After some time in Papua New Guinea I realised that I had ended up on a sort of plateau when it came to relating to people in greater depth. I was comfortable speaking with people using the Tok Pisin language, but it seemed to me that wasn’t enough, and I needed to put effort into learning the local Enga language. So I asked the Bishop if I could spend six months in a small isolated village within the parish where I would have the chance of being totally immersed in the local language and culture. The Bishop kindly agreed.

I soon found out that back in the “mission station” our lives are regulated by timetables. For example there were normally three meals a day and I would organise my time around what I would do “after breakfast” or “before lunch”. In fact my spiritual exercises and prayer schedule seemed closely associated with food too. Breakfast followed morning mass, and we would pray after the evening meal.

The family in the village didn’t follow such a schedule. For them it was normal to eat each day, but as for time – it was when food became available. We would eat in the morning if food was left over from the day before – otherwise not. We might eat later in the day if someone had gone out to the gardens to harvest sweet potato or greens. If it was a cold rainy day they would come back early, but if it was a fine day, the women would spend the whole day out in the gardens, returning with fresh vegetables only at nightfall. And then cooking depended on whether the menfolk had arrived back with firewood. If someone went to a funerary feast or marriage celebration they might come carrying pork meat wrapped in ferns. Some could be eaten, and some set aside to exchange with other families.

I felt disoriented at first, being used to structuring my day around meals. In the village, how one eats might be structured, but when one eats was not. So how was I to organise my day? It seemed that life in the village followed a rather fluid series of encounters. In the morning my host would go and sit with a group of men, smoking together while they decided who else they would meet that day. A lot would depend on the weather or on the current state of wellbeing of the community.

The six months in the village – almost thirty years ago - was a learning experience in language, but more importantly in many other ways as I slowly changed in my understanding of what is “normal” about life. Knowing a language is important, but it is only one means of communication and the most important is the language of acceptance that opens one up to dialogue on a level beyond the confines of schedules and timetables.