ON MISSIONARIES: A PERSONAL VIEW (10)

In May of 1972, my mother was killed in an automobile accident on a mountain road in Pennsylvania. We were in the Kewa village of Usa at the time and learned about it like this: Our nearest European neighbors, Lutheran missionaries Norm and Bernie Imbrock, were close friends and had a small airstrip at their mission station. Norm arrived one morning on his motorcycle at our house with a message: A plane had landed at their station, and the pilot had a dispatch for me. I was to contact our highland center for an important message. I called “Mike Oscar” on our two-way radio and one of the assistant directors answered. “You had better sit down for this, Karl,” and he read a telegram that said my mom had died in an automobile accident. I was shocked, of course, but Norm and my Kewa friends comforted me.

About two months later the SIL directors sent a well-known photographer to visit us in the village. I met him at the Lutheran airstrip and transported him back to the village on my small 90cc Honda Trailbike. He had come to take photos in our village and for stories. We had both! During his visit, we mentioned that my mom had died and that I hoped to get back to Pennsylvania to visit my father, but that I had not been able. The photographer, Mr Cornell Capa, world renowned for his stories and photos, was with us a couple of nights. One morning he said, “Karl, I would like to buy that photograph you showed me of the village mourning the death of its leader.” It was quite a scene, with hundreds of mourners around a platform where Ropasi, the village leader’s body lay.

Mr Capa surprised me when he said, “I’ll give you $400 for that photo.” Joice and I were overwhelmed and even more so when the next morning he corrected himself with, “No, I’ll give you $500 for the photo.” This was back in the days when that amount of money would almost buy an airplane ticket to the U.S.

Mr Capa retuned to our headquarters at Ukarumpa by helicopter but came back the next weekend by helicopter as well. We flew to a village where a large “sing-sing” was taking place and he took many pictures, including me dancing with the men.

When I went to visit my father in the U.S., Mr Capa contacted me. He wanted me to assist him in providing captions for many of his photos. They would be published (in 1972 by Wycliffe and SIL), with stories, in a book which was later called “Language and Faith.” Joice, Karol, me, and many Kewa people are featured in parts of the book. My favorite picture is of Yandawae and me eating pie together. He has been at a dance and had been decorated for the event, but now he was obviously enjoying eating pie with me, although he had never eaten pie or held a fork in his hands.

I went to Mr Capa’s studio in New York City and spent the day working with him. Later I met him at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, where he gave me the photos he had borrowed from individuals in PNG. I was somehow to get them all back to their rightful owners.

We kept in contact with Mr Capa for several years and his book was widely used in publicity by Wycliffe and SIL. Sometimes, however, publicity personnel over-extend themselves it in their zeal for headlines. A photo in the book shows a Kewa man who has his hands on my shoulders and is staring intently at me. He is highly decorated with shells and has a pig’s tusk inserted in the septum of his nose. The picture was magnified into a large poster, hung in our Duncanville, Texas Wycliffe office with the man asking, “Does God really speak my language,” implying that he is anxious for the Bible in his tongue. To the dismay of those who seek the truth, he was saying, “Do you have another shirt like that?” 

Mr Capa and his associate, who also came for one of the visits, was a gracious man who brought us meat and food and delighted in our stories. He was a friend of Uncle Cam (Cameron Townsend), the founder of our mission, and had once taken photos of the five slain missionaries who were slain in Ecuador. His stories and photographs were published in Life Magazine, which Joice and I had seen.

Joice and I were careful not to exploit the life of the Kewa people with bizarre stories about cannibals and snakes. We didn’t need to—there were events happening almost daily that were unusual (to us) and which taught us much about life. In the book, Language and Faith, I summarized it like this: “I’ve learned a good deal from the Kewas. They appreciate all things in nature, and they have taught me to look around and enjoy the world God created. As I’ve watched the Kewas in their times of trial and sickness I’ve also learned that we have in pretty easy in our society.”

I often revisit our time living with the Kewa people of Papua New Guinea, thanking God for his direction and oversight in our lives.

Karl Franklin