Jan & Eunice Messersmith

1998 is almost over. This is the 22nd of December and I am trying to write a letter that tells you what we have been doing this year.

I was having trouble writing because I was thinking that it would be difficult to describe what we have accomplished this year. We usually report our own success by what is done by the translators in translation and literacy. This is because our own jobs are not very interesting to talk about. We are the support troops of the organization and our work is not very glamorous. Our translators have been working hard to complete the first drafts of books of the New Testament. A couple of years ago, it was decided by most of them that it would be more efficient to continue working on the New Testament as a whole rather than have a continuous stream of individual books coming out. Therefore, there have been no new books of scripture published this year.

There have been four co-workers training in the Summer Institute of Linguistics course for teaching them to train others to be literacy workers. That sounds a little confusing, I know. We have found that the best way to attack illiteracy is to get the people interested in reading. We have also found that the best trainers are local people, NOT foreigners (we are, of course, the foreigners). The training course I just mentioned is for training trainers. We send interested and capable people to the trainers training course and they go back to their villages and train literacy instructors and instructor helpers. It's like a pyramid thing. A little effort at one end makes a big difference on the other end.

We had a mission team come from the United States to help build an apartment for translators' housing and a new general-purpose building. The apartment will be completed very soon. We will finish the general-purpose building after the New Year. It was a lot of work to get ready for them to come and we didn't have as money as we hoped we would have. However, the work that they did in two weeks would have taken us months to do and would have cost us much more. As it stands we have two nearly finished structures that we really needed and would have had no hope of getting without their help.

Jan and I had three months leave this year. During this time we were with our second granddaughter Audrey for her first birthday and I was with Pippa for her fourth birthday. We spent lots of time being grandma and grandpa to the girls. Hans and Tamara took a weekend trip for their tenth wedding anniversary and we took care of the girls. Jan and I went to some great concerts. Jan and Hans got to go to a concert and on the same night we girls had a dinner out. We managed to get around to see everyone we needed to see and still had time for a little travel and vacation.

We went to Illinois to visit my family and had a great reunion with my sisters and brother and most of their families. While there I visited friends I have known since grade school.

During our visits to our supporting churches we told about the work of the local language pre-schools. Some of our supporters have now responded to this project and we now have money to help some of these schools. We are grateful for the support we have received for this project. We are also thankful for the increases in our basic support we have been getting during this year. It caught us up a bit with inflation over the last few years and, hopefully, we will not have to take on any new clients for our tentmaking ministry next year. We will still need to service our present clients and sell computers to them in the foreseeable future to make up the difference between what we need and the donations we receive. We are really praying that we will receive increases from churches that have not increased our level of support for many years. We would really like to reduce our "tentmaking' activities, but that will not be possible without increased support.

On a two-week holiday in Florida we saw a lift off of the space shuttle. Jan said that he had always promised himself that he would see one someday and since he's now 55, he'd probably better get serious about it. We got some great pictures even though we were about 10 miles from the lift off. Florida was having a terrible heat wave which was much hotter than we ever have here in PNG. Our poor little red Triumph Spitfire car had problems on this trip, which meant we had to put it in the car hospital for most of the rest of the time we were in the States. It's a 1973 with over 100,000 miles and it was getting tired.

We had several visitors in Indianapolis. Our friend Karen, who has since married and moved to Fiji, visited for almost a week. She was in PNG with us for two years working for the World Health Organization and also did a lot of SCUBA diving with Jan. Friends from Australia traveling in the States stopped by for about three days. My older sisters and husbands came to spend the last weekend I was home with me.

The first of July Jan left for Vienna, Austria to visit friends of ours for two weeks. I left the same time for Sedona, Arizona to spend a week with a friend I have known since I was four years old. Her mother is almost 90 years old. I wanted to spend time with them this year. I went back to Indianapolis and had one last week with Hans and his family before meeting Jan in Singapore for three days. When we got back to Madang, I immediately started working on the purchase of a new house for the mission. I had to work with the lawyers, bankers, and the company selling the house to complete the sale. It has been completed and we now have people getting it ready to rent out. Our mission will have to rent out the house commercially during the seven year mortgage period because the mortgage payments are higher than we can afford if our own people are living in it. When the house is paid off we will add it to our pool of housing available to our workers and we will be able to reduce our rents for all of us. This is the only way we can afford to live in Madang.

During the months since our return, we have been very busy. Next year is going to be very difficult, since we are losing some of our 'troops'. We will have to call translation teams in from their work to help out with the support work. Our biggest problem here is finding people who are committed to long term service. We have a constant procession of workers for a year or two. We appreciate that, but we really need long term commitments. At the present time, we have only myself, Jan, Sandra Schofield, and Lori Witham as permanent staff.

Jan and I have again spent a year saying goodbye to friends that are leaving for their home countries. We have said good-byes to seven families this year. As the year closes I still thank God for always giving us good friends to fill the spaces left by family in the States and friends that have moved on. We have found over the years that one of the most difficult things for us is the situation here where you make good friends of newcomers and then in two years they are leaving and you have to start all over again. Most people in the commercial sector (and in missions these days) come on two year contracts. It does have some advantages, but it can be depressing. You just start to really feel close to someone, and the next thing you know, they are packing to leave forever. It's a bit like being in the military (we remember the same problem from those days).

This Christmas we will be at home with some of our friends that are still here. I will cook Christmas dinner and our friends will bring a food dish that means something special to them at Christmas time. Our house will be full of people. I am excited about having Christmas at home and having lots of people around.

As the year closes we will be busy with year end reports, closing the financial year, and reports for the mission annual general meeting that always takes place the third week of January.

As I reflect on 1998 I see that we have accomplished quite a bit. This has been our seventeenth year here in Papua New Guinea. We are still convinced this is where we should be and we are doing what we should be doing. We will be staying here as long as we are needed, as long as we are financially able, and as long as our health allows. We owe much to YOU for allowing us the privilege of serving here for so long. What success we have achieved in our ministry here has been a result of the help of thousands of people who have counseled us, prayed for us, been friends in need (our need), and given us their hard-earned money because they believed what we are doing is important, and because they think we are capable of handling the job. This is pretty humbling to think about. A simple, "Thanks a lot." doesn't seem enough.

Jan and I hope your Christmas was blessed and that you will have a great 1999.

A NOTE ABOUT OUR NEWSLETTERS: Most of you already receive our quarterly newsletter from the PNG Branch of PBT. It's called The Storyboard. If you don't receive it and wish to, please let us know. We also try to get at least a couple of personal newsletters out each year. It costs about $500 (and a LOT of work) for us to do each newsletter, including the postage. Starting with this newsletter, if we have an email address for you, we will not be sending a copy of the newsletter through the snail mail. You will receive it by email instead. We hope that by doing this we can encourage ourselves to do more personal newsletters each year. If you have received this newsletter by way of the post office and you have an email address, would you please email us (jemessersmith@global.net.pg) so that we can send you the next newsletter by email.

Jan & Eunice Messersmith
P. O. Box 997
Madang
Papua New Guinea

[675] 852-3030 home
[675] 852-2440 office
[675] 852-2506 fax
jemessersmith@global.net.pg