Elijah and Moira Hall TRIBAL MISSIONS - Reaching the unreached 
Elijah (second from L) and Kanuka friends, 1992
Loud wailing greeted the boy as he neared the village – screaming sobs that announced the death of a Kanuka man. Elijah had hiked for hours with his father, who was a missionary to the this tribe in the dense interior of Papua New Guinea, to observe the funeral. They were hoping to see deeper into the minds of the Kanuka* people in order to better communicate the Gospel with them.
The ceremonial wailing continued long into the night. Part of the weeping was genuine sorrow for the dead; part of it was driven by fear, because the Kanuka believed that the spirit of the dead man was still lingering in the village. They were hoping to to appease the spirit so it would leave. Elijah wondered what else they believed… many of the rituals performed by the tribal people were motivated by the fear of spirits…but he was only thirteen years old, and fatigue was beginning to overtake him…
He lay down on a stick bed in one of the houses, but it was hard to sleep. The nubby sticks poked into him, smoke from the open fire stung his eyes, and the wailing was loudest here. It was in this hut that the family of the deceased kept watch over his body. Such a long night, the boy thought.
CRASH! Elijah jumped up out of the stick bed as he realized it was morning and he was all alone in the hut with the corpse. CRASH! He saw what was happening as the whooping and screaming began – the people were hurling rocks at the house he was in. They were stoning it to drive the dead man’s spirit out of the village, and anxiety struck him because the hut was none too sturdy. Elijah knew he didn’t want to stay there any longer! He dashed out the door.
The people were just as surprised as he was; they had forgotten about the white boy, whose face was even whiter now than it had been the day before. “Moso-moso (Little Bush Rat),” they asked him, “did you see the dead man’s spirit leave?”
“No,” Elijah answered. The strangeness of all that had happened left him a little dazed.
That afternoon he and his father hiked back home with their notes and a sober feeling inside, wishing they could communicate better with the Kanuka people.
*tribal name has been changed to protect the privacy of this people
Tags: funeral, Kanuka, Papua New Guinea
