In June 1984 we produce a Vail Vagaries newsletter with an amusing account of something that had happened. Well we thought it was amusing at the time but others didn’t. We had had a delay in our visa’s coming through and wondered why. I had taken two books up to some Wycliffe folk who had been in Kalimantan for nine years. We were going to loan them one of the books on Islam in Indonesia and get them to read some selected portions of the New Testament in Indonesian so we could listen to the sentence patterns of the Indonesian language. On showing them both books they said, “You can’t take those books into Indonesia with you.” I said, “Why not? What’s wrong with either book?” Nothing, the problem was my name stamp in the front of the book.
‘Matamata’ reduplicated like that was the problem. ‘Mata’ is the Indonesia word for ‘eye’, the reduplication turns the word into the plural ‘eyes’ or ‘spy’. Putting that image along with my name stamp in our newsletter at a sensitive time was also a problem. Especially with the inference that perhaps we were spies. You can see how names and place names can become a problem in an unexpected way.