Hometown Rankin - April & May 2016

John Michael has recently finished learning the Hewa culture and language so
that he can aid fellow missionaries in literacy classes, Bible lessons, discipleship of
believers, and the translation of the Bible into the Hewa language. The goal is to
plant a mature church among the Hewa people that can function on its own and
reach out to neighboring villages with no missionary presence. Eventually the Hewa
people will become missionaries themselves to the villages around them who have
been begging for years to hear the Word of God.
The Hewa people have believed for centuries that there are many evil spirits in
the jungles surrounding them, and those spirits must be appeased, tricked, or killed in
order for a person to survive. The most tragic example of this belief is “witch” killing.
The Hewa believe that evil spirits can enter a person (mostly women and children)
and this spirit leaves her body at night consuming the insides of otherwise healthy
people causing them to get sick and die. They believe the only way to stop this spirit
is to kill the innocent woman or child that is possessed. It is impossible to get an
accurate count of all the women and children across Hewa territory that are marked as
witches, but the number is probably in the hundreds. We, along with our co-workers,
have worked tirelessly to evacuate as many of these marked women and children as
possible to a safe location (other tribes in Papua New Guinea who do not share the
beliefs of the Hewa, and do not practice witch killing). Unfortunately, many of the
families of these women will not allow them to leave and in the last year we have seen
two innocent ladies murdered because of this tragic belief system. We have tried to
get police and government officials in to help with the problem, however, it is very
difficult for them to capture and punish perpetrators when they can easily run and
hide in the jungle and when the only way in or out of the village is by airplane…an
airplane that they can hear a long way off before it actually lands. The best hope of
ending this tragic practice is for the Gospel to be spread and accepted in all Hewa
villages making our work and ministry that much more urgent.
So we live and work alongside the Hewa and will continue to do so until the Bible
translation is finished and the Hewa church is spiritually mature with its own pastors,
elders, and deacons–even sending out missionaries of its own.
As a wife and mother, my day is on the most basic level filled with what most any
other wife and mothers is filled with. I cook, I clean, and I make sure my children
make it through each day in (mostly) one piece. But each of those tasks are made more
complex by living in the extreme conditions of a remote rainforest. Everything I
cook, I cook from scratch, often with foods harvested in my garden right next to my
house. I am at constant war with the hoards of jungle insects that can easily invade
my house that is made of jungle lumber, plywood and mesh screens for windows.
Imagine living your entire life on your screened-in porch in the Mississippi summer.
That is how we live year-round. Of course there are no schools for my daughters to
attend in the jungle, so the majority of my day is spent in home school. And when I
want to visit with a neighbor, I go sit in a one room, smoke-filled hut made entirely
of vines and leaves with no electricity, plumbing, or furniture to sit on.
Above all else, we as a family spend as much time as we can with our Hewa
neighbors working when they work, laughing when they laugh, crying when they cry,
and becoming part of a greater community to serve God in Papua New Guinea.
From the outside, our lives look drastically different from the ones we left almost
5 years and over 9,000 miles ago in Rankin County. But we are really just an
ordinary family sent by God to an extraordinary place with extraordinary people. n
Hometown Rankin • 47