Ramblings...

There’s a little girl who is about 10 or 11 years old who likes to hang around at our neighbours house. Sarah happens to be Icelina’s (my helper) niece and the granddaughter of my helper from four years ago, Ibu Termina. Sarah’s parents are living a fractured life. Right now her dad lives in Wamena, an interior city (happens to be the largest city in the world with no roads going to it-everything is brought in by Hercules airplanes). He claims to have a good government job there and wants his wife and daughter to move up there too. But his wife is having nothing of it. She hears rumours that he is being unfaithful to her while living up there. He denies it all and says that he is living with his sister and has been faithful. You know, there are many, many families here with this same story. While they consider themselves Christian, many are still a bit in the dark as to what that really means. The men, sadly, are often not faithful to their wives. Ibu Rita’s (my other helper) husband has actually had a child with another woman and wanted her to take care of it. She put her foot down and the child is living with his mother. Rita and her husband have had to work through this, and they seem to be doing okay now. This area of the world may have been exposed to the Gospel for over 50 years now, but there is still so much for the people to learn. Not to say that we in the West never do things such as this, but here it is the norm rather than the exception.
Sarah was telling us how her teacher at school was getting her students to go to her house and cut her grass and do her dishes until the head of the school found out and put a stop to it. Too funny, but not so funny… education here is really bad. Sarah was also saying how all the kids at the school are required to take a machete to school on certain days and they altogether cut the lawn around the school. And if you don’t take one you get into trouble. Can you imagine? Sarah said that there have been kids who’ve accidentally cut into another students leg as they are swinging the machete to cut the grass. There’s just no thought of safety measures here. There really isn’t. Little tiny kids play by the side of the roads all the time. The bridges that they make in their kampungs to go over the rivers or streams never have railings and are always very rickety. I asked Icelina about the rickety bridge in front of her house. “Do people ever fall off?” I asked. “Oh sure,” she says, “Lots of people have fallen off.” But no one takes the time to make the bridge stronger and better.