I was 43 years old when I volunteered to live with the Kamula tribe in a remote village in western Papua New Guinea after the church asked for someone to translate the Bible into the local language. I took my husband and children and set out leaning the language from scratch.
Many of the Kamula people had never seen a white person until the late 1970s. They used to hide from planes, believing the huge "smoking bird" would swoop down to eat them.
But Dekapowe, the tribal leader, traveled for days to a mission outpost after hearing stories about a new tribe that had moved to the forest.
The Kamula did everything they could do to make us feel at home, and were very eager to teach us their language. They found us very funny in our initial attempts to speak Kamula, and found everything we did fascinating.
They got a house ready for us to live in and brought fruit and white grubs, which are highly prized. Our sons, Brad and Rob, who were the first white-skin children they had ever seen, fascinated them in particular.
But the tribe's eating habits took some getting used to.
Men in the remote village in western Papua New Guinea would cut off women's breasts during raids and carry them home to eat.
The Kamula have been cannibals for generations. Apparently women's breasts were one of the tenderest parts, and if the men were in a hurry after a raid on another village, they would just lop off the breasts and take them back to the village.
The Kamula would eat "anything that moved" including rats, snakes, bats and slugs.
After twenty-three years of marriage my husband and my sex life was almost non-existent. We normally slept in separate bedrooms and concentrated on the care and upbringing of our two sons, Brad age 17 and Rob age 15.
Dekapowe furnished our family with a comfortable two-bedroom lodge close to the village center. It was more than adequate for our requirements.
However there was an unusual twist, Dekapowe required that I stay with him in his lodge. Dekapowe's lodge was more elaborate than ours, larger and right in the village center. I was to share Dekapowe's lodge with the chief and his wife and four children.
The Kamula people had a different culture than we. For one to share their spouse with the chief was considered a great honor. I was much older than Dekapowe's teenage ebony skinned wife but my alabaster white skin fascinated him.
This arrangement had caused great anxiety between my husband Ron and I. After much thought and prayer we decided it was necessary for us to do the Lord's work amongst these heathens. Reluctantly I become Dekapowe's bride.
Chief Dekapowe was an impressive man, about mid-thirties standing a loft six foot six inches tall. His skin was shiny ebony with the decorative scaring that was the custom of Kamula warriors. As the Kamulas were not keen about bathing there was a pungent odor about all of them similar to other beasts of the jungle.