Good News Church
New Guinea is a huge island, a small continent, which lies off the north of Australia. The eastern part is called Papua New Guinea and is a separate country, while the western part belongs to Indonesia.
Papua New Guinea covers a land area of 462,000 km2. The country is home to 2.9 million people, divided into 1,000 tribes and speaking 700 different languages. The national language is Pidgin English. The capital is Port Moresby.
Vic and Elsie Schlatter, who lived in the USA, were called by God to work as missionaries in Papua New Guinea. In 1961 they came to the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea with their four small children. Vic - a chemist by profession - saw his task as translating the Bible into a tribal language and building churches on the foundation of the Word of God. His wife Elsie had been certain for many years that God wanted to use her to "bring the Word to those who had never heard it before".
When they arrived in Papua New Guinea, they met natives who were literally still living in the Stone Age and were just experiencing their first contact with the modern culture of the 20th century. For many of them, the undercarriage of the small plane that Vic Schlatter used to land on the bumpy runway were the first wheels they had ever seen.
After gathering information from the government and other missionary organizations, Vic and Elsie settled in the WAOLA tribe and immediately began learning the tribal language. As quickly as possible, Vic translated individual Bible verses, and after just a few months, local chiefs were taking these translated verses back to their villages so that their people could learn them by heart. Within three years, 200 natives came to faith in Jesus Christ.
God has richly blessed the great commitment of the brothers and sisters who supported the mission work through financial means or personal assistance.
At the beginning of 1993 there were 65 local congregations with about 5000 members, 120 teaching brothers and 24 elders.
Since the beginning of their work, the missionary workers have been concerned not only with their "spiritual" mission but also with improving health care and schools.
A simple hospital was opened in Nipa, which was co-financed for a long time by the Western Missionary Committee. After American and Canadian nurses had worked there for 15 years, management was handed over to the locals a few years ago. A few small outpatient clinics were also set up in more remote areas, which are now run by local nursing staff. Infant mortality was significantly reduced through systematic training of the population.
The language spoken by the Waola tribe is called "Angal Heneng". This language has never been written down. Vic and Elsie learned the tribal language, developed a simple phonetic alphabet and began to write this language down for the first time in history.
An effective literacy program is now being implemented, which has been co-financed by EMD Basel and EMD Ludwigsburg since 1991. The aim of the program: to offer every interested member of the Waola tribe the opportunity to learn to read and write their native language. The natives should be able to read the New Testament translated by Vic into their tribal language. To date, over 1,000 villagers have learned to read and write the Angal Heneng language through the literacy program.