How PNG saved future teens... from me

The air was hot and sticky, just like I was used to it being during summers in the Piedmont of North Carolina. I remember being completely worn out and just a little bit terrified as I walked from the plane to the terminal. I had flown from Los Angeles to New Zealand to Australia, finally arriving in Port Moresby where I was set to spend two nights before heading to the highlands.

My trip to Papua New Guinea began just over a year before I actually arrived. During the Christmas holidays my family had some friends over for dinner that live and serve in PNG. During that meal I expressed my new desire to work overseas as a teacher. They encouraged me to look into the international school at the mission station where they work, and one thing led to another. Over the course of the next few months I graduated with a degree in education and prepared for my first teaching job in PNG. When I arrived that hot afternoon I was overwhelmed by what I was doing. In the end, I realized that my nerves weren’t from being in a foreign country as far from home as I could find on the planet. Instead, they came from the fact that I would start teaching high schoolers within a week and I didn’t want to fail.

The six months I spent teaching in PNG changed my life, but not in a short-term-missions-trip-high sort of way. While teaching at the secondary school for some of the highest functioning teenagers I’ve ever met, I realized that I hated the profession I had chosen (a feeling which, believe it or not, did not stem from the mortifying experience of falling over a concrete pylon in front of the senior gym class I was a substitute for, though that was the icing on my teaching cake). I just wasn’t meant to be a high school teacher. One morning when I woke up with the familiar dread in the pit of my stomach, I had an epiphany. I was going to become THAT teacher. You know the one. She (or he) teaches with the gusto of a limp noodle. They clearly hate life and, as a result, every student in their class is miserable. Growing up I wondered how a person became a teacher like that. Obviously they didn’t aspire to be that way, but there they are. Being miserable and making everyone else miserable. On that morning I began to realize that some teachers end up old and cranky because they ignore the moment early on when they suspect that they hate teaching. Instead of stepping away from the ill-advised career choice, they just keep going and slowly become a limp noodle teacher trying to get to retirement. That morning I decided I would not resign myself to becoming a limp noodle, and the knot in my stomach began to dissipate.

As my incredibly short-lived teaching career was vanishing, I heard all about language survey and how it fit into the Bible translation process. It sounded like the most amazing job in the world, but I was quite sure that my physical and academic abilities were not up to it (if you haven’t noticed, I tend to struggle with insecurity and a sometimes overwhelming need to not fail). Instead of succumbing to the insecurity I began to cautiously move in the direction of becoming a language surveyor for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Since then, I have been to PNG twice for extended periods as a surveyor, once single and once married, and I’m happy to have left teaching far behind.

All of the people I grew up with spent their twenties establishing their careers, getting married, buying houses, and having children. I spent my twenties getting to know myself and Papua New Guinea. During that first trip PNG got into my blood and I couldn’t shake it. I struggle daily with not having a “normal” life and not having a stable home for our baby Ray to grow up in. Then I remember that what she will miss out on here in the US will be made up for by the life experience she’ll gain by growing up in PNG. Looking back on this chaotic decade of my life wears me out and, though my anxious nerves are never far, I do look forward to what God has in store for my family as we follow His lead.