The Spirits of the Water

     Alright this is kind of a difficult one to explain but it is so critically important in understanding spirituality in Papua New Guinea and syncratism in general. As many of you have heard most of us got a pretty nasty rash shortly after we got to the village, some of us (Tiffany) worse than others. I wish I could show you the pictures of her rash but I promised not to. The rash went on getting worse for about a week. The nurse from the training center was supposed to be coming to visit in another 5 days or so. So we were trying to hold out.
     But someone in the village noticed first and we became the topic of much discussion and inspection. There were two trains of thought as to what the problem was. The first was that there is a grass that grows beside the water called pitpit and it has very fine needles on it. When it rained the water would come up washing the needles off the pit pit along with other irritants (aka. masong) and then we would bathe in the masong and get this nasty rash. The other line of thought was that the spirits of the water didn't like us because we were new and they were causing the rash. I should mention at this point that there were some other white skins from our training class bathing in the same river about 1.5K down river and they were not having any problems.
    Finally, the oldest man in the village (wasmama's father)(pictured below) came to see for himself. After a short examination he decided to go with the spirits in the water. His speech was very slurred and my tok pisin was very bad at this point so I did not understand this. He quickly decide on a remedy that involved some counter magic (which I didn't understand either) and plants.

(Me and the oldest man in the village)

   I should also say that I don't believe that this man or wasmama were Christians. Neither one of them would even go near the church and they would disappear when the pastor came around. But some of the people that helped with what I am about to describe were Christians and here in lies the problem.

     We thought that he was doing some basic bush medicine with locally available plants (this is often very effective) but it turned out to be more than that. First he got one of the young men to cut the plant from the bush and bring it to him. He broke off a small piece and began to mumble to it in his tok place so I was not able to understand him, even if my tok pisin was better. Then he gave the piece to the young man who passed it around our heads. He spoke to it again. And then instructed the young man to chew it up and spit it on us in a fine mist. He did this then, the old man rubbed it in. And the whole thing was done. If you are interested it didn't help at all.

    So the real problem here was not that they thought that the spirits of the water were doing this to us. I believe that this is a real possibility, especially since the people down river were not effected at all. You see they believe that these spirits are very localized and they live under certain rocks in certain areas. The pit pit idea is also very plausible and I saw the needles myself. The real problem is where they believe power resides. Do you believe that these spirits are more powerful than the God that you claim to serve and so you have to revert to ancestral magic to try to control them. Or do you believe that the God that you serve is more powerful than anything that Satan can throw at you and that he hears and answers your prayers. This is where having the Bible in your heart language is so valuable, where its transformational effects can be truly experienced in a persons day to day life.

    This is getting really long but we left the village for a few days, bathed in rain water while we were gone, and prayed. We got better. When we returned to the village we brought drinking water up to the house for Tiffany, Silas and Evie to bathe in. The rest of us continued to bathe in the river and we all got better. Praise be to God.