by John Algate
This one had been burnt badly some weeks ago and it hadn’t healed; this one had ulcers in the mouth; this one has a strange rash; this one has a swelling in his leg; this one a swollen arm; and so the voice of the evangelist goes on as he translates from the local language into Dani for me as we see hosts of patients.
Chaos; as they all try to have priority and are pushing and shoving to be seen first and maybe get an injection. Injections are special and a cure for all ills in their estimation. Slowly we straightened up as the last patient is seen and we quickly pack up to be on our way. Everything stored away when yet another patient arrives. Could I please see him as he has a pain in his chest? So we unpack again to see the late comer.
As we race down the airstrip, wave goodbye to all the faces and buzz off into the sky we are reminded again of the vast responsibility the teacher and the evangelist has in that village. They sit and live with the people. They are the only close examples of Christianity that they see and know. They learn the language. They teach and preach the love of Jesus.
The plane is now headed towards another airstrip. Just four more to go today. The hours creep by as we come and go from place to place until about 3 pm when we are finished our schedule and head for home. Soaked to the skin from perspiration after working in the hot sun, feet literally caked with mud from the squelchy airstrips, we are looking forward to a hot shower and a cup of tea.
Tomorrow we start again on the radio with the medical problems from the other airstrips that didn’t get visited today. To try and decipher what is wrong with them without actually seeing the patient isn’t always easy. Then explaining to the teacher what drugs to give and how to use them is something else.
12. A new challenge – Korupun
Many of you are aware that I will be returning to the Eastern Highlands and life there will be even more isolated than previously.
Jessie’s first posting at Karubaga lay 71 kilometres to the west of Wamena, then, as now, the most important administrative centre in the Highlands. By contrast her next permanent posting of Korupun, lay 88 kilometres to Wamena’s east. The distances don’t sound far to the western mind but in the context of West Papua in the last quarter of the twentieth century these two villages, just an hour or so apart in the small MAF aircraft, were a world apart in the context of their place and time. Karubaga was home to the Dani people who at first reluctantly, then with great enthusiasm, abandoned their old ways and became the mountain and valley foot soldiers of a new and rapidly expanding religion. The Dani converts were at the forefront of the evangelical engagement reaching out to near neighbours like the Yali people, but also to the more foreign environments of the hot and swampy coastal lowlands. By contrast, Korupun, was home to the Kimyal people, who were often referred to as pygmy people because of their diminutive stature. The Bible came later to the Kimyal than it had to their Dani counterparts.
Jessie enjoyed sharing mission news of the slow but inevitable advance of Christianity among the highland peoples with her network back home.
We have been thrilled recently on hearing from Korupun in the Eastern Highlands that a small group of believers have burnt their fetishes. Do pray for this little band of believers because they are often persecuted and ridiculed by the rest of the villagers and much pressure is put on them. It is so much easier to go with the crowd than stand alone against it. (October 1972)
We have been greatly thrilled and encouraged to learn that the first baptism at Korupun will take place this coming week. Some of the Christians in this area have been killed for their faith. It is no light thing they are planning to do. (This is the area where Phil Masters worked before he was killed). (July 1973)
In 1977 when new missionaries Orin and Rosa Kidd arrived in West Papua they were posted to the Korupun station where they became the catalyst for Jessie’s own move to Korupun three years later. Rosa recalls the circumstances:
‘Korupun had a missionary-trained National clinic worker but no nurse or officially trained medical person. The Dani clinic worker was very limited in what he could do and a lot of medical emergencies would fall on our shoulders. Because of this and the many medical needs in our area, we were constantly requesting the field leadership to allocate a nurse to our station.’
So in 1979, after 13 years among the Dani in Karubaga, and no doubt in response to much prayer and the many requests by the Kidds, Jessie was on the move.
It was at this time that our Doctor at Karubaga had to go home and was unable to return. I was asked by the mission conference if I would be willing to go to Korupun in the area where the men had been killed to open up a clinic for training clinic workers and midwives. If you got sick out there it might be four days walk to a clinic. No roads or ambulances, so you died.
Jessie began a nine-month furlough back in Australia in April 1979 and took up her posting to Korupun early the next year. It is clear from her January 1980 letters that she was well aware of the isolation, dangers and adversity that confronted her.
My new home is finished and sitting in the middle of a potato patch. I guess I will have to wait until the owner digs his potatoes before I can plant a garden. Hopefully I will be able to grow a few other vegies besides potatoes. The clinic and schoolroom that I need have yet to be built. But I am hoping it will soon be underway so I can get things moving. There has been a lot of unrest in the area and several people have been killed. About 200 people from the Sela Valley have fled to our area for protection as raiding parties from a neighbouring village descended upon them, burnt their houses and threatened their lives if they stayed. One man was caught, staked out and killed. These are our neighbours and need much prayer.
With the cultural differences and limited literacy skills it required patience and perseverance to train the clinic workers.
I began bringing in trainees from the far away villages to work with me for a year and at the end of a year they were expected to know how to diagnose, treat, give the right medications, give injections, fix broken bones, pull teeth and help to deliver babies.
Within a few years there were 30 to 40 clinics dotted around the small mountain villages, staffed by clinic workers whom Jessie had trained. This was the first mass intrusion of modern medicine into the lives of these remote mountain people and the initiative saved countless lives and eased much suffering over the coming decades. In her eulogy Thelma drew from Jess’s writing and her own personal experiences to paint a picture of life in Korupun.
‘The thing that stands out is her willingness to always be ‘on call’ to respond without question. The constant cries of ‘Yetty,’ at her back door (the Kimyal couldn’t pronounce the sound for ‘J’ just like the Danis) or the worried husbands with their wives in labour in the middle of the night, pouring rain. She would pull her tracksuit on over her pyjamas, grab her bag and a torch and step out into the mud. It was no easy task to climb the pole into their small front doors designed to keep intruders out. Jess used to joke it conjured up a picture of the husband pushing her up the pole and through the hole. Once inside there would be the fire… children huddled in the corner and several feet away the pigs. Very difficult in the dark trying to find a vein to put up a saline drip. When we visited it was nothing to find eight or 10 little kids in a circle on her lounge room floor with an inhalation of gum leaves in a bowl in the centre with a sheet over them all. Jess planted and grew the gum tree for the Eucalyptus. She loved her garden.’
Jess’s letters from Korupun were as descriptive and colourful as ever.
Just saw some of the elders going off to teach Sunday school so I guess it must be getting near time – now 10.30 am. He was really dressed well – in his skin – and a plastic bag containing his Sunday school book and scriptures under his arm and an axe over his shoulder! Some of the evangelists have just come from the Sela Valley which is the next one to here and said that there was fighting going on there again. Last week one of the Christians was ambushed and killed…. (January 1980)
Where Karubaga
was a mission and administrative centre, Korupun was an outpost which Jess shared for many years with the Kidds and her new colleague Elinor Young, an American linguist/translator. Jessie was quick to introduce Elinor to her army of supporters back home. She also painted some wonderful word pictures of her new posting to give them a flavour of the different place and different life she now shared with the Kimyal people.
This week Elinor and I were invited to have ‘tea’ with one of the local elders and his wife. We duly arrived at 4 pm to share in their big meal of the day. Their little round house is built on a smaller scale than the Dani houses. The roof reaches down almost to the ground so that you have to stoop almost double to get underneath the eaves. The little door was certainly made for pygmy people and not for people my size.
After some manoeuvring I finally got into the house itself. Three quarters of the house was taken up with pig pens and pig honking and squealing were the background music as I began my meal with my back leaning against the sty. This area was about six feet by four feet so we were rather cramped with five adults and two children sitting on the floor to eat our meal. One lady arrived late so she had to climb over the pig rails and sit in with the pigs.
We were treated as honoured guests, and they had cooked sweet potatoes, potato leaves and a few small pieces of pig as a special treat. At night three women and two children sleep in that small area on the bark floor beside the fireplace. No electric blankets there! The women were busy making string from bark after the meal was finished. They had to go almost a day’s journey to collect this particular bark, and it makes a very strong string which they use for their pig ropes. I was mostly just a spectator because of my limited vocabulary, so Elinor did all the talking.
Elinor also introduced her to the new routines of life in the high mountains. Learning the new language and local customs wasn’t the only steep learning curve facing the new arrival.
Last Sunday Elinor and I went up the closest mountain to church as Elinor wanted to teach one of the elders how to take Sunday school. It sure is a little different from Sunday school at home. Sitting in the sun in the centre of the village with about 30 children grouped around listening intently to the story and watching the pictures. Great competition to see who could be the first six to say the memory verse and gain a picture card as a reward.
Walking on these trails is very different from Karubaga, as the mountains are very steep and the trails just a ‘sheep track’ of mud and stones. Climbing up through streams, hanging on when there were just toe holes straight up was no joke. Maybe a mountain climber’s paradise but!! I finally staggered over the rim to the plateau at the top to see the most magnificent view of layer upon layer of mountains away in the distance. Well worth the effort to get there.
Sunday school over, we headed down, down, down. I sat on my bottom and slid along in some places where it was too steep for me to get a good footing. Crossing the so called bridge at the bottom was an experience – a few round poles lashed together after a fashion, and I was glad to get to the other side of the roaring river.
At the moment I am living with Elinor Young as my house is not yet finished enough to move in. It has a lovely view down the valley of a 10,000 foot mountain with higher ones behind it. They often have cloud and fog clouding their tops and therefore we have very high rainfall.
My house is made of hewn timber from local trees on the outside and pit sawn timber on the floor. The inside walls are of bark. Hopefully the ceilings will be plywood, if and when it gets here, to help with my allergy problems. The front windows are glass louvres and there is plenty of plastic in the bedroom windows. There is a bush septic toilet to go in when we get hooked up to the spring which they tell me is not far up the mountain. The water supply for the kitchen will be from drums which catch rain from the roof; the shower, a bucket.
A wood stove has been bought to go in the kitchen when we can locate some zinc to go on the walls to protect them from sparks. Work progresses very slowly up here so do pray that we will be able to get somebody to help us get all the necessary things done so that I can move in. Then you can consider yourself invited to come and visit me and share in the work here. I would love to have you and visitor’s visas are fairly easy to obtain. At the moment I am supervising the clinic here and three out-clinics in the other valleys. There is still a lot of unrest in the Sela Valley and there has been continued fighting on and off since I returned. (February 1980)
Orin and Rosa Kidd were excited to have Jessie join them and welcomed her contribution to the mission team and the Kimyal community.
‘We were thrilled beyond words when the Field allocated her to minister with us in Korupun. One of the marks of a good missionary is the ability to adjust. Making a move from one tribal work and language to another is no small undertaking, yet Jessie took up the challenge with her whole heart. She started Kimyal language study and initially used Elinor, Orin or myself to help her with the translation. She was also able to use some Dani and some Indonesian to communicate.’
Jessie’s may have been a simple house but it took a long time to complete. It wasn’t until October 1980 that she informed friends and family she was in her own home again.
At last the long awaited day has arrived, and I have moved into my own house. It is still far from finished, but I do praise the Lord that at long last it is liveable and I can unpack my own things instead of living out of suitcases and having to constantly borrow from others. I still don’t have any water in the house so we are bucketing that. The toilet is set in and I flush it with a bucket. We finally got the new stove in but the chimney is rather short. It barely comes through the roof.
And there were constant reminders that this was a different world.
Elinor and I had the company of two dead pigs as the other passengers on the flight out. One of the Korupun churches wants to buy aluminium for their church roof and asked if we would bring out these pigs and sell them in Sentani for them to buy the roofing while we are here. (August 1981)
After spending three weeks away in Mulia to serve as midwife to a missionary family expecting their second child, Jessie returned to Korupun for Easter.
I was greeted with open arms by the clinic workers on my return, because they had almost run out of medicine. They were all waiting with their empty pill cans to be refilled. They told me there had been a second outbreak of whooping cough in another valley with some more deaths. Unfortunately, not all the mothers will bring their babies in for DPT injections and now it is too late. As I sat in the midst of a throng of dark skinned folk on Easter Sunday morning and listened to their Pastor explaining the wonder of what Easter really means I was thrilled to be part of the Church of Christ in this land. (April 1982)
Greetings once again from wet and windy Korupun. Our dry season seems to have got lost somewhere, so we are enjoying an excess of cold weather. With the continuation of the cold weather we have had a flu epidemic for the past three months which has laid low the whole population for varying lengths of time…. A tablespoon of pure lemon juice and an aspirin is great medicine. (November 1984)
The missionaries had to weigh all passengers and luggage that were to travel on the next day’s plane. Sometimes the manifest included pigs, dead or alive to be placed in the pod under the plane. Jessie wrote: when they realise a plane is due they rush up with all sorts of gifts for their friends in Wamena. It is very hard to convince them they have to stay under the limit. (1986)
Government services began to follow into areas pacified by the missionaries. Korupun was no exception. By July 1989 a government primary school supplemented the literacy and other education services originally provided by the mission.
Last week we attended the first graduation ceremony of the grade six students of the Indonesian primary school here. It was followed by the pig feast. Thirty students sat the exam and 21 passed, so there was great excitement. Most of the students have now begun the long seven-day walk to Wamena to get enrolled in the high school there.
(July 1989)
On 14 May 1991 Jessie completed 25 years as a medical missionary. Her colleague Elinor was nearing the end of her time in West Papua. Small in stature, the result of polio as a child, Elinor could not walk very far and by this time travelled around perched on a makeshift arrangement of hessian supported by long poles on each side. One man on each corner carried this on their shoulders. Thelma recalls that they would often run flat out: ‘This appeared very precarious but she loved it!’ Unfortunately Elinor’s health was deteriorating irrevocably.
Elinor went home in August to get some help for the problem she has been having with severe pains in her knees. After many doctor’s appointments, X-rays etc. the results are not good. She has post-polio syndrome which has also affected her lungs, arms, possibly her heart and her knees. She is also using a special wheelchair. It seems very uncertain that she will ever be able to return to Irian Jaya. Do pray for her and for the unfinished Kimyal translation. (October 1991)
Around this time the Kidds were among a group of missionaries who had their visas withdrawn and Elinor’s departure meant Jessie would be the only expatriate in Korupun for lengthy periods of time. She knew how difficult this would be when she returned from furlough in late 1992.
Please continue to pray for me as I get settled in again and also that I will not get too lonely by myself.
As always, Jessie kept her network well informed of life, colour and progress in Korupun.
Several weeks after I returned from Australia, Korupun was once again the venue of a large church gathering. This time the Kimyal area churches were officially welcomed into the larger Irian Jaya Evangelical Church body. About 2500 visitors arrived, including government officials from Wamena and delegates from other tribes. A feast followed and many of the people were dressed up in traditional dress – or lack of it – for the occasion. Beautiful head dresses were made from the yellow bird of paradise feathers. They danced and sang until they were hoarse and legs tired. We needed ear plugs. (January 1995)
