Missionaries’ egalitarian instinct does more than spread the message
I had expected the big powers, like the US and Britain, to be dominating the front. Instead, they were right up at the back. As I looked around to try to find them, I noticed that they were positioned right beside the Vanuatu desk.
I was intrigued to see a single black diplomat manning the Vanuatu desk, and made my way up to where he was sitting. He spoke perfect English, and as I discovered, perfect French. Like everyone else from Vanuatu, he was also fluent in pidgin.
"I hope you don't mind my introducing myself," I said. "I have a brother who lives in Vanuatu, and works there as a missionary priest."
He looked surprised.
"You don't mean Father Derek?" he asked.
Apart from the fact that it was one more confirmation that the world is indeed a very small place, it was the first indirect contact I had had with my brother for some time. I think Derek by then had given up hope that I would ever be even a half-decent correspondent. He was an assiduous and good letter-writer, while I am one of those people who are full of good resolutions when it comes to letter-writing.
Vanuatu had no email or other form of easy communication, so I learned for the first time from this diplomat that my brother had been ill and had been in New Zealand for medical treatment. Thankfully, the diplomat was also able to tell me Derek had made a full recovery on that occasion.
I regret now that I'm such a poor letter-writer. In the course of a more recent illness, Derek spent some time in Australia, where he discovered the ease of email, and we had a lot of contact. But last week, three weeks after his return to Vanuatu, Derek died in his sleep.
He was buried almost immediately on his South Seas island, among the people he loved and to whom he had given his entire adult life. While all of us in his family mourn his loss, we all agree that Derek would not have wanted it any other way. He contracted malaria very early in his time in Vanuatu, and lived a life that was often difficult. But he never wanted to leave. He loved Vanuatu and its people, and he was totally committed to his role as a teacher and pastor.
If it wasn't for Derek, I don't suppose I would ever have heard of Vanuatu.
A group of islands in the South Pacific, Vanuatu has suffered throughout a lot of its history from mismanagement and exploitation. In earlier times, its natural resources were plundered by explorers hunting whales and harvesting sandalwood. With every marauding band, the islands were introduced to new conditions epidemics of influenza and measles, venereal disease and the slave trade, and the populations of some islands, particularly in the north, have never recovered.
Eventually, the English and French came to an agreement to jointly rule the New Hebrides, as it was known then. Their joint government was officially called the condominium, though it was often known as the pandemonium, because it delivered little progress to Vanuatu. Both the British and the French regarded the islands as part of their empires, and felt free to take whatever they wanted out of it.
By far the greatest misery inflicted on the islanders was called 'blackbirding'. It was the South Seas' own version of slavery, and it continued up to the early years of the last century. Thousands of ni-Vanuatu (as the people of Vanuatu are known) were persuaded, and downright kidnapped, to work on the sugar and cotton plantations of Queensland and
Fiji, and many never returned.
In World War II several of the islands became critical Pacific bases for the American war effort, and it has to be said that for many ni-Vanuatu, this was the first time in their lives that they had real jobs and real money. It was also an eye-opening experience for a people that had become accustomed to being subservient to white masters. The black American soldiers who enjoyed an apparent equality with their white colleagues left a lasting impression, which contributed in some measure to the demand for independence, finally settled in the 1980s with the ending of the condominium and the emergence of an independent Vanuatu.
Derek, though a Catholic priest, was totally committed to the campaign for independence, and apparently made a significant contribution in his own way to the emergence of a new sense of national pride among the people of the islands. It certainly seems to be the case that the people among whom he lived, a proud and beautiful people by all accounts, loved him as much as he loved them.
Thinking about Derek over the past few days, the life he lived and the circumstances of his death, it occurred to me that Derek's life is reflected in a great many ways by the experience of missionary priests and nuns all over the world still. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking about missionary work as a thing of the past. I tend to associate it with Victorian times, when the task of converting the pagan, even though it was regarded as a high calling, often involved exploitation and violence as a sort of by-product.
But there are still dozens, if not hundreds, of Irish priests and nuns in different parts of the world. Many of them are elderly, and yet many of them are indispensable to the communities in which they live. Since Derek died, I have heard many stories of religious in Africa, the Far East, and the South Seas. They all involve a life of hardship and sacrifice, a life lived for the good of others. They involve great skill too; people working as teachers, builders, doctors, nurses and community leaders.
Where once, perhaps, missionaries were the people who brought the natives to God, whether the natives wanted it or not, now they seem to be the enablers and supporters of communities. They face issues of poverty and disease, and they face them up close, in a way that many of the rest of us simply would never be able to do. And they do it out of a conviction, very often a belief in the value of their own people every bit as much as a religious imperative.
My own brother was one among many. I know that those who knew him best described him as a friend and teacher, a man with the gift of changing people's lives through friendship. We'll never see him again, and that's a source of great sadness for his family. But we know there are many, people we never knew, who will mourn him, celebrate him, and never forget him.
And that's a source of great pride.
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