Jessie's House of Needles Read online

  Jessie’s

  HOUSE OF NEEDLES

  A missionary nurse brings faith and healing to the remote highlands of West Papua

  John Algate

  JAC Publishing

  Brisbane, Australia

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2016 John Algate.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  All photos courtesy of the estate of Jessie Williamson

  Cover photo: Jessie Williamson with clinic workers. ‘The clinic workers came to the hospital to collect their equipment. Two by two they would go in different directions to visit as many villages as possible.’

  Published by JAC Publishing, Brisbane, Australia

  Printed by IngramSpark

  Contact author at [email protected]

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978-0-9953583-0-0 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-9953583-1-7 (e-Book)

  I was asked to come to Korupun because they didn’t have a medical program. The church needed someone to train their local people to become clinic workers and midwives. When I arrived the people were not very keen about the clinic because they still had their witch doctors and their medicine men. So we started off with maybe half a dozen people in the clinic. Two years later the clinic was full and I was training six clinic workers a year....

  When I first came here the death rate for children under two years was 50 per cent. Now it’s down to just one or two (every) couple of months.

  - Jessie Williamson

  John Algate has more than 40 years’ experience in journalism, politics, communications and marketing. Whatever his day job – news or political reporter, documentary maker, speech writer or media advisor – he never lost his love of writing and the thrill of unearthing a good story.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1.First contact... first impressions

  2.An eye opening initiation

  3.The house of needles

  4.Finding God and nursing

  5.Called to a hard life

  6.Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF)

  7.Missions in West Papua

  8.Medical evangelism

  9.Oubiyo’s story

  10.Death and ‘coincidence’

  11.Adjusting to change

  12.A new challenge – Korupun

  13.Through others’ eyes

  14.Clinic workers

  15.Village midwives

  16.Staying connected — staying well

  17.Clash of cultures and beliefs

  18.The Tokuni

  19.Church and state

  20.To baptise or not to baptise

  21.Aches, pains and emergencies

  22.The ‘death’ month

  23.Translating the Bible

  24.Drought, death and desperation

  25.Jessie’s two worlds

  26.Earthquakes

  27.An inspiration to many

  28.Rebels, war and payback

  29.Rising expectations

  30.Payback for the postman

  31.Goodbye to the highlands

  32.Like the prodigal son

  33.Back home – the later years

  34.The last word

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  For the first 11 years of Jessie Williamson’s three-and-a-half decades serving as a nurse with World Team mission amid mountain tribes in West Papua, Indonesia, Carol and I were delighted to be her colleagues. Though we worked amid swamp-dwellers far to the south of Jessie’s mountain outpost, we met her at least annually in mission gatherings. Beyond that, Jessie helped Dr. Jack Leng deliver our fourth child, our dear little Valerie, in 1975. When I became ill during an admin trip to Karubaga, none other than Jessie diagnosed me with Hepatitis C and ordered me home for six weeks of bedrest!

  Now, reading John Algate’s Jessie’s House of Needles, I discover that what we and others saw Jessie accomplishing during her first years at Karubaga was merely a prelude to her exponentially wider ministry in later years. It seemed amazing enough that Jessie herself, facing the occasional absence of a doctor at World Team’s Karubaga hospital, administered procedures that normally would be performed only by fully trained physicians in hospitals elsewhere.

  I refer to procedures such as removing a barbed arrow or spear-tip that is deeply embedded in a patient’s back or thigh and then suturing the gash! Or tilting a baby in a mother’s womb so that it could then be born head-first rather than foot-first or hand-first! Or, later at Korupun, performing an episiotomy in a cramped tribal hut with naught but a flashlight and a crackling fire to illumine the patient!

  What amazed everyone in West Papua even more was to see Jessie begin training hundreds of newly Christian, newly literate tribal youth to perform similarly complex medical procedures on their own. Jessie did this in more and more locations, including for missions other than World Team. She taught trainees to dosage penicillin for pneumonia, sulpha drugs for dysentery, iodine for goiter, chloroquine for malaria and tetracycline for other diseases. She even arranged for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilots to resupply her trainees with medicine via airdrops in areas where aircraft could not land.

  Many of Jessie’s trainees pioneered medical ministry in remote valleys, enabling needy patients to be treated where they lay rather than be carried or struggle on their own over steep, often slippery mountain trails to find help. But if trekking was indeed required because a helicopter was not available or weathered in, Jessie taught her trainees to arrange for a patient to be transported on a stretcher consisting of two poles stuck through the four corners of a 100-kilo rice sack!

  Jessie also urged trainees to teach the Gospel of Christ to the people they served. As a result, while adult and especially infant mortality rates were diminishing, additional churches were not only planted but also began to flourish. Long-stagnant population growth rates began to rise even at a distance from outposts where Western missionaries themselves resided.

  Not long before her death, Jessie agreed to publication of a book about her life with the proviso that she not be portrayed as an evangelical ‘Mother Teresa’. That the Australian government had recognised her with a medal of honor was more than enough! However, I personally believe greater recognition is indeed well merited. Though Jessie might chide me when I meet her in Heaven, still I believe Bible-believing Christians everywhere will do well to recognize Jessie Williamson posthumously as exactly what her proviso dismissed.

  Mother Teresa served long and faithfully in urban India where taxis, law enforcement and medical supplies were readily available. Everyone around Mother Teresa spoke or at least understood the same language—Hindi.

  Furthermore, Mother Teresa enjoyed support and publicity from the Vatican.

  Evangelist-nurse Jessie served about as long and just as faithfully among warring Dani and Kimyal tribal people hidden away amid West Papua’s rugged, earthquake-and-landslide-prone mountains. Yet Jessie and her numerous trainees also influenced people in at least 10 other remote outposts as well. In some places, as many as eight languages had to be learned or at least interpreted. Moreover, all the while—with logistic help from her World Team colleagues and MAF—Jessie had to inspire individual backers to support her by maintaining a constant flow of correspondence with friends in her homeland. Excerpts from that poignant correspondence abound in this book.

  Jessie Williamson is a godly and ingeniously heroic example of Christlike servanthood. Spread the word, fellow Christians! Urge e
veryone you know to be blessed and inspired by Jessie’s House of Needles—an epic biography.

  Don Richardson

  Author of Peace Child, Lords of the Earth, and other books

  Introduction

  Jessie’s House of Needles tells the story of Jessie Williamson, a remarkable Australian who served as a missionary nurse in wild and remote parts of West Papua1 for 35 years. Jessie toiled tirelessly to improve the health and wellbeing of local people in one of the most untouched, isolated and fascinating corners of the planet. Through faith, commitment, skill, resourcefulness and perseverance she patiently learned local languages, nursed, evangelised and built networks of local medics and midwives who today continue her work among the Dani, Kimyal, and other Indigenous people of West Papua. It is a remarkable legacy that brought Jessie considerable recognition in both her church family, and the broader Australian and international community, including her induction as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) on Australia Day 1998 for her ‘service to international humanitarian assistance’.

  Wherever you see italicised text in Jessie’s House of Needles it is Jessie speaking from the pages of hundreds of prayer letters, private correspondence and other writings that have been preserved by her family. The lively letters not only track her own life and work but also provide eyewitness accounts of droughts, earthquakes, rebel wars, murders and the spiritual and cultural conflicts that came with the encroachment of the outside world on previously closed communities.

  Each letter, often hastily drafted at the end of long, demanding days with all the challenges and human dramas involved, was a snapshot in time, capturing both cataclysmic events and touching moments as they unfolded. This posthumous memoir built on edited extracts from Jessie’s writings is broadly chronological, but it is also thematic. Because Jessie lived so many years in the highlands her snapshots, when grouped together and placed in context, tell much of West Papua’s emergence into the modern world and the central role Christian missionaries played in that process.

  Jessie was both a witness and participant in the rapid transformation of the stone-age societies of West Papua with all its triumphs and tragedies, social, religious and political confrontations, life and deaths struggles, earthquakes, droughts, and the uneasy clash of old Gods and new beliefs.

  * * *

  1 The administrative arrangements and official names for the western half of the island of New Guinea have changed many times over the years and further changes are mooted at the time of writing. While West Papua is the generic term used in this book, comments that are directly quoted retain the speaker’s original words - Irian Jaya, West Irian and so on - to reflect the flavour of the times and their historical context.

  1. First contact... first impressions

  The task here is enormous for which I am inadequate, but ‘with God all things are possible’.

  Jessie Williamson struggled to suppress her excitement as the small Cessna plane of the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) lifted off from Biak Island and turned towards the mainland of West Papua, then known as West Irian. Jessie strained for her first glimpse of this strange new land that would be her home and passion for the next 35 years. It was a thrill to watch the green shores of West Irian come into sight she wrote a few weeks later in the first of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prayer letters to friends and supporters in Australia. Just 27 years of age, Jessie, a missionary nurse, was beginning a fascinating new stage of her life journey. On Saturday, 14 May 1966, she arrived in a dangerous and exciting land to live and work with tribal people. Many were still cannibals who had yet to encounter the outside world, let alone Christian missionaries with their new faith, customs and values.

  After touching down at Sentani Airport near the coastal border town of Jayapura Jessie spent a further 10 days cooling her heels while her paperwork was processed. Only then could she fly to the interior and begin her first posting at the remote and isolated Karubaga Station in the Central Highlands. You gain a sense of the personality, humour, enthusiasm and optimism of Jessie Williamson from her first letter home.

  Let me bring you up to date since I left Melbourne on 9 May. Arriving in Jakarta at 4.30 pm I was hit by a blast of hot air as I stepped off the plane. This was a signal to hurriedly shed the remainder of my winter clothes.

  First impressions…Heat, dust, mosquitoes and hundreds of people everywhere. New sights, smells and tastes….

  The years of waiting and anticipation were finally over. Now her training and experience as nurse, midwife and novice missionary would be tested under the most demanding and difficult of circumstances. The bright-eyed optimism that accompanied Jessie’s arrival in the highlands would be challenged many times in the years ahead for times were changing fast in West Papua. Sometimes the missionaries worked tirelessly for change, other times they worked equally tirelessly to mitigate against its excesses. If West Papua was all new to Jessie, western medicine, western culture, western religion and western concepts were equally new to the local Dani. It was a big learning curve for everyone.

  The people were not used to a hospital. They were frightened and didn’t like sleeping in a bed. In the morning I sometimes came in and found them sleeping under the bed and the relatives in the bed. We had one man who nearly burnt the hospital down as he said he couldn’t sleep without a fire in his room. Fortunately we found the fire he lit before it did any major damage. So we built a hospital village with 10 little huts. The patients could stay in the huts with their relatives with a fire burning in the centre of each hut. We found that all the people recovered faster and were much happier in a more familiar, village environment.

  Our little hospital was kept very busy because at the time it was the only decent hospital in the highlands. MAF would often fly in patients from other areas. We had no roads, no cars and no way to communicate except through two-way radio.

  Karubaga enjoyed better flying weather than many villages in the highlands, making it a sensible location for the Regions Beyond Missionary Union’s (RBMU – later World Team) base and hospital. By the time Jessie arrived its Christian Leadership Training School had taken firm roots at Karubaga under the astute leadership of West Papuan veteran John Dekker. The campus included five school buildings, a chapel and two houses for missionaries as well as three hut villages where students would build their own huts when they came to Karubaga to train.

  The small Karubaga hospital became the main focus of Jessie’s working life for the next 13 years and was an important part of the mission’s growing presence in the highlands. Over the previous decade a small band of dedicated evangelists had planted a strong foothold in the Swart Valley. The mission station and its one-doctor hospital was an oasis in a wilderness surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of dense forests and mist shrouded mountains. It was the missionaries, rather than the underfunded and overstretched government in faraway Jakarta that introduced a semblance of modern infrastructure, health and education services to the highlands. Airstrips were few and far between, usually little more than narrow, bumpy, rough-hewn tracks just big enough to take the small planes that provided a lifeline to the highlands. Take-offs and landings were an adventure in themselves and flying could be treacherous in the fast changing weather. Jessie often operated the early morning radio schedule.

  This enabled us to find out about weather patterns which dictated when planes could land. We could also let MAF know about emergencies and pass on messages to other members of the mission although we could not speak to them directly.

  Other times Jessie talked to the pilots as they approached, because cloud could roll in very quickly and reduce visibility making it impossible to land. Everyone knew that a plane that crashed in the jungle might never be found. It really was life on the edge, even more so in those early years before the government’s presence increased and foresters and miners moved in to exploit the region’s rich resources.

  Any passing illusions young Jessie, or “Nona Yetty” as the Dani called her b
ecause of their difficulty pronouncing J and S, may have harboured about the romanticism of mission life in the highlands of West Papua were quickly reined in. There were overwhelming demands for health and medical services in a land sadly lacking in both.

  The ambush and spearing of fellow missionary Stan Dale soon after her arrival reinforced the personal dangers and risks faced by missionaries living in this remote wilderness.

  2. An eye opening initiation

  We treated many accidents… people involved in wars who came in with spears and arrows in different parts of their anatomy, adventurous people falling out of trees and down cliffs.

  Life was hectic, and so different from anything Jess had experienced before. Most men wore only a penis gourd and the women skimpy grass skirts. Jessie was always interested in local culture, but, like most outsiders, struggled to comprehend some of its more brutal manifestations. Women often had knuckles cut from their fingers, apparently to appease the spirits following the death of a close relative, and babies were sometimes thrown over waterfalls to ensure protection for their crops and family.

  Such was the place Jessie had chosen to be. It was a challenging and dangerous choice. Just 10 days after she touched down at Karubaga station Jessie saw first-hand the personal risks facing her and her colleagues

  Jack Leng, (the station doctor) knocked on my door to tell me there had been a message from Ninia. Pat Dale, wife of missionary Stan Dale, had heard via the Dani villagers that her husband had been killed and the rest of the group ambushed by hostile Yali tribesmen who were now coming to kill Pat and the children. She needed an aeroplane to get out as soon as possible.

  Initially the mission planned to fly Dr Leng into Ninia, just in case Stan had been wounded and not killed, as the Dani word for ‘kill’ and ‘unconscious’ can be confused. Jack asked me to organise an emergency box for him to take on the plane. Never having dealt with arrow and spear wounds I was a little confused as to what to pack.