IN NEW GUINEA

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 48, 25 January 1938, Page 8

IN NEW GUINEA

MISSIONARY’S VIEWS. A LIKEABLE PEOPLE. “The natives of New Guinea are a peculiar yet very likeable people ; they wear next to no clothes despite the intense cold of the inland heights, and, continually smearing their bodies with pig’s fat, they have seldom been known to wash themselves.” This interesting statement was mado to a “Standard” reporter by Pastor R. G. Stewart, who is at present attending the camp of the Seventh Day Adventists at the Showgrounds, and who has spent many years in the mission fields of the South Sea Islands. < Mr and Mrs Stewart left these shores 30 years ago and laboured, first of all, in Fiji. On the island of Maleknla they were brought very closely in touch with the savages, cannibalism being practised very freely. “It was our privilege,” Pastor Stewart said to-day, “to rescue a baby girl in the nick of time when she was about to be burned alive, and we brought the child up until, two months ago, as a young woman of 22, she was married to a Christian teacher.” The past 10 years Mr and Mrs Stewart had spent in Now Guinea, where wonderful success had been achieved by the Adventist missions, tho visitor added. There had been from 3000 to 4000 native converts, and they were really a wonderful people to be working with. Last year Mr Stewart went by ’plane inland—there was no other way of getting there —to a new station at Bona Bena, 100 miles from the goldfields and 6500 feet above sea level. There the resident missionary and his wife and daughter and a patrol officer were the only white people for miles around. Their only contact with the outside world was by ’plarie, and the freight charges—-these strangely enough, applied to human beings as well as goods—ranged from 6d to 8d per lb. There were 50 native lads living nt the mission and they were being taught the rudiments of education with a view to becoming teachers some day. Mr Stewart said that ho had passed through Rabaul at the time of the eruption, last year, and he described it as an unenviable experience. “It seemed certain that the town and its people were to be wiped out, but we had a Providential deliverance,” be added. The proposal to shift the capital was a wise one, as sooner or later the area where it stood would, in his opinion, puffer from another eruption. New Guinea was an interesting country with great possibilities, concluded Mr Stewart, who expresed the opinion that its gold resources were practically untapped.