I was young and inexperienced when I left Texas in the summer of 1961 to serve as a short-term volunteer missionary teacher in Lutheran Mission New Guinea.New Guinea was on the opposite side of the globe and below the equator. In those days, young girls from Texas did not go to the other side of the world. The Peace Corps was just in its beginning stages, and the ideal of altruism, of volunteering to help make life better for people in third world countries, was at its inception.
On the Train at Dallas, Texas, Bound for San Francisco and New Guinea During my two years in New Guinea, I served as a teacher in Katharine Lehmann School, the school for missionaries' children at Wau, Territory of New Guinea.
Map of Lutheran Missions, "World Missions of the ALC," 1964
I then returned to Texas and set about building a life for myself.
Forty-four years passed in the blink of an eye. Through many years of marriage and child rearing, helping my husband to run a business, hosting foreign exchange students, sending our children into the world, burying our parents, and finally retirement, my New Guinea experiences were hardly thought of, though never very far from my heart.
Then one of my former students, Marilyn Tuff, took it upon herself to organize a reunion to be held in Minnesota in August, 2005. I put it on our calendar a year in advance, and nothing would stand in the way of my attending.
In preparation for the reunion, I scanned all 600 of my slides, located and organized my journals and the letters I had written to my parents, contacted old friends, and began trying to remember people that I had not even thought of in nearly half a century.
There is much that could be said by way of explanation and introduction, and perhaps some of it will be said later. I have been advised to stick to recording my own impressions and experiences, and not to try to do an interpretive history. This is what I intend to do. If you need to know historical background in order to understand my diaries, then I would recommend that you do some background reading on the history of Lutheran Mission New Guinea and of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of New Guinea.
I began typing my journals on my Apple laptop while we were traveling, making our way slowly through the South, then the East, then the North, and finally to Minnesota. I began, not at the beginning of my journey to New Guinea, but at the beginning of our group's arrival at mission headquarters in Lae, TPNG, August, 1961.
I am calling this part Chapter III. I have also placed the story of my first week at Katharine Lehmann School, which I am calling Chapter IV.
Chapter V is entitled “My First Days of Teaching at KLS.”
Chapter VI is “Getting into the Swing of Life at KLS.”
Chapter VII is “Three More Weeks at KLS.”
I will eventually type Chapters I and II covering our trip to San Francisco and subsequent voyage to Australia by ocean liner, but not now.
My plan is to add photos where appropriate, when possible. Many of the slides which you will see here actually were originally taken by my Texas friend and traveling companion, Mike Jenson, or by other mission staff. I find I recorded in my journals the fact that I borrowed slides freely to have duplicates made, filling in where necessary. Consider that 35mm cameras were heavy and difficult to operate in those days when there was no such thing as point-and-shoot, and you will understand why I borrowed slides.
If you have photos that were taken during my New Guinea years and that would fit in any of my chapters, I would be delighted if you would e-mail them to me, and I will give you credit for them when I place them.
Now I must write a line or two in the interest of justifying my placement of this New Guinea diary on my personal genealogy site, McCann Kin, which is hosted at Freepages by Rootsweb, the genealogy and history website. You will see that there is genealogical advertising on each of my pages. I thought long and hard about it, and have decided that this story is, indeed, part of history and, as such can rightfully occupy this space. Thank you, Rootsweb.
If you find yourself in my story and object to having your name on the Internet, please let me know, and I will delete you from my history.
Last, please let me know of any errors that need to be corrected, whether typos or errors of fact. My e-mail address is at the bottom of this page.
© Karen McCann Hett All Rights Reserved 2005
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Karen McCann Hett
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