New Hanover and the Malmalang festival,PNG

Our friend, John Rice, mentioned a man who lives on Tsoi island named Boston, that he thought we might like to meet. We located his village and discovered that we had arrived just in time for the Malmalang Cultural Festival, a week-long competition of singing, dancing and music, with entrants from all the villages in the New Hanover Group.

We saw the dance competition which also included modern instrumental music (electric guitars!). The costumes were quite fantastic and some of the dancing was, well, startling! We were able to watch at the edge of the platform and occasionally the dancers would come right up to us and shout and stomp their routine right in our faces.

We also met several of the New Tribes missionaries who were stationed there. We have met others throughout Papua New Guinea and the Solomons. Their mission in each location is to first learn the unwritten local dialect (which usually takes several years to record exactly) and them they translate the Bible into the local language, publish and then distribute them to the villagers. They spend a year or more before coming into the field to learn the proper techniques for this task. Vicki was so fascinated that she asked for, and got, a set of books explaining this process.