When word came that Linus Wairapu had died of Tuberculosis, I was having dinner with a friend I had not seen in 28 years. In less than that time, Linus Wairapu came into our lives, and had left. My friend asked what the phone call from Papua New Guinea was about. I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.” I couldn’t begin to tell him how much Linus Wairapu means to me and to my family, and how much we will miss him. I knew I could not handle the emotion of thinking about Linus while trying to catch up on my friend and his family. So we had our dinner, and now it’s time to mourn Linus and to remember his life, at least the part of it that touched ours.
When we first arrived in Arop in February 1988, Linus was probably the first Arop man we ever met. During our ten years on the beach in Arop, Linus was our skipper. He piloted our 18-foot dinghy with its 40 h.p. Yamaha outboard motor to and from Arop, with my most precious cargo inside: my family. Going in and out of the dangerous breakers, we routinely placed our lives in his hands.
He was among the best skippers on the north coast of Papua New Guinea, always careful to count the waves as they came in, waiting for just the right gap between swells when he could start the engine and gun it, crossing an oncoming wave just after it broke, then speeding on before the next one approached.
He could “read” the waves better than anyone we knew—an important skill when moving through ocean breakers.
Eric especially enjoyed the occasions when Linus let him drive the boat. [I'll put a photo of that in here when I find it.]
On one occasion, Linus misjudged a particularly large wave when a fellow passenger was too active in backseat driving. The wave crashed right into the boat, sweeping Bonnie and Brianna, along with the chair they were sitting on, all the way to the back of the boat. Somehow, Linus was able to get the boat, half-full of water out of the impact zone before the next wave could hit us. Linus felt awful. It was a reminder of how dangerous coastal sea travel can be, and of how good a skipper he was: Of the dozens of times we traveled with him, that was the only mishap.
With a knack for mechanical things, he was in charge of maintaining our outboard motor. When my parents came to visit us in Arop in 1989, Linus was away visiting relatives, so I had to skipper the boat myself as we went to the airstrip. It poured rain, and I forgot to flush the engine with fresh water. Of course it froze up, and Linus (right, in photo below) had to help me free it up again while our friend John Maki looked on.
Linus also did carpentry for us on our house in Arop village, which was quickly going the way of all things made of tropical materials.
He protected our lives as a skipper, and repaired our house as a carpenter. We worked together on electrical and plumbing projects. But his most critical service to us was as trusted confidant. When we first started living in Arop, many things about the culture confused us. When we didn’t know what was going on or how to respond to a situation, we could always ask Linus. We knew we would get the real answer, even if it meant he had to tell us we had done something inappropriate.
I had been trying to get the Arop word for “help,” but everybody said there was no word for “help” in Arop. Instead, they borrowed the Tok Pisin word. I had pestered Linus so much about this word that he finally told me: “awupaij.” So when I saw Linus carrying our heavy outboard motor from the boat to the workshop, I though I had my opportunity to use it. I yelled from our back porch, “Linus, let me come and awupaij you.” Raucous laughter erupted from all the houses in the neighborhood. In the quiet of the workshop, I asked him why so many people had laughed so hard. He said, “Well, that’s our word for help. But we don’t use it because the young people have ruined it. It used to be just a normal word, but now it’s . . . it’s like . . .” He hesitated. “Sexy words” he whispered in English.
One day his daughter Nira had fallen into the lagoon out of her mother’s canoe and nearly drowned. I rode along as Linus drove our boat to the closest clinic with Nira and his wife, Jenny. Nira had been under water for some time, but she survived with no apparent ill effects.
Linus became my closest Arop friend while we were on the beach. Most Arops don’t want you to mess around with their names. A nickname based on what somebody has done is fine, but it should never sound anything like their name. Linus had a tendency to sleep soundly. Often when we gathered on the beach at 5:30 a.m. for a boat trip to Aitape, our nearest town, everybody would be there except the skipper. Linus was still asleep, so somebody would have to go and wake him up. It was a long-standing joke, so I started calling him “Lin usia,” which in Arop sounds like, “he didn’t get up.” I took the fact that he let me call him that as an indication of how close our friendship was. Or maybe he was just that gracious.
After the 1998 tsunami wiped out Arop village and killed his pregnant wife, Jenny, and their baby daughter, Christophila, he was left with five children. He married a widow who had six of her own.
We no longer owned a boat and now we lived inland in a new house in the new Arop village. We didn’t need a skipper or a carpenter. I invited Linus to join the team as a translator. His major contribution to the Arop translation team was his ability to think of better ways to say things in Arop. Many translators find it hard to try to think of other ways to express an idea once they have already written something down.
Linus (in striped shirt on the right, with fellow Arop language translators Emil Ninkure (left) and Pastor Peter Marokiki) was also great at making jokes and fond of saying that translation was too hard to do and too tiring if you didn’t have some humor to keep everybody’s eyes open. He and I enjoyed many good jokes together over the years, and tried to outdo each other coming up with expressions that incorporated at least one word each from English, Tok Pisin, and his Arop language. A friend who enjoys trilingual puns is a rare gift.
Linus has suffered with tuberculosis for the last decade or so, and apparently that is what finally killed him. As his body weakened, his faith grew and his desire to finish the Bible translation in Arop grew with it.
By his perseverance, he was a great encouragement to the translators from all eleven languages involved in the Aitape West Translation Project. I’m sure they will all be at his funeral.
Linus reminded me that since the project started, several translators who were not Christians when they began translating have become followers of Christ. He predicted some would eventually be leaders in their villages because of the wisdom they have gained working on their translations.
Linus did not live to see that prediction come true, or “bear fruit” as he would say in Arop. But he did live to see several books of the Bible published in his language. He spent most of his adult life helping to make that happen.
He told me in February 2011, “I am going to stay with this work until I die.”
He kept that promise.