A Bible Dedication - Part 2

We had spent the previous day in travel to this remote tropical island in the Pacific called Tuam. I had slept at least a few hours that night on the hardwood floor with a wadded up t-shirt for a pillow. But as soon as the moon came out, a rooster started crowing outside my window every 15 seconds! I'm guessing it started around 2am and lasted well past daylight. It was a little more than mildly annoying :)

I finally lifted my stiff self off of the floor and stretched out all the kinks. Then went outside to take a look around. Something interesting about this village is that they have built huge walls out of bamboo posts and palm & banana leaves, many were about 20 feet high. I had seen a couple of these walls yesterday, but looking around in the daylight, I saw that they were all over the place, and all facing the same direction. My first thoughts went back to the movie King Kong! I was thinking what kind of animal are they trying to keep out of here? I was able to use enough Tok Pisin to ask someone what they were for and they told me it was an attempt to block the wind from the ocean. I thought that was a little strange, cause I hadn't really felt any wind since I'd been there.

So they pointed me toward the ocean and I headed that way. I reached the biggest wall yet but noticed a small openning big enough to crouch through. As soon as I stood in front of the openning I felt a blast of steady cool ocean breeze hit me. Forcing my way through, I found myself standing on a beatufil ocean shore with waves pounding the beach! Definately the kind of scene you would expect from a tropical pacific island.

After taking in some of the scenery, I headed back for the house. I didn't want to be late for breakfast and for any of the dedication ceremonies.

We had a breakfast of biscuts and bananas. And headed for the courtyard like area in the center of the villiage. Here are some pictures of the people as we approached.

We were welcomed to stand alongside the procession as dancers and singers performed. I'm going to fork over a little money now to upload a video of some of the dancing. It's totally worth it though for you to see a little of what I was taking in that day. I've got some more video of the men dancers that I'll show in the next part to this series.

 After the dedication ceremonies that day at Tuam, we had a couple hours before we hopped into the boat again to travel to Aromat island for another dedication ceremony. I decided to head out to my earlier discovered beach and take a swim! When I got there, I found a small group of kids playing in the water. As I swam out to them, one of the littlelest saw me and screamed! He was terrified of the big whiteskin approaching him :). I found out later, that in a similar way we will tell our kids about the "boggie man", the villagers will tell stories of how the white skins are ghosts and that the eat black skin children.

Fortunately, they found I wasn't all that bad so we played together in the ocean. They had a game of counting how long you can stay underwater. So when one would yell out "Mi!" (pronounced like Me) he would dive down and we would all count. I think the record was about 30. So I went in and waited until about 27 so that we could celebrate the current record holder and he could have something to brag about to his friends!

After we made it back to shore, I grabbed the camera and snapped some pictures.

I said "Lokim yu!" (goodbye,n but more litterally translated as "see you later") and headed for the boat for our next adventure! Stay tuned.