25 oktober 2012

On the liberation of Binumarien women


I really enjoyed reading the story here below! Do it you too!

For many years, Des and Jenny Oatridge lived in a small village in New Guinea among the Binumarien people to learn their language and translate the Bible for them. The village was nestled in an isolated valley in the New Guinea Highlands. The people had almost no knowledge of the outside world, were prone to sickness and early death, lived a subsistence existence, and there was frequent violence.



Des Oatridge speaks in Binumarien on return visit in 2006, some 20 years after he and Jenny completed their translation and left the village.

Lutheran missionaries had come into the area decades before and set up a village church. It used a language called Kate, which was the language of early Lutheran pastors from far away on the coast. Consequently the Binumariens understood almost nothing of the gospel. They believed that the Bible was mostly stories of spirits and magic rituals, and they had developed other distorted ideas about what it said.

Once the Scripture was translated into their mother tongue, it was truly remarkable