• Papua New Guinea
    2011 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses

    • INTO THE HIGHLANDS

      That same month, Tom and Rowena Kitto left Port Moresby on a grueling journey that lasted several weeks. They were taking the good news to untouched territory​—the rugged New Guinea highlands.

      Thirty years earlier, Australian gold prospectors had entered the highlands to discover a civilization of about one million people completely cut off from the outside world. The awestruck highlanders thought that the white men were ancestral spirits returned from the dead.

      On the heels of the prospectors came Christendom’s missionaries. “When the missionaries heard that we were coming, they ordered the villagers not to listen to us,” relates Rowena. “But their warning proved to be good advertising. The highland people​—curious by nature—​were eagerly waiting for us to arrive.”

      Tom and Rowena established a small store at Wabag, 50 miles [80 km] northwest of the town of Mount Hagen. “The clergy ordered their flocks not to buy from, sell to, or speak with us and even pressured them to ask that our land lease be revoked,” says Tom. “In time, however, the villagers saw that we were different from the other Europeans they knew. Most noticeably, we treated them kindly. Indeed, our kind acts often brought tears to their eyes, and they said they wanted us to stay!”

  • Papua New Guinea
    2011 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses

    • ◼ WHEN Tom and Rowena Kitto came to Wabag, Enga Province, the local missions spread false stories about them. For example, the missions claimed that Tom and Rowena dug up dead people and ate them. Those stories really frightened me.

      One day, Tom asked my father if he knew of a young woman who could help his wife with her housework. My father pointed to me. I was terrified, but my father made me accept the job.

      Later, Tom and Rowena asked me, “What do you think happens to people when they die?”

      “Good people will go to heaven,” I replied.

      “Did you read that in the Bible?” they asked.

      “I have not been to school, so I cannot read,” I answered.

      They started to teach me to read, and slowly I began to understand Bible truth. When I stopped attending the Catholic Church, one of the church leaders asked me: “Why have you stopped coming to church? Have that white couple eaten your heart?”

      “Yes,” I replied, “my figurative heart is now with them because I know that they are teaching me the truth.”