REFLECTING ON THE JOURNEY (24)

I have taken you, the reader, through 23 chapters of “On Missionaries: A Personal View,” many of them dealing with Joice’s experience with cancer. 

I started the series by reflecting on how I “became” a missionary, not called in the sense of St. Paul or most of the great missionaries, but somehow convinced that I should “become” one. I really had no idea what that would mean. I was a 17-year-old senior in High School, about to go to college, which I thought would prepare me to be a missionary.

I went to a very small liberal arts college in Delaware, mainly because a neighbor girl was going there and had a catalogue showing me some pictures of baseball and soccer teams. She was not a girlfriend, but a good friend and was transferring to the college from Penn State because she too had just become a Christian.

The college I attended no longer exists and probably the same can be said for much that I remember of my college education. I was uncertain what to “major” in but enjoyed some of the science courses (physiology, kinesiology, zoology, etc.) and the one Bible course we were required to take each semester. I finished with a B.A. and a major in psychology.

During my sophomore year I got to know a girl in my class, Joice Barnett from Michigan, who was also interested in missions. We became friends, then went “steady” and in 1954 graduated from college believing we would someday marry and become missionaries.

But first, I went to California to attend the Biola School of Missionary Medicine for a year while Joice worked at a Foundation.

We were engaged in 1955 and married in May of 1956. We immediately left for the University of Oklahoma to study linguistics for a summer. (We took our honeymoon on the way.)

By the end of the summer, we were new members of the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Then things “heated up” with scores of church meetings, training in the jungles of Mexico, and more linguistic studies.

Finally, in February 1958 we boarded the USS Orcades in Oakland, California and set sail for New Guinea, via Vancouver, Honolulu, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. After 21 days we were finally on shore and ready to fly to New Guinea. Or so we thought.

However, our directors in New Guinea said we should delay our flight until we transshipped our belongings from Sydney to Lae, a port city in New Guinea. That took several weeks, but finally we flew to the capital city of Port Moresby, then on to Lae, and finally to the Eastern Highlands and our new administrative center at Ukarumpa, Eastern Highlands.

During the time our shipment was on its way to New Guinea we visited the Australian summer school in Melbourne and met new Aussie and NZ colleagues. Little did we realize how important the school and the colleagues would play in our lives.

We flew from Syndey to Port Moresby, then on to Lae and finally to Kainantu in the Eastern Highlands, just 8 miles from our administrative center at Ukarumpa.

At Ukarumpa we were assigned various tasks, for example I hauled logs for the sawmill on Saturdays when we could borrow the nearby agricultural station’s tractor and trailer.

Harland Kerr, a colleague we had met in Melbourne at the SIL school was interested in surveying a new area in the Southern Highlands. He and I took 10 days, did the survey and were subsequently I was given permission to begin studying the Kewa language, while Harland and his wife were granted access to an adjoining language called Wiru.

From March 1958 until December 1963 Joice and I (Kirk joined us in 1959) lived in New Guinea, studying Kewa and performing other assignments. We were asked to teach at a language learning course for government officers and missionaries, which we did in 1961 and 1962, when we also headed up the course. Harland I also studied the Tolai language of east New Britain and published a language learning manual on the language for the government.

On April 11 1959, Kirk was born, one day short of my birthday. Joice had already been in labor for 72 hours and didn’t want to wait any longer! Kirk was a difficult delivery and as a result Joice needed surgery during our first furlough. 

Joice and I were learning to speak East Kewa, write and publish papers on the language, and compile an orthography, for the language had never been written. Joice taught several Kewa men to read (women were not allowed), based on the primers and readers she wrote.

We remained in New Guinea until December 1963, then went to Melbourne, Australia to teach at the summer school when we took our first furlough, on our way back to the U.S. It was not to our home states of Michigan or Pennsylvania, but to Ithaca in New York state where I attended Cornell University to study and receive an M.A. in linguistics and anthropology.

When we returned to New Guinea, we did not immediately return to our work with the Kewa. Instead, we were given a new assignment: I was the newly elected Director of Language Affairs for the next two years. We had also been asked to start a summer linguistics school in New Zealand.

Karl Franklin