessie’s part in assisting the surgeons, was duly recounted by the wide-eyed and observant young nurse reporting back to her prayer network.

  Two years later the tragic sequel to this first attack was played out in the Yali village of Wilboon in the remote Seng Valley, some distance away from the first attack. This time there was no escape for Stan Dale and his colleague Phil Masters who fell in a hail of arrows from tribesmen determined to keep the white men and their new faith out of the valley.

  In Lords of the Earth, Don Richardson carefully recreated the story of Yali belief and their resistance and later conversion to Christianity, including those fateful days in September 1968 when Stan and Phil made their final trek across the mountains from the missionary station at Korupun, Phil’s home station. Stan believed it would be safer to enter the Seng Valley from Korupun, rather than his own station at Ninia.

  As they farewelled their wives and families the two missionaries were well aware of the potential danger that confronted them, though confident in their mission. Trouble had been brewing for a long time and was brought to a head when Stan pressured his Christian converts to burn their fetishes, the sacred objects that the Yali believed appeased the spirits and kept their world in balance. Stan was warned that a ‘death sentence’ had been served on him, but chose to ignore the warning. Now his enemies waited for the missionary’s next move to regions that lay beyond their current mission settlements. It was a showdown between two belief systems and the most intransigent supporters on both sides.

  The death of Stan and Phil soon made headlines around the world, with Jessie as eager as anyone to transmit the news to her prayer network, registering a series of news flashes in the days that followed the terrible tragedy. It would be almost a decade before Don Richardson uncovered and published the full story of what happened on the trek, but Jessie’s prayer letters, drafted from the snippets of ne
ws as it came to hand, captures both the urgency, immediacy and horrific nature of the ambush and murder.

  26th September

  News has just come through from Angurak, a station two-days walk from Ninia, that Phil Masters and Stan Dale had been ambushed on trek yesterday. Two of the carriers fled and brought the news to the missionaries at Angurak. They ran all the way to ask for help. A normally two-day trek was travelled in one day over unused and unknown trails and through enemy territory.

  Frank Clarke and Dave Martin were able to speak to the two Dani men on the radio and received their shocked message. MAF was immediately alerted and within minutes a plane was taking Frank Clarke and Jacques Teeuwen into the area. The rest of us at the station gathered together to pray. The Dani folk also gathered together to pray.

  Because of bad weather the plane was unable to land, but with the Dani man on board they were able to locate the site where the ambush occurred in very rough country. Frank was able to ask for the aid of a helicopter from TPNG (Territory of Papua New Guinea), and as one was at Tolefomin close to the border it could come next morning to help the search.

  27th September

  Early next morning the plane again took off and headed for Korupun where the two wives were waiting for their husbands to return from the trek. Pat Dale returned to Ninia to help with the catering for the police and searchers and to be on hand when the helicopter arrived. Phyllis Masters moved to Karubaga to be with her children. We were glad when the helicopter finally arrived this afternoon after some detours because of bad weather. They were unable to begin the search until next day when the weather cleared.

  28th September

  The helicopter left Ninia early this morning with Frank, Jacques, three police, and a Dani boy on board. A MAF plane circled overhead during the whole proceedings to keep watch on any suspicious movements. This was well worth the precaution as he was able to alert the folk on the ground of warriors approaching from a nearby village.