Hope for the Hewa

In the year 2000, missionary and Bible translator Jonathan Kopf moved with his wife Susan, a nurse, to Fiyawena, a remote village in Papua New Guinea’s Enga Province.

“For years they lived with us in the village. Jonathan started preaching the Word of God, but we were only a few who listened,” remembers Yanis, a teenager back then.

But existing tribal tensions rose during this time, and then calamity struck in 2006.

“One of my tribal friends got killed in my front yard,” says Jonathan.

“The death made the whole village go into uproar. They were shooting at each other, trying to kill each other.”

Yanis told Jonathan; “Please, we need to flee to the mountains and go to my grandmother’s village.”

Even though Yanis was a young believer, he was convinced that God was going to change the hearts of his relatives who lived there.

Despite them being of the same people group, only fifteen kilometres apart, the dialects were so different that Jonathan couldn’t understand them.

Yanis became the translator, and the key to sharing the Gospel.

“We started teaching the story of the Bible,” says Jonathan. “They responded, saying, ‘This is it! Now we can read the Bible for ourselves and see that we have been lied to our whole lives.’”

The tribal leader Fato, who became one of Jonathan’s closest friends, accepted the Gospel for himself.

As more people came to faith, the desire for education and medical help also grew.

So, eventually, Fato, Yanis and the other village members decided to move to a nearby valley called Yifki in order to construct an airstrip.