Bringing words of healing to Papua New Guinea

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 7th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: help for the hurting.

At the end of May, a landslide buried a village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea under 20 feet of rubble. Since then, geography, politics, and tribal tensions have complicated recovery efforts.

WORLD reporter Amy Lewis has the story of how the gospel is bringing hope.

AUDIO: [Woman speaking in Engan]

AMY LEWIS: There was very little warning before the mountain fell, says this woman from the village of Yambali.

The community of several hundred people sits at the foot of Mount Mungalo in the Mulitaka region of Papua New Guinea. It’s nearly 40 miles up a mountain road from the provincial capital of Wabag Town—about an hour’s drive under ideal circumstances.

Around 2 a.m. on Friday, May 24th, several villagers heard loud cracking noises. Some left their houses to investigate, but before they could return to wake their children, boulders, rocks, and dirt swept over the village. The landslide buried 150 houses and their inhabitants within minutes.

AUDIO: [Search and rescue efforts]

Counting the missing and dead would take much longer.

WATERREUS: There were still people on the landslide, digging, using sticks, you know, wooden poles, small hand tools, shovels, you know, so they're still trying to reach their loved ones.

Aaron Waterreus is a specialist response manager and leads a team of urban search and rescuers for Fire and Emergency New Zealand. They arrived just days after the tragedy struck.

Estimates of missing people varied from hundreds to thousands, but after two weeks of digging with hand tools, locals recovered only 11 bodies.

WATERREUS: You're standing there and looking at, you know, what is essentially a mass grave…

A week after the landslide, the country’s Prime Minister James Marape visited the area.

AUDIO: [Grieving voices]

The villagers met Marape with faces and bodies smeared with ashes, mourning while they marched.

MARAPE: [Speaking Tok Pisin] The place is a little bit unstable. That is why Works hasn’t moved in with its machinery in case it triggers another landslide.

Here Marape says that seismic reports show the ground is still moving…and bringing in heavy machinery could have triggered another landslide.

Here’s Waterreus again.

WATERREUS: There is definitely going to be another landslide there. It's not a case of ‘if.’ It's a case of ‘when,’ and that might be tomorrow, it might be next week, it might be next year. This event is not isolated, and it's not over.

Researchers think the slide was caused by heavy rainfall. They fear that monsoon rains later this year could trigger new slides. That’s bad news for the thousands already displaced, including Yayonakali Ambolo.

YAYONKALI AMBOLO: [Speaking in Engan] I don’t have a pot, blanket, mattress. Everything I had is covered by the landslide. I have no clothes. I am wearing things given to me.

Ambolo told ABC Australia that besides losing his family, he doesn’t own as much as a pot, a blanket, or a mattress. Everything he had is covered in boulders, trees, and dirt—and he’s wearing borrowed clothes.

For now, sixteen-hundred displaced people live in tents surrounding the landslide. Nations like the United States, Australia, Japan, and India have sent aid. But some long-term workers say the needs run deeper and will take longer to heal than the immediate effects of the disaster.

BOYD: There’s a lot of trauma. Nearly every person in Enga has gone through trauma.

Adam Boyd advises the translation team that’s been working for 12 years on a new translation of the Bible into Engan. With 370,000 speakers, it’s the largest language group in Papua New Guinea. Local pastors say they regularly deal with the effects of domestic violence and tribal fighting. Boyd and his family live in Imi, an Engan village of what used to be known as the worst tribe.

BOYD: We see the Gospel bearing fruit in the village where we’ve lived, and it’s our hope that that will be replicated in other villages, as well as people gain a deeper understanding of Scripture in their own language.

His team has just returned from dedicating the New Testament in four villages. One of them was less than two miles away from the landslide in Yambali.

BOYD: We had planned to do a mini-dedication in Mulitaka, in the landslide area, on July 11. We had planned that before the landslide happened. After the landslide happened, that complicated matters significantly.

They finally arrived at the end of July to distribute printed and recorded translations of the New Testament.

BOYD: It's hard to focus on dedicating an Enga New Testament when there's so many other things going on, when there's relief agencies, when people are scrambling to figure out, you know, how they're going to transport goods across the highway, now that the highway has basically become a mass burial site, the highway’s being rerouted. You know, people are distracted.

Even with the threat of another landslide in Yambali, Boyd is confident that God’s Word can bring a strong foundation for the Engan people.

BOYD: It's a huge need, to help people see how what Jesus tells us in the New Testament, what we hear from the apostles, how those words can help us deal with the trauma and allow the Holy Spirit to bring about healing.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis.

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