It was a place where, to get somewhere, one walks; to get somewhere quickly, one runs. Deep in the jungles of southeast Asia, there are thousands of people who have never seen a piece of paper, never mind read a verse of the Bible.
It was that fact that drove Moss Park residents Peter and Sue Westrum up a little-traveled river in Indonesia to the Kireb people, an indigenous tribe isolated from the outside world. They wore no shoes, carried bows and arrows, and some men wore only a loincloth.
In the canoe, their 15-month-old son, David, was ill for the first time, with vomiting and diarrhea, and a temperature of 105 degrees. “We just kept going. Later, I said, ‘Were we stupid? Why didn’t we turn around when David got sick?’” Sue says.
“But it never occurred to us. We were so convinced that God wanted us to do this, and that he’d take care of us. I believe the safest place is to be in the center of God’s will for you.” David got well after they arrived in the village, and the Kireb tribe jumped up and down and sang all night to celebrate the arrival of the only white family they had ever seen.
“We could see their faces, they were smiling. And we felt a peace that passes understanding,” Sue says. Anthropology classifies the world into industrial, peasant and kinship societies, such as that of the Kireb tribe. Each clan or family group provides everything for its own people; without specialization, they build their homes and canoes, grow their food and make their clothes. To whom much is given, much is expected.
Fate drew the Westrums to southeast Asia. In the early 1960s, Peter was among the first to serve in the newly formed Peace Corps, in the Philippines, where he was a teacher’s aide in an elementary school. “President Kennedy had started a program to create goodwill abroad, and to give our young people new experiences.
And I had answered that call,” he says. “Afterwards I thought, ‘The U.S. government has a project to establish goodwill abroad, so what is our church doing?’ Maybe our life’s goal is to work abroad.” Peter already spoke conversational German, which he had studied in high school, and so he learned enough Tagalog to get by.
In the mid-’60s, he went with his church on a mission to Malaysia, where he learned to speak Malay fairly well. Later he easily picked up Indonesian, which is about as similar to Malay as American English is to British English, and both Peter and Sue became fluent in Kireb, the language of the tribe.
Though they arrived among the Kireb in 1972 with common Western misconceptions about primitive people — that their lack of formal education indicated a lack of intelligence — those notions were undone immediately. “They know the names of every tree. They know how to live with all God’s creatures in the jungle,” Sue says.
“We met some very gifted people,” Peter says. “They knew how to make tools from stone, how to make a dipper for water. Their technology is appropriate to where they’re living.” The couple raised their sons, David and Scott, among the Kireb. Today, Scott, 34, lives in Indiana with his wife and three children.
David, 36, has taken the torch from his parents and has been a Christian missionary in Russia for 13 years. He is married to a Russian woman and has two (bilingual) children. “Both boys feel blessed that they had the opportunity to grow up in southeast Asia, where the school system provided for them was excellent — they got very, very high scores on the SAT — and with the education they got from traveling,” Sue says.
The couple also unofficially adopted two boys, Larry (ne้ Leong Yaufun) and George (ne้ Sunarjo), who came to the United States for their secondary education. Today, Larry and his Taiwanese wife live in Minneapolis; George and his Swiss German wife reside in New Guinea. The Westrums consider all four their sons, and the boys call each other “brother”.
A healing presence Because of their linguistics training at SIL International, the Westrums could hear, reproduce and write a symbol for any sound that the human vocal apparatus is capable of making.
Peter and Sue went to work creating an alphabet and primers for the Kireb tongue. Sue, a nurse, also became the village’s unofficial doctor — she delivered babies, diagnosed illnesses, prescribed medicine and stitched wounds.
It became second-nature to recognize the symptoms of malaria, which everyone in the family had more than once: an off-the-charts fever, a throbbing headache, and severe chills — “as if there’s ice cubes in your chest,” Sue says.
It took Sue a full year to heal the tropical ulcers on the leg of a woman in their village, with rounds of penicillin, and regular washing and covering of the infection. And when one of her sons, while swinging on a vine like Tarzan, fell and broke his arm, it was she who set it to heal properly.
In a monolingual learning situation, without books or teachers, there are definite ways to learn a language. One begins by pointing at a tree, and saying “tree” — 9 times out of 10, the person will respond with the word for tree in their tongue.
Verbs are a bit trickier. “You jump up and down, you run or walk, you skip, you sit, you stand. But you have to wait a little, because if you do anything of these things too quickly, you’ll get the words for ‘You’re acting crazy.’” Sue laughs.
The verbs in Kireb are very complex — everything about the subject and object of the sentence is marked on the verb. For example, if a fish is swimming in the water, the verb ‘swim’ alone tells whether the fish is big or small, whether it’s far away or close, how many fish there are, if the water is high or low, if it’s daylight or night, and if it’s today or yesterday or the near or far future.
More dear to Sue than anyone was Magdalena, the 13-year-old girl who lived with them to help with the baby and the housework. One day, Sue was studying how to use the various forms of the verb ‘to give’.
She made a chart to understand how verbs change depending on the situation — 15 columns across, at least 12 rows down — and Magdalena grasped it immediately. “She was a genius. She had never seen paper and pencils and she couldn’t read or write. I had Magdalena sit down with me and I pointed with a pencil and we went across the whole chart,” she says.
“I didn’t have to explain. She caught on right away, and she remembered everything in all those columns.” The Westrums spent 21 years among the Kireb, authoring 32 books and completing their magnum opus, a translation of the New Testament (“The Great Father’s New Promise”).
Before they read the Bible, the people were animists, worshipping various spirits of nature. But as a result of their work, Sue estimates about 60 percent of the tribe became baptized believers. From the Kireb, they learned how to thrive with nothing separating them from the elements. They also discovered how to rely completely on God for their strength.
Coming back to America’s unapologetic affluence seemed almost hurtful — a friend mentioning a large sum spent on pet care seemed insane, after witnessing the Kireb’s proud struggle to survive.
“That first time back home at a grocery store, a cashier asked me, ‘Paper or plastic?’ I said, ‘Things that begin with the letter ‘P’?’ I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, what she was asking me,” Peter says, laughing. “With the Kireb, there is an emphasis on family, on people and relationships, on being there for one another.
We got used to a simple lifestyle, drawing water from a well to cook and wash clothes.” “The first time I heard that 2,000 groups of people in the world do not have even one verse of the Bible in a language they can understand, I felt in my heart like God was saying to me, ‘Translate the New Testament for at least one of those groups of people,’” Sue says. “I said, ‘I’m just a nurse, how can I do this?’ And God said, ‘I’ll be your strength, I’ll help you do this.’”
