From Melbourne to Mangga

A chance meeting at the 30-year anniversary celebration of the PNG Bible Translation Association last year fulfilled a childhood wish for ‘The National’ (PNG) journalist LUCY KAPI.

My old folks often tell the story of two young Australian women who came in the 1960s to live in our village of Mangga in Mumeng, Morobe province.

Joan Healey and Roma Hardwick spent 20 years learning to speak my local language fluently. I always admired the courage and work of these white women who translated the New Testament and then taught my people to write and read in their own language so we could read the Bible and learn more about God.

It was a long-held wish to one day meet these remarkable women and hear them speak my language. That wish came true last year when Joan attended the 30-year anniversary celebration of the Bible Translation Association (BTA) in Port Moresby.

It was only when BTA director Thomas Stephen was speaking to the international guests about the work done by Joan and Roma that I knew Joan was present. It was an honour for me to meet the woman who had done such great work for my people and the curiosity I had was satisfied when I heard her speak in my language and mention my relatives.

Joan and her husband Bruce Hooley now live in United States but through constant communication I have been able to learn more about her life at my village.

Both she and Roma were born in Melbourne, Australia. Joan was a primary school teacher and Roma a secretary before they met when each of them answered separate calls from God to study at the Summer Institute of Linguistics' Melbourne Bible Institute.

At that time Joan's older brother Alan and his wife Phyllis were members of SIL working in Telefomin in West Sepik province translating the Bible for local language speakers. Joan and Roma began to think that perhaps God wanted them to do Bible translation work with SIL in PNG.

At the ages of 31 and 26 respectively, Roma arrived in PNG in 1961 and Joan came a year later.

Each spent their first three months orientating and learning some Tok Pisin before they went to live in the Markham Valley where they stayed in bush shelters, ate local food, cooked using mud stoves, learnt first aid and other practical skills and did lots of hiking.

They then went to the Highlands and in early 1963 the SIL director in PNG talked to them about places they could do their language and translation work.

They decided to go to Mangga and ask the people if they would be happy to have them live among them. They travelled by vehicle from Lae to Mumeng, and then walked through the Snake River valley before climbing the mountain to Mangga.

They met some old men at Lisakane hamlet who agreed to talk about the women's plans to other villagers. They had to wait several weeks at a Lutheran mission before getting the answer they wanted.

Returning to the village, through open grassland up the mountain to Deend, they enjoyed looking across the valley to the steep hills on the other side where there is a big waterfall (Bel Laangoyang).

"The Mangga people were very kind and brought us food and firewood," Joan told me.

A house was built for the women at Dumbjariiy hamlet on land owned by my elder aunt Gamungo and her husband Yaling and in the 21 years from1963 to 1984 Joan and Roma lived there for a several months each year. At other times, they stayed at the SIL centre in the Eastern Highlands at Ukarumpa.

Uncle Yaling built their house using timber and plaited bamboo for walls, pandanus palms trunks (huv vaha) for the floor and a thatched grass roof. Some years later, when the grass roof was leaking badly, someone in Australia donated funds to buy corrugated iron for a new roof.

The people of my village welcomed the two women as their own, and even gave them village names and included them in one of our own clans.

Joan says Mangga people were very patient in teaching them their language. "We spoke Tok Pisin at first, and as people told us Mangga words, we mimicked what they said, and wrote down words and sentences. We made lots of mistakes in understanding and speaking but after nine months we had learnt enough Mangga to talk about everyday things so we stopped using Tok Pisin and just spoke Mangga."

When they learned enough Mangga sentences and stories, they were able to work out speech sounds and determine the alphabet letters to use to write the language for Mangga people to read and understand. They worked out Mangga grammar, the order of words in sentences, and all the different ways that Mangga people put words together to say different things, to ask questions and make statements.

They found that Mangga has five different words that mean "we" or "us" and four different words meaning "you". "We also found that Mangga has rules that allow a speaker to leave out a word because people will understand the meaning anyway - but these are only a few of the many things that make up the grammar of Mangga," Joan told me.

Between 1971 and 1973, they worked with local pastor Andrew Baru translating the New Testament. After completing a few books of the New Testament, they would take a couple of villagers to Ukarumpa to work with a qualified consultant to make sure that the translation was clear.

They taught small groups of people to read in Mangga and trained young people to become literacy teachers in their own villages at Mangga, Kwasang, Tokanen and Baayemaatuh.

In 1982, their work translating the New Testament was finished and people came from nearby villages to Mangga and joyfully celebrated the arrival of the printed copies of their own New Testament, Vakasin Moos.  Many people bought their own copies to read and many more continue to read it today. One of the old men told Joan that reading Vakasin Moos was making him a new person. "We were thrilled to hear that God was changing him as he read God's word in his own language," she said.

Over the next two years, they completed a translation of Genesis and a mini dictionary of the Mangga language with meanings in Tok Pisin and in English.

The two women left Deend at the end of 1984. "It was very hard to say goodbye," Joan said. "It felt like we were leaving home ... we felt blessed and very privileged that we had been able to live in Mangga for so many years, sharing in people's lives there, and giving them the opportunity to learn to read and write their own language, and to read God's word in the language which speaks most clearly to them."

Joan has returned to PNG a couple of times since, including a short visit to Mangga in 2000.

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