Papuan Pictures

by H. M. Dauncey

Magazines and papers are passed from one to another in Papua, but the final use of many of them is to provide wall-paper for teachers’ houses. Timoteo’s house is so lined and the effect, if peculiar, is also useful, for a picture gallery is provided. I might almost have written a library, for I have found my wife going round the room trying to connect up the various parts of a serial, and getting on a box to reach those nearer the roof. On one occasion, so mounted, she managed to take a crochet pattern from an odd leaf of a ladies’ paper.

Few teachers knew their people better, or entered more into their life, than did Timoteo. As a boy he came to Kabadi with his father, who was the first teacher there, and after returning to Samoa for training at Malua, he succeeded his father, who had died at his post. His case is an example of what it costs the South Sea men and women to engage in work for Christ in Papua. His mother, his father, and his stepmother all died in Kabadi. He and his three children all died there, and his widow returned to her home alone. She wished to remain and carry on the work, and when that was declared impossible expressed the hope that some day she might again be able to join us.

At the time of which I am writing both teacher and wife were at their best, and in the evening after the big gathering on the verandah for prayers, there was much to talk about. A little girl called Papauta, after the girls’ school in Samoa, was put forward for inspection. A jolly little smiling savage she looked, and never before in her short life, had she been so happy. When her mother died her father took no notice of her, and Fafoa, Timoteo’s wife, found her crawling about the village fighting with the pigs for scraps of food. For a time it was doubtful if she would recover from such neglect, but care won the day, and Papauta is now a strong, thickset girl who, when Fafoa left for Samoa, came to live with us at Delena. Her father tried to claim her, but the Government decided that as the Mission had saved her life, she should live at the Mission till old enough to start life on her own account.

A sad story of cruelty was introduced by reference to a small enclosure we had seen under a house opposite to the teacher’s. A man had died and his relatives instead of comforting and helping his widow, had destroyed all her plantations and so ill-treated her that she would have died but for the help of Fafoa. They prevented the poor woman, who was covered from head to foot with a mixture like lamp-black, from eating anything but scraps of food. She was ordered not to be seen in the village or any of the tracks round it, and no one must hear her voice. She was confined in the little enclosure we had noticed under the house, from cock-crow in the morning till the village was all quiet at night, and even then she was only allowed to go on to the verandah of her house. Her well-grown children were threatened that if they attempted to help their mother they would be killed.

Why all this trouble and persecution? Simply this: the woman’s husband had died and his relatives believed that some wrong-doing on her part had made the spirits angry, and caused them to kill him.

Fafoa feared neither the threats nor the spirits, and at night she fed the woman and kept her alive till I was able to get the cruelty ended. Kabadi natives as much as any in this dark country need to learn the Golden Rule. They certainly know nothing of it till they are taught.

The school the next morning was worth a visit. Timoteo was a success as a teacher, as at most other things, but not as a singing master. His classes were well ordered, and more advanced than any others in the district. Seventy-six children were present, and they began badly, for they chanted the opening hymn on one note only. That was the weakest point. The strongest was the adaptation of the kindergarten methods to the teaching of the alphabet. Suddenly, while we were engaged with the seniors, all the smaller children rushed out of school and through the open doors and windows we saw the boys climbing cocoanut palms. There was a scramble for the fronds they threw down, and soon the children returned to school each carrying a bundle of the mid-rib they had got from the fronds. These looked like lengths of fine spring wire. With much energy they got to work, and when it was their turn to stand in front of the table, each child had a handful of letters made from the mid-rib, from which he or she sorted out and held out the particular letter asked for. With such letters as D or P it was a simple matter, for when once fixed they remained in the shape desired. S. G. M. and others were more difficult to manage, for though the pieces of mid-ribs were ready they had to be fixed or bent into position when held up. The children enjoyed the work, using their strong teeth in the place of scissors or nippers, and when the lesson was over the table looked as though basket-makers had been at work.

Here again one noticed that the position of the scholar in the class determined not only the angle at which he looked at his book, but in some cases the angle at which he wrote or printed his capital letters. Some of them were on their backs, and others leaning to either right or left. One boy signed his slate with carefully printed capitals—I.K.O.B.O.U.—a full stop after each letter.

The Sabate was to be spent at Ukaukana, so that we might be in touch with three villages for the services of the day.

Two hours across a plain as flat as a table top, and through grass in many places above our heads, brought us to a large banana plantation. At the right season it would be a grand place for a Sunday school treat, if the owners did not object. To travellers it was acceptable because it gave the only bit of shade to be found in the two hours’ walk, and we lingered long enough to enjoy it and notice that the natives had marked off each man’s share of the plantation by rows of bright dracena and coleus. The rich vegetation told that we were not far from the river, and we were no sooner out of the plantation and through a small village, than there was the Aroa River at our feet but some twenty feet below us.