What God's put in front of me: Natalie McDaniel in Papua New Guinea

“It’s going to be so difficult.”  

The Ethnos360 missionaries told senior Natalie McDaniel this time and time again during her five weeks of missionary training in Madang, Papua New Guinea, with 30 other interns. But sitting in a six-seater bush plane on her way to a remote Yifki village on the sixth and last week, McDaniel wasn’t worried. She looked below at the rainforests and mountains and thought to herself, "I can adapt. If someone wants to change the room temperature, I tolerate it. This out-of-the-way village will be no different. 

She was wrong, and it was a shock.  

Lice crawled in villagers’ hair, yet they had no qualms about washing it in the water they would use later to boil their food. The villagers were too poor to afford shoes, yet bare feet meant parasites.  

With every mosquito bite came the danger of malaria. Mice and rats, like the one keeping McDaniel awake at night by running back and forth through the wall by her bed, carried typhus. 

Even worse was the cultural shock of how spiritually poor the Yifki natives were. They were animists, living in dread of the spirits and attempting to appease them in every way. When new people came to the village, the natives would kill something and put that blood on the ground to soothe the spirits. McDaniel was told that the reason native houses only had one small window in each was “so the spirits can’t get in and find them.” Their doorways were also small and had an extra wall to go around to get into the house because they believed that “spirits don’t make sharp turns.” 

It was only 22 years ago that missionaries first came to the Yifki village. The missionaries spent four years studying the culture and language. In 2006, they understood enough to begin teaching the Yifki tribe their own unique alphabet and how to read and write. At this point, they also began translating the Bible into Yifki. This was the reason McDaniel was in Papua New Guinea: to see first-hand how this translation process was done.  

It is a long process, containing fourteen different steps for each individual verse. Beginning in Genesis 1:1, missionaries translated the original Greek into Yifki. After translating chunks of passages, they then went around the village doing “comprehension checks” consisting of reading to villagers the translated verses and seeing what they understood. The translation was then turned into English and checked with several base English versions, like the ESV or NASB. All the words that were in those base English versions must be in the back-to-English Yifki translation.  

“It can take anywhere from 7 to twenty years to translate the New Testament and Genesis and Exodus,” said Mark Woodard, who has worked in Papua New Guinea with Ethnos360 since 2000. 

Yet the missionaries would have it no other way.  

“You don't want to say too much because that's adding to God's Word, and you don't want to take away from God's Word,” Woodard said.  

The missionaries had told McDaniel about how the natives had wrestled with the Bible’s story. They had learned in Genesis about God: how He was everything before anything ever existed, how He created the world, how He was good, and how He is not angry when one forgets to appease Him. 

Many natives just added God to their list of “spirits” to appease. Others realized that they had sinned, and according to the Bible’s law could not be saved.  

As the scripture was translated to them verse by verse, they waited for God to fulfill His promise of sending someone to help them finally meet the standard. When they got to how God wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac they said, “No, we need Isaac. We thought he was going to be the promised one.” Then, “He’s still a sinner, he can’t be [the one], there must be somebody else.”  

One of them finally spoke out loud what many of them were thinking, “You know, the only way this is going to work is if God Himself comes.”  

They came to this conclusion before they had ever heard the Gospel.  

*** 

It was Sunday in Yifki. Interns and natives sat together on wooden planks on the ground under the open-air metal-roofed church building. As bugs flew in and out around her, McDaniel heard the conversion stories of some of the natives.  

“Because they receive the Bible verse by verse, they can identify a verse at which they understood what the Gospel is about, or a verse that meant a lot to them when they became a believer,” McDaniel said.  

She noticed that a lot of the testimonies were based in Luke 2, about the birth of Jesus. They had been convicted in the moment when it was first read to them, realizing, “Oh, I'm a sinner, He’s here to save me.” 

Speaking in the Melanesian pigeon-English that she had learned from the villagers in the week she had been in Yifki, McDaniel then gave her own “boring testimony,” telling of how her parents gave the Gospel to her and she became a believer at the age of six. 

The response of the villagers was the opposite of what she expected.  

“That is amazing, praise God!” they cried.  

They later told the missionaries that it was so encouraging to them to hear the testimony of a second-generation believer because they are all first-generation, as their ancestors never knew the Gospel.  

Despite the culture shock, something in Papua New Guinea resonated with McDaniel. The school in Yifki needs an English teacher, and at the end of this school year, McDaniel will graduate with a degree in English. 

“If I had to guess what God's will for me is, I would think it would be to stop hemming and hawing and just do what He's put in front of me,” she said. 

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