Raji

I wanted to write a little about Raji and his life, so you can pray for him. He is one of the middle sons of the main clan that lives in our area. When he was a kid, he told me, he chopped down a tree near a river, and the tree fell on the knee of a marunding spirit that lived there. The marunding spirit got angry and afflicted Raji’s knees in revenge. They both got infected, and one swelled up to the size of a watermelon. He was about 9 or 10 years old at the time, I think. Everyone remembers Raji’s swollen knees. The infection caused some permanent damage to his knees, so that he is not able to carry anything heavy very far. Most of the Palawanos head up to the high mountains several times a year to harvest the tree sap called begtik, but Raji is unable to go with them. When you look at his legs, they are considerably smaller and weaker than other men his age, but as long as he doesn’t carry lots of heavy loads, he seems to get around ok now.

About 5 years ago, a lady in one of the 2 clans living here (we’ll call her Rumita) lost her husband. It was a very unexpected death, apparently. He had been sick, but had just recovered and decided to work hard in his field all day. A hard day of work, with little water, combined with a liver that had frequently fought off malaria and a weekly bout of drunkenness is what did him in. All of a sudden he just keeled over. He was a fairly young man, too, late 30s or early 40s. They buried him right away (as is their custom), and the main witch doctor told his spirit not to come back to the village, that they were going to take care of his wife and kids. Nobody else could see his spirit except the witch doctor, and so afterwards they all asked, “What was he (his spirit) wearing when you talked to him?”

The witch doctor turned to one of the men who helped bury the dead man and asked, “What was he wearing when we buried him?”

The helper replied, “A striped t-shirt.”

So the witch doctor turned to the other Palawanos and said, “He was wearing a striped t-shirt.”

Apparently they all wailed at the truth of this, that the witch doctor really could see and had talked to the dead man’s spirit.

Over the next year, several men came and begged for Rumita to become their 2^nd wife. She was apparently a very hard worker. One of the men, Panin, was said to have gotten up and walked around his house at night several nights in a row wailing for the desire of taking Rumita as a 2^nd wife. He was unsuccessful, and later he claimed that a bad spirit had affected him and made him do that.  Other men were responding similarly, although perhaps not as dramatic as Panin.

However, there was 1 young man, Raji, who knew the right cards to play. He did not have a wife yet, and he knew that Rumita was a hard worker. He actually was good friends with her oldest son, as there were probably less than 10 years difference between them. He knew that with her already having 4 kids of her own that were still alive (she had 6 or 7 others that died), he would not be able to have lots of his own offspring. However, he had grown fond of the 3 youngest kids of Rumita, so he started secretly making arrangements to be the one that would be allowed to marry her. They were first cousins, but it is not forbidden to marry first cousins of this kind. (The kind of first cousins that are forbidden to marry are the kind where the 2 fathers are brothers – then they are said to have the same blood. Anyone who marries like this will be executed and cut in half, laid out without burial, to appease the anger of Empu.) In this case, however, Raji’s father was the older brother of Rumita’s mother, so they did not have the same blood and it was acceptable to marry.  

They still had to make arrangements in secret, though, as is custom with all the mountain Palawanos. Whenever someone wants to marry, they are only supposed to tell their parents and their local chieftains, who will approve or disapprove the marriages. If they tell anyone else, word will get around and someone will try and make a stink about it so as to stop the marriage (usually out of jealousy or some similar reason). Eventually, they do let people know, usually about a week or so before the wedding.  So the arrangements were made, and Raji married Rumita. They eventually had 1 son, and have decided to stop having children after that.

When we joined the team, Raji seemed like a diligent guy who could speak a little Tagalog, so I asked him to be my language helper. That is where we are now. I know a lot about his family and we are pretty good friends. He is my main source of information about the spirit world, as both he and his wife are full believers in Palawano animism.

Please pray for Raji, Rumita, her son Runiliyo and their other children that their hearts will be open to hearing and understanding the Gospel of Christ when we get to the point that we are able to teach them.

They have 3 of the fat guy that lives downriver…

Now that we are back in the tribe and things are starting to settle down a bit, I am going to make the effort to start regularly updating this thing. Right now I am fighting off a case of amoeba or giardia – wow, the medicine really saps your energy when you are taking it. The first 2 days of metronidazole, well, I will just say I was in a lot of pain. I am on the 3^rd day now, and the book says my body should start getting used to the medicine. I think it is, because I have enough energy today to get up and walk around a bit.

When the evaluator came in, I had to do what are called “communication tasks.” One of these was to describe in the Palawano language a place that my language helper had never seen before. I tried to describe the airfield we lease across the mountains. As part of it, I wanted to say that the caretakers there have 3 dogs. The Palawano word for dog is ideng. The correct way to say this would be tege ideng dye talo. I knew enough not to say tege adung dye talo, because that would be saying they have 3 noses. But I did slip up and say tege idung dye talo. The problem is, I said idung instead of ideng. Well, idung doesn’t mean anything, except that it is the name of a fat guy that lives downriver. So in effect, I said, They have 3 of the fat guy that lives downriver.

This set them off in quite a laugh. I had my language helper there, Raji, and another helper, Tabung. They couldn’t stop laughing at my mistake! Well, we all had a good laugh about it.

A storm for every season…
The most powerful storm in a decade, in terms of wind speed, just passed through Northern Luzon, very far from us here in Palawan, causing a lot of damage. The season right now in the Philippines is tag-bagyo, which means typhoon season. Here is an interesting little word study. In the USA, our word for typhoon is hurricane. So when we arrived in the Philippines we had to start getting used to the word typhoon. Then as we started learning Tagalog, we found out that the word for typhoon in Tagalog was bagyo. As we got a little deeper in the language, we found out that the word bagyo doesn’t exactly mean the same as typhoon, because some people in Manila would call it a bagyo whenever there was any kind of heavy storm, whether or not there was a typhoon looming out there in the Pacific ready to come down on us. If there was no actual typhoon out there, sometimes people would say “It’s not a real bagyo. It’s just strong enough to be like a bagyo.”

When we arrived in the tribe, whenever there was a heavy rain storm, the people would say barat. So I asked my friend what is Tagalog for barat, and he said that it was bagyo. Ok, I thought, either a typhoon or a heavy storm. However, then when I asked how many barat hit this area over the year, they started naming them. Storm of the hen, storm of the chick, storm of the sky-fish, storm of the coconut, storm of the dead tree, crumbling of the pangi leaves. You could almost call a barat a “season” in the English sense because sometimes one may last one and off for up to 3 weeks or longer, but it depends more on the characteristics of the storm than on a particular time of year.

Right now is the barat et buntél, storm of the sky-fish, or season of the sky-fish. The god Asok is chasing a buntél fish up around the river in the sky, and as he tries to spear it, the fish flaps and brings intermittent bursts of rain and wind down on us. He is currently out over the ocean, which means the rains come from that direction, and therefore the river will not flood to any great extent. (If the rains came from up in the mountains instead of down towards the ocean, we would get big floods along with the rain, because the rain in the mountains fills up all the tributaries which then pour into the main river that runs by our place.) As the fish flaps around, it also causes the wind to blow intermittently with the bursts of rain. In the mind of the mountain-dwelling Palawano, this is why the rains are acting like they are right now.

In the outside world, there is a super-typhoon that just passed over the northern end of the country. The Philippines named it “typhoon Juan”, but internationally it had the name “typhoon Megi.” The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, & Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) correctly predicted the landfall in Isabela province (the other international agencies had projected a more northerly course). Authorities evacuated the predicted landfall area, and there were only about 13 fatalities, which is pretty amazing for such a powerful storm (well done to the PAGASA people for their correct assessment). There was however massive damage, with the storm destroying a significant portion of the country’s rice harvest for the year and flattening at least 3 towns up in that area. Down here in Palawan, the storm way up north drew moisture off the South China Sea, blew it over the Palawano territories, giving us intermittent bursts of rain and wind coming in off the ocean. Hence, Asok is chasing his fish.

And all this ties into the use of the word barat. If you ask a Palawano what barat means in Tagalog, he will say bagyo. If you ask a Filipino what bagyo means in English, he will say a typhoon. However, as you can now see, without understanding the cultural implications of the meaning of that word, there can be a lot of misunderstanding on both sides of the conversation. For example, if someone is trying to talk to Palawanos about the impact of a typhoon on northern Luzon through a translator, the Palawanos are thinking about which barat (if it is Asok chasing his fish or the mother hen flapping her wings to bring rain down, etc.), and what the characteristics of it are, while the person talking goes on about a typhoon coming in from the Pacific and slamming into the mountains. The communicator is talking wind and rain, evacuations and damage, while the listeners are wondering if Asok was chasing his fish or the mother hen was flapping her wings to knock heavy rain on the people. So the attempt to communicate misses the mark, because the communicator did not understand how his listeners would interpret what he was saying. That is just another example of why it is important to study the language and the culture when attempting to communicate the Gospel of Christ to a group of people that have not heard before.

Consultant visits, travels, seeing our kids
The last few weeks have been very busy as always. Our consultant came in and gave us some help on language learning. After observing and watching me for a few days, he observed that while my understanding is very high, I am making a lot of mistakes in my speech. So I am tasked to focus on correctness of speech over the next few months. It was really good to get his help.

When the consultant visit for us was over, I accompanied him to another island where some friends of ours are missionaries to a different language group. Together we assisted them in their language studies. Afterwards our kids came in from Manila and we were able to spend a week with them here in the tribe. The tribal people were mostly gone for the week, because many of them had gone upriver for the rice offering of the village there.

It was really good to have our kids here and spend a week with them!  We visited with Maman and Minan (Uncle and Aunty), and some of the other folks that didn’t go upriver.  Maman told the kids stories about the cannibals that used to live in this area, how they had yellow blood and vertical eyes, and how they were chased away by American soldiers with machine guns after World War 2. It was nice to be together, play games, swim in the river, and let the kids relax from school for their October break. We will see them again in December – please be praying that they will continue to work hard and grow in faith, and that we will be able to have good communication with them while we are apart.

We have some prayer requests that we would like to put before you all. One of us took the kids out to Puerto Princesa to put them on the plane back to Manila. She also took Maman out because he has had a problem in the back of his knee, with some kind of swelling making it difficult for him to walk. In this place, if someone cannot walk, they cannot really live because the environment here is so rugged. So here are our prayer requests:
-         That the doctor would be able to quickly determine what is wrong with Maman’s knee, and if it is surgery to be able to take care of the problem quickly so they can come home.
-         That as our partners write the Gospel lessons, the message will be clear and the hearts and minds of the Palawano will be prepared to hear, understand, and believe.
-         That our language study will progress smoothly and quickly, and we will learn to speak more clearly and effectively, as well as deepen our understanding of the language and culture.
-         That our kids in Manila will have a good semester and have happy hearts, pressing on in good faith. Pray that they will both stay safe in their sporting endeavors, especially our oldest as he plays rugby.
-         That our youngest here in the tribe with us will be able to make deeper friendships with some of the tribal kids, and that the tribal kids, in particular girls her age, will come around more often so that she has the opportunity to make friends with them. Also pray that she will pick up more of the language.
-         Our next door neighbor friend when we lived in Manila just passed away very suddenly from a stroke. Please pray for his family. He was not very old, so this was very unexpected. He was always a help to us when we lived in Manila and we are very sad to see him go.

 flooded river

 worms to eat

 family swim

 visitation from space aliens