My Life is a National Geographic Magazine

MY LIFE IS A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
I mean it—that is no exaggeration. I am seeing such suffering and such beauty in nature and in people here in the South Pacific, that I cannot do justice to it with words. My husband, great photographer that he is, also cannot do justice photographically to what we’re experiencing here.

Today we visited a village that is by far the poorest and most-forsaken place on this Tonga Tapu main island. It is way out on a peninsula outside of town, past the wharf, the market, and the Her Majesty’s Marine Base of Tongatapu. This is the part of the island where all the other villages take their old garbage and junk. There are shipwrecks out in the harbor, rusting carcasses of commerce long-forsaken. There are stacks of cars, smashed, along the road. Behind many of the “houses” is a type of bay, but it’s more of a pond that is indiscernible of where it ends and the garbage starts. I cannot believe people are allowed to live in this place. I’ve been told by the locals that the government has actually improved it quite a bit in an effort to move the junk outside of town into the “bush-bush.” I found myself praying repeatedly that the people in this hidden-away village would not feel forgotten and overlooked. Though they are surrounded by trash from this whole island, I prayed that they would know they are valuable and beautiful to the Lord.

Our time there today involved pulling up in our bus, all 20 of us emptying out, and then going door-to-door inviting people to the program we’d be putting on at 1:00 that afternoon. Well, we didn’t get far in this endeavor. Upon disembarking from our bus, we were flocked with about 20 kids, all in various states of dirtiness and disheveledness. I looked at a little girl holding a red flower in one hand, and gripping a barbed wire fence in the other, and I thought of a name for these kids: Children of the Barbed Wire. They were all beautiful children, and you wanted to take them home. One little girl was brought to our attention who had a bad gauge out of her foot—from barbed wire. It looked pretty gruesome to our healthcare people, but they cleaned her off and patched her up. “When did she cut herself?” my son inquired. “Last week,” her big sister replied. WHAT?! Last week? This is a bloody mess on a three year-old that should have been dealt with that day, not the next week. Where was her mother? ? Though I saw many children playing along the road, along with stray dogs and the local pigs that have access to everywhere, I didn’t see many moms. (It was a week-day in late morning; perhaps the moms were at work.)

Enroute through the community, I strolled on to the beach for a few minutes while some of our people played marbles with some of the boys. What was here?! Shells of the most-unusual shape and color! Like the beautiful Children of the Barbed Wire, these shells were diamonds in the rough—spotted huge Cowrie and Collector Urchins and spiny shells that looked like a glove that could fit your hand. Evan plucked out of the coral bits of a giant oyster shell. I found two of the type of mollusks that I’d seen and bought in the Philippines, from which the harvest pearls come.

Eventually, I started a spontaneous game with the 30 or so kids sitting on mats in a yard. We sang songs, performed a skit or two, and I gave a testimony about how God is faithful even when we have a big mountain to be moved. My “mountain” was when I lived in Portland as a young teacher who was only subbing and not getting paid throughout the summer. My waitressing pay helped, but wouldn’t enable me to pay my bills. God came through by allowing my car to get hit when I wasn’t in it, and the person in the car insisting on paying top-dollar cash to fix the car. I wonder if the kids could relate to my story—even with our friend Paki translating. Would the Children of the Barbed Wire—some with faces like older ladies due to pain they have known—consider difficulty paying your bills for one summer a “mountain” to be moved?

I doubt the impact we had on those kids was from what we said, or what truths we chose to highlight. Instead, it was the love of God that caused us to visit, to hold, to pray, to hug, to bandage, and to remember (and write about) the Barbed Wire Children.