Sometimes I feel we are getting somewhere, sometimes not. They can do excellent work if they want to do it, but sometimes their behaviour is very bad.
Margaret Higman, letter to parents
It started with complaints. Someone was stealing from the rooms of some of the mission workers at Tende. Sometimes it was money and sometimes it was clothes or other small things. Things went missing over several weeks. This was upsetting. Everyone blamed the school boys who worked in the kitchens of the mission staff, because they knew the houses well. Nobody knew which person was a thief. This was very disappointing because these students were young people who had just been baptised as new Christians.
The minister John Rees was very cross about the stealing. He told the school students, ‘We must find out who is stealing. If we can’t find that person, all of you must leave school and go home.’
These were strong words. Unfortunately, very soon after he said this, Rees left Mendi for a conference in Lae and was away for a week. Senior pastors Setepano Nabwakulea and Solomon Dongohoring did their best to find the culprit. They called the whole school to a meeting and then talked to the students one by one. At first, they thought that they had the answer. One young man admitted that he was the thief, but then he changed his story and said that he was not. Only a few boys and the girl students lived on the Tende side of the river and the others lived on the Unjamap side of the river. The students who lived at Unjamap said that it wasn’t their fault and it must be someone from Tende.
Over the weekend, all the students talked among themselves about this. They were very unhappy. Very early on Monday morning at the end of July 1962, nearly all the school students carried their school blankets, spades, cups and plates and left them outside the house of their teacher. There was a big pile of school things. The teacher was shocked to see this, and to see her students walking away on the road to their homes in the bush.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘We can’t stay. We are all being blamed for something we didn’t do. We don’t want to live here where people are suspicious of us,’ they answered. ‘We think that the mission staff are protecting the boys who live at Tende. We will only stay if you send the four boys at Tende far away so that they can’t come back in the night to steal. Very far away – like Australia!’
Wasun Koka was one of their leaders. He was an adult man who could be doing other work and he was angry because the school was no longer a good place where he could learn in peace. Many people thought that one older boy was the problem but nobody knew for sure.
Suddenly, instead of a busy school with four teachers and quite a lot of students, there was no school. Only a small group of school girls were still there. Some of the younger children went home to their families in the bush. Some boys went to ask to transfer to the government school in Murumbu. A few of the older ones went looking for work in the town as tractor drivers or to go out with the labour scheme. A few wanted to go to Mt Hagen to train as medical orderlies. This was possible because a number of the students were already in their mid to late teenage, and already were almost men. Because they were the first generation of people to have any formal education in the Southern Highlands, they were a lot older than the usual age of school children in the first few years of their education.
At first, the teachers decided to close the school until John Rees came back. But, even when Rees returned and tried to help everyone to resolve their problems, the trouble was still there. For a few weeks, everyone was confused, worried and upset. Some people were gossiping about other people. Some people complained that the mission school was not as good as the government schools because no mission school student had been successful in the national Standard 6 examination; but at that time NO students of any school in the Southern Highlands had passed the Standard 6 examination. Some said that the government teachers were better than the mission teachers; but most of the Australian teachers in the Mendi region had been trained in a 6-month short course while the mission teachers had been trained for two years and had several years teaching experience. For Mendi young men, it may have been a problem that their teacher was a young woman, in a place where women were not well respected. Some teenage youths said that they would leave the bad atmosphere of the mission and go to Mt Hagen to train as medical orderlies; but leader Enenol, who had trained there at an earlier time, told them that they would find that Mt Hagen was much worse than the mission at Mendi.
There were rumours and stories going around, and the stories changed all the time. Would the students leave for ever? Would they come back? Some people said one thing and then others told different stories. It was impossible to know what was true or who was telling lies.
In the end, they decided that there were not enough students for four teachers. Isaac Kenaji was going to teach the younger children in Standard 1 and 2 and Margaret Higman would take the rest. Setepano Nabwakulea would now focus on pastoral and church work, and Solomon Dongohoring would go to support John Hutton who was starting a new pioneer mission at Magarima.
John Rees was very disappointed that so many of the older boys had gone away. A number of them were in the recently baptised group and he had hoped that they would help him with the special mission that he was planning. Now he had to change his program. The students who left at that time included Sondowe, Kongel, Songul, Mangol, Tekopiri, Nemom, Tipilem and Lapon. When Margaret visited the government school for the regular Religious Education class there, she was sad to see three of her former students sitting at the back, looking embarrassed.
Australian teacher Margaret Higman was very unhappy about everything that was happening in the school. She felt that she was a failure. She told her parents, ‘Sometimes I feel we are getting somewhere, sometimes not. They can do excellent work if they want to do it, but sometimes their behaviour is very bad.’
When she visited the fine big Methodist school at Vunairima near Rabaul during her holiday in August, she saw a well-run school with 240 students, four Australian teachers and at least another seven trained local teachers, with good buildings, programs and equipment. It was very different from her small bush materials classrooms and her students who were the first ones of their people to have any education at all. Now those students were running away from school. Nothing was secure and she was very discouraged. When she was invited to write something for the Methodist magazine ‘The Missionary Review’ for the 1962 Christmas edition, she wrote a heart-felt piece titled “If Christ had been born in Mendi”. In it, she imagined what it would have been like if the incarnation of Christ had happened in the Highlands, with those who welcomed him and those who ignored or rejected the Son of God – ‘They will again break his heart’, she wrote.
During the school holidays, John Rees planned a big mission. He sent teams of men to twelve different places where there were no missions, in the Mendi Valley and the Lai Valley. Each team stayed there for a week, talking to the local people about God. There was a strong response and Rees decided that he needed all the pastors from the coast to focus on church work, not school work.
When the head teacher of the mission school at Tende came back from her holiday, John Rees met her at the airstrip. ‘I have closed seven out of our eight mission schools’, he said. ‘We will just keep the school at Tende.’
This was a shock. Margaret was not really surprised. She knew that it was very difficult for the pastor-teachers to do a good job in a work for which they were not trained and had very few resources. But this was very sudden and they did not have a clear plan.
In the first weeks of the new term the school work at Tende was in confusion. New children were arriving from the village schools at Kamberep and Tukup to join Standard 1 at Tende. Some of the students who had run away came back. One of the older boys who had left and gone to Mt Hagen wrote to the teacher, ‘They all come back to school? I hope so they did.’
Instead of four teachers, they had only two teachers but now they had almost as many students as they had before. Isaac was teaching a big class of Standard 1 children, so Margaret took thirty children in Standards 2-6. She was very worried because the Schools Inspector was due very soon. What would he think about the closure of so many schools? Was the school at Tende ready for an inspection? Even the class roll book was in a muddle as it was hard to know which children were on the roll and when they had been attending.
The schools Inspector came to visit the school at Tende in September 1962. Despite the chaos and disruption of the previous months, at least some of the students’ work was good and there were signs of progress. The classrooms looked attractive. There was a problem with some of the paperwork, such as the roll book. The biggest problem was about language. Margaret Higman had been working hard to learn the Mendi language. Some of the students spoke to her in their language in front of the Inspector. He was very critical about this.
He said, ‘Your job is to teach English, spoken and written, and any use of the local vernacular will retard their progress.’
Even though the students showed that they could speak English quite well, the Inspector was not pleased. Later, he wrote to Rees to say that it was useless to try to teach literacy in the local language and he criticized the closure of the village schools.
It was quite depressing and discouraging at first, but the teachers Isaac and Margaret were keen to work as well as possible with the new students. Margaret told her parents ‘Now formal inspection is over, I’ve had several bright ideas which should improve schoolwork a lot, for their sake, not the Inspector’s’.
In the older classes, the main goal was to prepare Wesi and Angopa for their Standard 6 examination. Their English was quite good but their Arithmetic and Maths was not. When they did the exam at the end of October, Margaret was afraid that they would fail the Arithmetic paper. They had made too many mistakes, she thought, when she checked their work later. The head teacher at the government school in the town was also worried about his students. When the exam results came in December, they were all relieved that Wesi had passed in English and nearly passed in Arithmetic.
By the time the school year ended in December 1962, many of the old students as well as the new ones had fun with a school Christmas party and the annual Nativity play.
Insert set: Reeson 1963 edu Christmas play at Tende: Upiri; Omolpi; MOM school group; Wasun; Mol, Unguya, Mapot
The year 1962 was a very important and often a difficult time at the Methodist mission in Mendi. At the same time as the school was having problems, other things were going well. New staff arrived. Important visitors came to see them. More and more people were becoming Christians. The new Mendi Bible School started at Tende. The big mission to many places across the Mendi Valley and Lai Valley was successful. Local people across the region were starting to lead the services themselves and choosing to build small church buildings for their communities. These were very big changes in a very short time.
With school closures and problems in her own school, there was a lot to trouble the Australian teacher. Even so, she was learning to love the people of Mendi and told her parents, ‘I trust the General Secretary doesn’t think he ought to transfer me to Papua district if we close our schools.’
At the Methodist School at Tende, they learned some important things. They were surprised and happy to find that, when the students at both the government school in the town of Murumbu and the students at Methodist school at Tende attempted exactly the same examination papers for Standards 4 and 5, the students at Tende did much better than the others. It showed that their mission school was not poor quality after all. They also learned that it was possible to follow Jesus and be a Christian believer whether you went to a mission school, or a government school, or no school at all.
Margaret Higman (Reeson), personal letters 29,31 July 1962
Margaret Higman (Reeson), personal letters 2,6,9,16, 19 August 1962
Margaret Higman (Reeson), personal letters 9,11,17,23 September 1962
John Rees, Setepano Nabwakulea, Solomon Dongohoring, Isaac Kenaji, Margaret Higman, John Hutton, Enenol, Wasun Koka, Sondowe, Kongel, Songul, Mangol Soka, Tekopiri, Nemom, Tipilem, Lapon, Upiri, Ungiya, Mapot, Mol, Dus, Tende, Unjamap, Murumbu, Lai Valley, Magarima, Vunairima, Yaken, Methodist schools, government schools, education, village schools, school inspection, examinations, pastor-teachers.
Margaret Reeson 