Christianity takes root in Irian Jaya
Christianity takes root in Irian Jaya
By Chris McCall
JIWIKA, Iran Jaya (Reuters): Mary and Jesus gaze down on Catholics in Jiwika with Papuan faces. A human skull lies in a crevasse in the rock underneath them.
Across it is the skull of a pig, the animal central to the lives of the Dani of Indonesia's Baliem Valley. Wives have been bought and grudges settled with pigs since time immemorial.
On Christmas Day local Catholics celebrate mass in Mary's Cave, as it is now called. But moving either skull, even touching them, is taboo. No one knows who the human one belonged to or will say why it is there.
Only seen by outsiders in 1938, the valley moved from the stone age to a bastion of Christendom in record time. But Jesus had to make a few compromises to win the people's souls here.
"Pioneer for Christ" reads a gravestone from the 1950s in Wamena, the valley's main town, 2,500 km (2,200 miles) east of Jakarta. Many of the early missionaries paid for their faith with their lives.
People throughout Irian Jaya province recount tales of missionaries killed and eaten by the people they went to save.
Their latter day successors have high-tech back-up.
Len Van Wingerden flies and maintains a small fleet of helicopters for Helimission, flying missionaries in and out of the jungle.
"There are still places where no one has been," says Van Wingerden, 42.
He has been in Irian Jaya for years, even though he would get a much better job in his native United States.
"It's a much greater reward to fly for the people out here."
Irian Jaya's Christians talk disparagingly of "infidels" or those who have not received the word of God, but there are fewer and fewer of them left. And increasingly it is Irianese who are spreading the word.
Army sergeant and part-time Protestant priest Mesak Napi can cram up to 100 people into his tiny wooden church in Jiwika, some 20 km north of Wamena.
On Sundays, they and the other denominations in the town make the valley echo with the sound of hymns.
The Irianese believe in Christ with the conviction of first generation Christians elsewhere in the world.
But for the Dani and other peoples of the valley, being a good Christian does not necessarily mean having only one wife.
Older people still often prefer the penis gourd or grass skirt their ancestors wore to the clothes the missionaries introduced a few decades ago.
The staple food, the sweet potato, is offered at Sunday collection alongside Indonesia's rupiah currency, and many believers cannot make it to church as they have to work their fields.
And in a land once famed for incessant tribal warfare, religion has become something to fight about. Residents in Jiwika say the different Christian denominations sometimes fight amongst themselves. Their relations with Islam, Indonesia's main religion, are far worse.
Mosques have been demolished before they were even fully built and would-be Moslem settlers chased out. Military and police have learned not to send non-Christians on postings in remote parts of the valley.
But fellow believers from other parts of Indonesia are welcomed with open arms, even though they look quite different from the curly haired, dark-skinned Papuans and come from islands unknown to them less than a century ago.