When we first made contact with the language group we wondered about their unique ways but just put it down to cross-cultural differences and figured that every translation team would face difficulties and oddities. We just have to tough it out. But we did wonder. Not only was there huge suspicion of us and what we had come to do, but there was also strange behaviour which left us reeling. We had heard that Indonesian people were so gentle and refined, loving and approachable. But not ones we were with. The people group we were with were different. We would return to the city when it was time for me to teach at the university and share our latest stories of what happened in our village and other translation teams would be aghast at the stories we told. “My goodness Ian and Tania, they would never do that in our village.”
Even back in the city where people were known to be hard-nosed and suspicious, forthright and direct we still had stories to tell that would amaze the others. Like people coming up to us in the supermarket and asking us, “What kind of family planning methods do you practise?” Other teams were shocked that people would ask us such things. We worked out after a while that we were different from the other translation teams. The ideal for a family nationwide was a boy and then a girl. We had two girls and no boys, yet our children were older than the other teams going out to the villages to do linguistic work. They were still adding to their families. We had clearly finished, with our girls being 9 and 7 respectively. So we were asked the weirdest questions. I won’t go into all the details but you can ask personally if you want to know more. We learned to tell anyone anything – nothing was taboo or sacrosanct. We would field all sorts of questions and requests. Even down to requests for us to bring an Xray machine or MRI equipment next time to the village. Tania was asked in one village we lived in if she had the medicine making her skin white. When she responded by saying, “There is no such medicine, it is natural on the basis our birth parents” the questioner picked up Tania’s bag beside the bed and began to look for the ointment she was asking for. These people were different. And yes you read that right:- people came into the inner sanctuary of our bedroom to talk, ask their questions and minta minta (ask for things).
We lived in a series of villages during the surveying period of time where we were caught between rival groups of people, traditional cultural groupings and divisions across religious lines, even times where the majority religionists welcomed us and the Christians were suspicious of us. We were caught at other times between rival families of influence, each wanting us to stay with them and after making our choice found we had section of the village against us by virtue of the side we had chosen. We lived a life where anything could happen outside of the ordinary or mundane and probably would – from riots and civil unrest to a murder in a neighbouring village yet connected with the family with whom we were living. Anything could happen which we would have to learn to accept it as normal and press on. After all, we were not quitters and we knew we were called to this unique life, God had shown us clearly over and over. So just get on with it.
I was asked numerous times if I would pick up a leadership role in the group but I said no I wanted to be a field linguist. That is what God wanted us to do. That much was clear. We just wanted to do what God had sent us here to do. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to do for numerous reasons – some trivial and others related to the grand scheme of things. In 1989 to 1990 things were conspiring to stretch us to breaking point. I had spent months working with a new computer programme called Font Shop which enable me to design letter fonts to handle Hebrew and Greek, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and symbols I designed to capture the variations in the language. I was close to getting it finished to have everything working as I desire where I could switch between the sets of letters / symbols to capture the detail I needed. My computer had also been having problems with intermittent power failure which would end in with the computer dying and me having to restart again, thus losing what I had been working on since the last back up. I learned to back up every half an hour in order to preserve what I had worked on. Suddenly after weeks of work to bring it the project to an end my computer screen image exploded as though a bomb had gone off on screen and everything turn to dust particles which then floated down to end up in piles at the bottom of the screen. Across my screen were written the words “You Have Been Cascaded”. I took my computer to the group computer specialist to do a thorough check to found I had a computer virus called Cascade and a problem with the intermittent power supply to the computer’s hard disk resulting in the regular mini crashes.
At the same time this was all happening our contract with the Education Department in country was up for review and there were some issues that were being worked out at the highest levels of government. We were told not to worry, they knew about the problems at national level in Jakarta and despite the fact that our visa was the first of those in the group to be expired it was not a problem. When the contract negotiations were sorted the visa would be renewed. We had a covering letter from Central Government signed by the Minister to whom we reported stating the situation and covering us all. It was a pity that information had not been sent to the Immigration Dept in our regional capital instructing them to follow up on foreigners whose paperwork was not in order. This happened after a group of Moonies had been travelled around our island spreading their message without permission. I was ordered to report to the Immigration office to explain why my paperwork was not in order.
I duly took the letter with me along with our colleague who related to the Immigration Dept on behalf of all of us. Once there I was threatened with prison if I didn’t come back in four day’s time with a signed letter by the Minister and addressed to the Immigration official in our city explaining our situation. As if that was going to happen. I reported back four days later on the Friday where I felt to call the bluff of the Immigration official and excuse myself from the meeting to the shock of my colleague. The Immigration official acquiesced and allowed me to leave to the surprise of all three of us, the Immigration Head as well.
The next time we went back to the village things had changed. The tone of relationship in the village had changed dramatically and we sensed a distance between us and the people with whom we were living. People were stand-offish and no one was coming to relate anymore. Even the children were not coming to play with the girls. It was clear our situation had changed. It had nothing to do with immigration issues or work processes. Rather it was the result of religious rumours going around about our organisation. Our village head had heard the stories from his brother-in-law who worked on a campus in our major university city. Hence the reaction to us personally in the village. In a nutshell our time there in the village was no longer tenable. We were no longer welcome. (I am abbreviating the story to economise on words.) We could no longer work in the villages and could not apply for a new work permit and travel permits to work in a different area. We had to return to the city while the issues related to the agreement between the government and our NGO was worked out. Those negotiations continue for a further couple of years until we were all asked to leave.