Protein

**This post is not for vegetarians**

A balanced diet includes a certain amount of protein, but this is often a scare resource in PNG. As a ‘meat minimalist’* in my home country, I have been faced with some unusual protein challenges here…

Bat: surprisingly beefy but lots of bones

Beans: green beans grow all over the country and are often served fresh, no more than a day from the garden to the plate. Yum.

Bush rat: any of the small marsupials of the bush. I don’t want to know if they are rat or bandicoot, I just thank the hunter for sharing his catch and try not to think about it.

Chicken: village chickens are scrawny and tough. Chickens raised for market are fed specific stock feed, are fat and are a little scary as I’m not sure what hormones are in the stock feed. I want to support the locals who take the initiative to start and maintain chickens as a business, but I’m not sure I want to eat the product they provide.

Corned Beef: not the yummy stuff one of my farm Aunts used to make, but the tinned version which oozes fat. I try not to think about what is in it but about the generosity of my hosts in sharing expensive store bought goods.

Crayfish: at a dollar for a small, live crayfish, I have no complaints about price, just about having to kill my dinner. It is a good reminder though that eating meat involves taking a life.

Splurging on a seafood buffet
in Kavieng

Crab: the only animal I know of that can still hurt you once it is cooked and served. Those shells are dangerous!

Crocodile: commercially harvested and tastes like a cross between chicken and fish. I expect the wild version would be tougher.

Eggs: for all the chickens in villages, there are surprisingly few eggs. When located, they are small and a very generous gift to have given to me.

Fish: smoked, salted, fresh… so many types, so may preparations, so many options of good or bad.

Looks pretty
Tastes bad

Lentils: when they are available at our store I stock up and they are a common part of my self-catered diet.

Parrot: has a very strong flavour and I was glad to only be given a small piece.

Peanuts: a common roadside snack. There is somewhere on the road to Lae where you can pull over a purchase a bunch through the car window to shell and eat as you continue your journey.

Be gone, alarm clock!

Pig: wealth is counted in pigs, unless you are in a Seventh Day Adventist area, then it is counted in goats. Once killed, a pig is generally boiled and shared with all rather than stored or preserved. The fat and skin is considered the good bits, so given to guests. This guest usually finds a way to politely eat the meat and then pass the rest on to a kid who is very happy to help me clean my plate.

Prawns: yum!

Rooster: tough to eat but satisfying to no longer have him waking me before dawn.

Surprisingly tasty sago grubs

Sago grubs: thankfully they were toasted, not fresh, with a surprisingly bacon-like taste, probably because they are mostly fat. I surprised myself by liking them!

Shellfish: tiny black ones, big crawly ones… all salty tasting and chewy but good.

Shellfish kebabs on the fire

Spam: this is the luxury brand name version that tastes like polony/fritz/devon/luncheon (Why does Australia have so many dialect choices for this smallgood?). Usually it is the cheaper and fattier version of tinned pork which is on offer. Even the smell is enough to make me cringe, but I can eat a piece when required.

Stingray: the only protein I couldn’t eat and quietly slipped to the dogs. Maybe I struggled because it was breakfast, but I think the chewing on a car tyre sensation was the bigger issue.

Tree kangaroo and cassowary: thankfully I’ve so far been saved from eating these, as my nieces love to see them at the zoo and I don’t want to have to explain why Auntie Hanna ate their favourite animal. Turtle is another one I hope to never be faced with at dinner.

Pet with a dubious future

Tuna: tinned in oil and has a strong flavour, but is the winning option of the tinned meats available.

Victoria Crowned Pigeon: beautiful, endangered and tasty.

Wallaby: I ate roo meat in Australia, so wallaby is just a relative.

Weevils: the little pests get in my flour, my weetbix, my pasta and anything that I fail to store properly. Some days I fish them out, some days I just eat them.

The ethics of many of these protein sources is questionable, but I choose to focus on the hospitality of sharing an important and limited resource. PNG is not a country for gourmet dining, but it is a country for generosity in hospitality.

*meat minimalist: I do eat meat, but in limited amounts. For the practical purposes of catering on ships, I defined it to the cook as eating whatever they served at lunch (usually meat light anyway) and vegetarian at dinner. Even with that guideline, I generally ate more meat at sea than I did when catering for myself at home.

Call, Discernment and Action

Defining ‘call’ is endlessly difficult. It can be a problem when people play the ‘God told me to’ card or the ‘I’m still waiting to hear from God’ card, but to not stop and carefully spend time discerning God’s direction in our lives is also a problem.

Biblically, some people had a very clear and audible call. I believe such clear calls can still happen, but that they are not to be expected. For me, discerning call is about an intersection of head and heart. With my head I can research a possibility and be practical about if my skills, interests and abilities are sufficient for the task. I can decide if the negatives are worth it. With my heart though, I am also looking to see if it is something I am passionate about, if there is something that draws me in.

Walking on the path or falling into the deep river
can be a fine line at times!

Discerning a call is not an expectation of perfection. We live in a broken world and have to deal with that. It is not needing to know everything, as I know that there will always be challenges and blessings down the road which are not evident now. It is giving due diligence to finding out what I can at this point in time.

In small questions, discerning God’s will is a small matter as the Word gives us direction in life. Are we called to love our neighbours? Yes! So do it, in whatever ways big or small today.

In big questions though, discerning God’s will and God’s call is a bigger challenge. That is when I call on mentors, prayer supporters and those who know me well and that I trust.

A language allocation is a big question, as the decision results in many years working in an often isolated situation as well as a relationship and commitment to a group of people that I would not want to break.

In making this decision it is important to me to hand the decision over to God. Is this the place the skills, interests and limitations God has given me best intersect with the many immediate needs around us? In making this decision prayerfully and in community I am given strength. In the long run, when the hard times come, I will be able to look back and say ‘God, you lead me here and you will lead me through.’  If I simply follow the directions of people, it is easy to say ‘The person-I-listened-to didn’t know what they were doing!’ It is hard to say ‘God didn’t know what he was doing!’

The story of my call to work as  Bible translator in PNG is a story of discernment along the way. The idea of translation was presented to me at a youth camp and would not go away, so I followed up on it. Eventually I did two months ‘work experience’ here in PNG, mostly in a remote village. At the end of two months I felt called to the work. Something in me knew it was the path I was to walk,  although I still had to work through my desire to live a ‘normal’ life. I did not feel called to a place and knew the timing was not right, but I felt called to the work.

Which way? There are many 'short cuts' through the palms
and many dead ends too.

It took me nearly ten years to get to the translation field full time. These were ten years in which God shaped me and prepared me. On a practical front I completed an honours degree in anthropology, worked full time at sea (which has given me all sorts of skills handy for life here), went travelling (so that now I do not feel the need to wander off), and completed theology and linguistics degrees. Personally, the time was spent building connections at home, repairing some broken relationships, (mostly!) letting go of the dream of marriage and maturing a lot. When I left PNG after my two months of taste-and-see I was overwhelmed by the sense of call and the implications that had. When I returned, I was trained, ready, willing and excited. I was, and am, committed to this work for the long haul.

Choosing to work in PNG was a process of elimination, not of big signs from God. I wanted to work in the Pacific Area. Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands were my first choices, but they both said they could not support extra singles at the time. PNG on the other hand, was more than willing to have more singles (we’re something like 20% of the Branch) and had lots of useful things I could help with while I sorted out the partnership question.

After two years of being a generally helpful linguist and testing other skills by filling a need in the Project Office, I am now in the stage of seriously considering which place to work in long term. There has been little guidance on how to make such a decision, so with other unallocated linguists we formed a group, to work out this big question together. We called ourselves ‘Translators Exploring Allocations’ (TEA), although some days ‘Unallocated Linguists Anonymous’ may have been more accurate!

For three months we have been meeting several times a week. We have invited Regional Directors to tell us the priorities in their region. We have followed up on areas of interest by interviewing other translators who work nearby, by reading reports, even by going to Lae to meet with Church leadership to talk about an area which was presented as a potential need at a conference in January.  We have done team building exercises to help with the partnership challenge singles must face. We have all also been working on our secondary assignments (discourse analysis paper, grammar paper, writing for the Communications department… and more).

Along the way we have found that we have formed a group that is now looking at the possibility of working together as a larger team among a group of languages. We have been surprised at the consensus between us. As we have listened to people and listened to God through prayer, the same potential projects have generally gone on and off the list of possibilities at the same time. When five people, each from a different cultural background, reach consensus like this, I think God is at work.

We now have two places that we have agreed to take the next step in checking out through a pre-allocation trip. The plan is to do workshops in each place that allow us to be there for a time and to be helpful to the community, but without having to commit for the long term. The thought of saying ‘no’ to one place and ‘yes’ to the other makes me nervous. The knowledge that we’ve had consensus along the way so far gives me comfort, as I do believe God is with us in this difficult decision making process.

‘Call’ a slippery thing that can be used as an excuse for inaction or for rash action, but it is also an essential for me in a decision as big as a allocating to a language community long term. It is head and heart working together. It is listening to the advice of the community around me, seeking to move in the direction the branch is going and among the cacophony of needs in PNG, choosing one. It is difficult and time consuming. My prayer is that these months of discerning are an investment in the future, a foundation on which a partnership, a team and project can be firmly built. It is listening to God and then stepping out in faith.