From left to right: Hindramalai, Aki, Elatu, Pawa Hundu, Aileen and Schubert.
My life story attests to God’s capacity to turn the most tragic of beginnings into the most beautiful of stories that does not end but continues into eternity.
My story starts with my father, a carpenter who worked for the Seventh-day Adventist church in Papua New Guinea, and my mother, a homemaker. We were a family of seven, and being the eldest in my family, there were high expectations for me for the betterment of our family.
Unfortunately, all that he could contribute to my personal journey ended in 1984 when he suffered a severe stroke, which left him paralyzed on the right of his body. This devastating event had a profound impact on our family. My mother, unable to cope, abandoned our family after a year. My father’s condition only worsened, leaving him bedridden for 17 years until his passing in 2001.
During those years, our fledgling family hit rock bottom. No one was there for us; even my immediate relatives and family friends would not come and visit us. Everyone in the village abandoned us and did not recognize us as members worth assisting. Lacking significant resources to add to community contributions like compensation or bride price, we were irrelevant.
The situation got worse during the first year after my mom left. I was 10 years old and had to be responsible for my younger siblings. There was no food, money, clothes, or even a blanket to keep ourselves warm at night. To illustrate the dire situation, I remember one day walking home from our small garden; I was so hungry and picking up a piece of sweet potato thrown on the roadside and eating it. We were all becoming severely malnourished, not having eaten a good meal for months on end; we could see bones protruding, barely concealed by our flesh. I was so worried that I decided to collect the fat from mutton flaps cooked by mothers on the roadside to supplement our diet of mainly sweet potatoes. However, I was older and somewhat self-conscious, so I recruited my little brother to collect our “protein.”
I told my small brother to sit next to the village mothers and ask them if he could collect the oil and lamb fat residue dripping from the various pan’s edges. He would collect the fat after sitting all afternoon by the roadside with the ladies frying lamb flaps. In the evening, he would return to the house with four tins full of lamb fat mixed with cooking oil, all solidified. We would then collect the wild ferns and eat the remaining sweet potatoes with the concoction.
Our little shelter had begun to deteriorate as the rain and cold wind penetrated every corner of the house, for the fraying bamboo walls and rotting thatched kunai grass roofs could offer little resistance. Our father had built the house when healthy; as children, we could do nothing but endure.
Yet through it all, my father prayed. He was bedridden and could do little to help us, yet his faithfulness in prayer and faith in God slowly persuaded me that things could get better for us and pushed me to take the first tentative steps toward creating a better future. I decided to go to school after my mother had returned to take care of my siblings in response to my pleas to be our one human ally in this struggle.
One memorable occurrence illustrates the welcoming party the devil had arranged for me as I set out on this essentially uncertain journey. One Friday, I had nothing to wear to school since I had washed my only shirt and long pants in preparation for the Sabbath. Hurriedly, I got my belt and tightened it over the tabale (small cloth) and pajapu (cordyline leaves) I had picked from the roadside, covering myself from the waist down, and quickly headed off to school. Unfortunately, I went to school late that day while everyone was in assembly. The teacher saw me coming and ordered me to stand before the assembly.
“Don’t you know that this is the SDA mission school?” He asked sternly, “Who told you to wear this thing?” Apart from the sheer horror of being called to the front of the student body, I couldn’t speak English/Tok pidgin, so I stammered, “mi aka nawi, mi aka bijore hangu gokoni sabat naka,” (I have no other clothes, my clothes are preserved for Sabbath). Not only was I late, but I was also inappropriately dressed and seemed to be deliberately not speaking English. He decided to meet out punishment equal to the rebelliousness displayed by striking me with his wooden meter-long ruler on the buttocks five times so ferociously that the student’s belt broke. The tabale and pajapu dropped in front of all the students, and I ran naked across the field and into the nearby bushes. I suspect I may still have some residue trauma from the incident 40 years later.
However, as I matured, I realized that it was not only my family who went through such struggles; it is the human lot and there are stories more painful than mine. From this empathetic perspective, I took to the path of forgiveness and saw people, both believers and nonbelievers, as God saw them. I had the choice to trust the God who is love and chose to love as He did or let the hate take over. By God’s grace, I chose love, which has made all the difference.
If an angel had told my father in a dream during those days that his son would have the privilege of studying at Andrews, along with his grandkids attending American colleges, he would have found it impossible to believe. God did not just give dreams nor send angels to tell me everything would be okay during those days. He did more than that; He decided to walk with me every step of the way. Looking back, I realize I had nothing to fear, my family was secure in that all-powerful, righteous right hand. We have always been in the grip of grace.
Aki Pawa hails from Hela Province in Papua New Guinea and is in the MDiv program at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University.
