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146 pages

English

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From Cannibals to Christ-Followers--A True StoryIn 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals, who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The "peace child" became the secret to unlocking a value system that had existed through generations. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, this missionary classic will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this remarkable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	08 août 2005
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441266965
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0432€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Readers interested in assisting World Team’s international work force in their spiritual, medical and educational labors in developing countries should contact:
World Team

1431 Stuckert Rd.
P.O. Box 217, Ringwood East
Warrington, PA 18976
Victoria, 3135
U.S.A.
Australia
7570 Danbro Cr.
www.worldteam.org
Mississauga, ON L5N 6P9

Canada
© 2005 Don Richardson
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Bethany House Publishers edition published 2014
ISBN 978-1-4412-6696-5
Previously published by Regal Books
Ebook edition originally created 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Photos on pages 236 and 238 by Don Richardson.
Other photos by Fred Roberts.
DEDICATION
To the men, women and children who prayed and shared their earthly substance that the Sawi might hear— we gratefully dedicate these pages .
Also by Don Richardson
Lords of the Earth
Eternity in Their Hearts

Peace Child is also published in these languages:

Chinese
Italian

Dutch
Norwegian

Finnish
Portuguese

French
Russian

German
Spanish

Indonesian
Swedish
CONTENTS
Author’s Introduction
Part One: World of the Sawi
1. Ambassador to Haenam
2. Fattened with Friendship
3. Shadow of the Tuans
4. The Tuans Are Coming
5. The Legendmaker
Part Two: When Worlds Meet
6. Genesis of a Mission
7. Through the Ironwood Curtain
8. The End of an Aeon
9. Gods from the Sky
10. Destiny in a Dugout
11. A Baptism of Strangeness
12. Patriarch of the Tumdu
13. War at My Door
14. The Tuan Eats Brains
15. Meeting in the Manhouse
16. Crisis by the Kronkel
17. Cool Water Tomorrow
Part Three: A World Transformed
18. Stillness in the Manhouse
19. Capsized Among Crocodiles
20. My Liver Trembles
21. The Living Dead
22. The Power of Aumamay
23. Eyes Red with Watching
24. The Long Journey
25. Out of the Ancestral Cocoon
Author’s Postscript
Epilogue
Thirty Years Later: An Update on the Sawi Tribe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My special thanks to Dr. Myron Bromley, noted linguist and translations consultant for the United Bible Society; to Rev. George Lazenby, author and mission leader; for their helpful criticism of this manuscript. My gratitude also to my wife, Carol, for the many hours she spent typing this manuscript.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
The Sawi people of the former Netherlands New Guinea are one of an estimated four hundred tribes in the western half of New Guinea now called West Irian or Irian Jaya. Each of these tribes is distinct and unique, a little cosmos to itself with its own world view, its own set of legends, its own sense of humor.
In 1962, Carol and I went to live among the Sawi. As we studied their language and probed into their legends and customs, we found that we were living and working among a people who honor treachery as an ideal. In many of the legends that the Sawi people tell to their children around the campfires, the heroes are men who formed friendships with the express purpose of later betraying the befriended one to be killed and eaten. The Sawi expression for this practice is “to fatten with friendship for the slaughter.”
In recognizing that the idealization of treachery was a part of the Sawi view of life, we understood why we felt a certain culture shock in living among them. Yet we had been sent there by God to win them, to overcome within a few short years this idealization of treachery which had been part of their way of life over centuries, possibly millenniums, of time.
The key God gave us to the heart of the Sawi people was the principle of redemptive analogy—the application to local custom of spiritual truth. The principle we discerned was that God had already provided for the evangelization of these people by means of redemptive analogies in their own culture. These analogies were our stepping-stones, the secret entryway by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within.
As Carol and I ministered to the Sawi by means of the “peace child” and other redemptive analogies, we watched in suspense to see if the Spirit of God would actually use this means of communication for the regeneration of these cannibalistic, head-hunting people. He did!
In an age when all of mankind is rapidly becoming interdependent within a single global community, cross-cultural communication unavoidably becomes one of man’s highest priorities. Peace Child chronicles the agony—and the triumph—of our attempt to probe one of the world’s most violent cultures to its foundations and then to communicate meaningfully with members of that culture.
The result, we believe, is an adventure in human understanding which will infuse the reader with an even greater and more compassionate regard for the earth’s endangered minority peoples.

RBMU, Sentani, Irian Jaya Indonesia

Part I
WORLD OF THE SAWI
AMBASSADOR TO HAENAM
Chapter 1
AS THE SUN ROSE, YAE GAZED DOWN THROUGH THE FLOOR SLATS OF HIS MAURO VILLAGE TREEHOUSE AT THE DARK SURFACE OF THE KRONKEL RIVER FORTY FEET BELOW. His calm, black eyes studied the slow drift of leaves on the waveless surface. The leaves were drifting downstream, but at a decreasing rate, evidence that the rising tide of the Arafura Sea, twenty-five miles to the west, was beginning to stay the seaward crawl of the Kronkel.
Soon the tide would reverse the river’s current completely. For a few hours it would force the black, algae-stained Kronkel back into the immense womb of the south New Guinea swamp which had spawned it. Yae had been waiting for this moment to begin his journey upstream, aided by the current.
Yae’s wife, Kautap, sat cross-legged by the central cooking place inside the treehouse. Her youngest child, still unnamed, lay asleep on her lap, cradled in the tresses of her heavy grass skirt. Leaning over the baby, Kautap sprinkled water from a bamboo cruse into the white sago flour scattered on the bark pallet before her. Slowly she kneaded the flour and water into a paste, while smoke from the smoldering fire bothered her eyes.
Her older offspring, two-year-old Miri, was playing contentedly beside her on a woven mat. His only toy was a human skull whose sad eyeholes gaped vacuously at the smoke-blackened ceiling as it rolled about. Already polished to a bright ocher sheen by years of fond handling, the skull was kept as a memento of Yae’s long-dead father, and also as a fetish to ward off evil spirits. But to little Miri it was only a shiny toy.
Yae spoke to Kautap without turning to her. “ Uvur haramavi maken; du famud, es! The tide is about to turn: cook my sago at once!”
Her deft black fingers quickly worked the damp sago paste into a long, slender shape, wrapped it in yohom leaves, and laid it among the hot coals. Yae meanwhile donned his ornaments in preparation for the journey. He covered his naked loins with the kind of narrow grass skirt which, in the Sawi tribe, could be worn only by men who had slain an enemy in battle. Yae had slain five. He had taken heads from three of his victims, and this was indicated by the three bracelets of gleaming wild boar tusks which hung around his left elbow.
His prowess in hunting was displayed next by his sudafen , a six-foot-long necklace of animal teeth which he draped in two loops around his neck. Each wild pig, crocodile, dog or marsupial he had killed had contributed one tooth to the necklace. Bands of finely woven rattan also were fitted tightly above and below the muscles on each arm and just below his knees. Into the pierced septum of his nose he proudly inserted a six-inch length of hollow bone carved from the thighbone of a pig and sharpened to a point on each end.
If he had been journeying to attend an all-night dance, there were other ornaments he could have worn as well—a flame-colored bird-of-paradise plume, a headband of gold and brown marsupial fur, a splay of white cockatoo feathers, as well as white and red body paint made from powdered sea shells and red earth. But Yae’s mission was purely diplomatic and not festive, so he was content simply to adorn himself with the white and gold of polished bone and braided rattan.
Kautap used a pair of tongs to remove the sago loaf from the coals, brushed off the charred leaves, and handed the steaming “swamp bread” to her husband. Yae ate half and placed half in his small sago bag made of woven fibers, along with a chunk of pork which Kautap had earlier smoked over the fire. Hanging the bag from his shoulder, he drew his six-foot-long bow made of black palmwood down from the overhead weapon rack. One end of the bow was tipped with a needle-sharp cassowary talon, so it could be used as a spear in close combat. Yae also selected a handful of sharply barbed, bamboo-shafted arrows. Grasping both bow and arrows in one hand, he took lastly his paddle which, along with his war shield, drum, stone axe, spear, canoe and bow, completed the main hierarchy of his earthly possessions.

The paddle was a striking example of Sawi artistry. Fashioned from a single nine-foot column of dark red ironwood, it featured a wide rectangular blade engraved with exotic designs, and at the upper end of its shaft, a boldly carved ancestral figure. Above the ancestral figure, the characteristic wooden barbs and cassowary talon warned that Yae’s paddle, like his bow, could also double as a spear.
Yae stepped out onto the porch of t