Not too long ago, Kelina wasn’t your ideal mother. She would spill her anger over onto her three children, hitting them every day. She never used an empty hand to hit them, but would use rattan to hurt them. Her children were scared of her.

“I started to hit them when my husband wasn’t at home.

“I don’t know why it was so easy to get angry with my children. All I know is that when they wouldn’t do something that I had asked, I became angry and started to smite them. My anger was known as a common and frightening morning greeting for them.”

Kelina lives in Wamena, West Papua, a small city on the western side of the remote island of New Guinea. Wamena women are known as caring people and responsible mothers. Even though they have two major responsibilities, to go to the farmland and take care of their children every day, they still have love to share with their family.

That responsibility encourages Wamena women to be strong against all challenges. Even when they receive challenges from the unpredictable weather, they always try to give their best. In the middle of the difficult conditions, they still are able to give their love and time for their family.

Wamena women think creatively with the resources they have to survive. Even though they do not own farmland themselves, they rent farmland from others. To pay the cost of the rental of the land, they will share half of the crops with the owner of the land.

Although Kelina owned her own land, she didn’t want to take care of it. She had a bad attitude toward it. As a wife of Yosep, Kelina never showed her thankfulness, preferring to blame her husband, who didn’t work and couldn’t support their needs.

“I liked to get angry with him. I even have hit him because he couldn’t support our family financially.”

Kelina didn’t know how to give her love to her family in appropriate ways. Since she was young, Kelina’s parents never taught her.

Kelina also did not have a good relationship with God, even though she was born in a Christian home. She didn’t go to Sunday school very often. She preferred to stay at home and sleep rather than to go to church or have a daily prayer life in the morning.

“I never knew that building a relationship with God would help me to deal with anything. I just know when I feel angry, I can hurt anyone I like to hurt.”

Kelina’s bad attitude didn’t stop at the front door of her house. Kelina liked to gossip about the things going on in her neighborhood.

Kelina once had a fight with one of her relatives who asked for food. She gave her answer with one slap to her relative.

Her bad attitude became a trigger for her to fight with everyone. But then everything changed. (more…)

Every year from June until September, the people in Minahasa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, have celebrated a traditional thanksgiving holiday from generation to generation, called Pengucapan. It is the way the people of Minahasa express their gratitude to God for the blessings of the previous year.

The Pengucapan tradition started when the people in this remote area of Indonesia still worshiped gods. They expressed their gratitude to the ultimate god or the highest god, known as opo wanatas empung walian empung rengan-rengan.

After the harvest, Minahasa people held a kuman kan weru ceremony to eat their harvest for the first time and express their gratitude though song and praise to their gods for fertility, good weather, harvest and health. They would  bring their crops as an offering to their gods.

Christianity came to Minahasa in the 1800s, and Minahasa now has one of the highest rates of Christianity in all of Indonesia.

Pastor Philep, who works with a Compassion child development center in Wiaulapi, explained that after Christianity’s arrival, the Church rejected all forms of worshiping gods as part of animism. But the Church at that time saw the expression of gratitude that Minahasa people had in this tradition and allowed them to continue it through churches.

With the presence of the Church, the form of kuman kan weru changed. (more…)

Over on another blog post – Where Do You Sponsor a Child? – several sponsors have been exchanging maps of the countries where we work; maps that list the child development center numbers and give a rough approximation of where the centers are located in relation to one another.

You can now find all of those maps in our Flickr account.

Have you ever wondered how Compassion, an openly evangelical organization, is able to work in Muslim or Hindu countries where evangelism is illegal? I have.

The other day I had an opportunity to spend an hour with a couple of our field staff, Mathew from India and Kevin from Bangladesh, and I asked them this question: How can Compassion work in India or Bangladesh or Indonesia?

Here is what they said …

We redefine the meaning of “evangelism.” The true way to evangelize someone is simply to act in a way that causes them to ask, “Why do you care?” This is what we do. We don’t “evangelize” the children in the sense most Westerners do. We simply care for them and then the parents ask why.

I’ve been processing that conversation ever since it occurred. Perhaps many of us have our focus in the wrong place. If Christians would make relationships our top priority, we wouldn’t have to put so much time or effort into evangelism. It would be the natural result.

What do you think?

Four years ago, on December 26, 2004, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. More than 225,000 people were killed in 11 countries.

Banda Aceh was one of those communities devastated by the tsunami. We had no active program in Banda Aceh before the tsunami, and in fact, none of the areas where we worked in Indonesia before the tsunami were affected.

But when the tsunami hit, we initiated temporary relief work under the name ‘ARIEF’ or Aceh Relief for the tsunami victims. This local name was chosen in order to allow a local ministry to take over the relief and do follow-up work for the beneficiaries of the programs after our initial relief work ended. Our relief work was initially planned for one year. (more…)

It was Christmas morning, and I lay impatiently in my bed awaiting the sound of my parents stirring downstairs. We’ve never been the kind of family that wakes up and rushes to the living room to tear into the gifts before we have properly washed the “eye boogers” out of our eyes (disgusting I know, but hey . . . the truth is ugly sometimes). We tend to be a little more reserved about the process. 

We sleep in, which for our family is until about 8:15. We shower and dress for the day, as we usually spend the afternoon with extended family, and we often debate about what we want Dad to make for breakfast. It’s usually his world famous omelets. If you think I’m exaggerating . . . well, I’m not. They’re insane. 

This one particular Christmas, though, held one very unique gift, wrapped in a beige envelope and delicately placed in between the branches of our tree. There were actually two envelopes; one had my brother’s name on it and the other had mine, written in my mother’s elegant penmanship. 

Curious as to what could possibly be in something the size of a letter and thin as paper, my brother and I opened them slowly, simultaneously. 

(more…)

Story and photos by Oktovina Butarbutar, Compassion East Indonesia Field Communications Specialist

Selvie, a 41-year-old single parent, has been serving as the coordinator of Elohim Child Development Center for almost two years now.

During her first year at the center, Selvie had been facing obstacles, which came from both her own family and the community around the center.

She had to take care of her two children and her new enlarged family. Her husband had left her after 16 years and left her in anguish. She moved back to her parents’ house, where her two siblings along with their families had just moved in, too.

The community doubted whether Selvie would be able to manage the ministry. They thought it was her fault that her family had been broken.

Surrendering to God’s will is what Selvie has been doing as well as raising her children. She has two children; the oldest, Indriani Natalia, graduated from college few months ago and the youngest, Aldo Aprillio Samuel, is in fifth grade now.

Selvie has been spending up to 12 hours a day for the ministry since appointed to be the center coordinator. Her daily activities are more or less the same:

• shopping for the children’s meal
• going to the center to help the cook prepare the meals and to clean up the church
• checking the reports and the day’s scheduled program
• having praise and worship with children
• talking with parents
• coordinating with staff members after the activity
• going back home

Spend a day with Selvie

(more…)