How Gutpela Sindaun started
ONE day, a Catholic parishioner went for the weekly confession at the local parish church.
The parishioner, a male, told the priest of his sin of the week and asked for forgiveness.
The parishioner confessed that he stole coffee beans from someone’s garden and sold them.
The priest then asked if this was the only time he had stolen coffee beans. The response was it wasn’t.
Then the priest asked how many times he had stolen coffee beans.
The man said he had been stealing coffee beans since he was a young boy and now he was a married man with children.
The troubled priest then sat him down and touched the parishioner’s beard and asked what his mausgras (beard) meant to him.
The man had nothing to say except to look down.
Acknowledging the Highlands customs, the expatriate priest told the parishioner that his mausgras symbolised his manhood – that he is a grown man who could sustain himself and his family rather than act like wayward child.
After counselling the man, the priest told the man about his penance for forgiveness.
Instead of telling him to pray the usual Hail Mary, the rosary and the standard penance prayers for forgiveness, he instructed the parishioner to go home, clear his garden and start planting coffee.
The priest offered him coffee seedlings, bush-knife and spade and warned him that he will check on the progress.
Weeks passed and the coffee-thief no longer stole from others. He was busy planting his own, as the priest checked regularly.
To cut the long story short, Father Joseph Sakitey said his former coffee-stealing parishioner regularly waved and smiled at him in Kundiawa town today, often updating him of how successful he is as a coffee grower.
This encapsulated the mindset of this Ghanaian missionary – that prayers and sermons alone don’t make a difference in the lives of ordinary Papua New Guineans but they have to be shown examples how to live better lives.
And to his credit, Fr Sakitey has founded the Gutpela Sindaun programme, a community empowerment and self-help programme aimed at helping the ordinary people in the remote and rural areas and the marginalised in the urban centres.
The programme promotes traditional food production, processing and preservation techniques as ways of empowering ordinary people and allowing them to be self-sustaining.
The Gutpela Sindaun programme began by accident in the kitchen of Fr Sakitey at his missionary home in Mingende parish near Kundiawa town in Simbu over 14 years ago.
It started out with some Christian mothers and fathers of the community taking a keen interest in Fr Sakitey’s ways of preparing and preserving the local food in the traditional Ghanaian way.
Intrigued by the taste and quality of the preserved foods such as peanut, cassava and pork, word soon got around and interest grew.
Before Fr Sakitey knew it, the interest soon became a community-wide programme.
The priest now found himself regularly in the midst of hordes of villagers showing them how to grow, process and preserve various local food.
Among other things, Fr Sakitey showed the people how to make peanut butter, various types of cassava cakes and dishes and mince meat from pork among others.
Fr Sakitey then started growing the food he was using and soon, his farm became the centre of attraction and the subject of much discussion.
In the midst of sharing the traditional Ghanaian skills with the local people over the fire place, Fr Sakitey soon used the forum to discuss with the people Christian values, law and order situation, health and hygiene and good community living.
When the priest was transferred to Goglme parish near Mount Wilhelm, he took the programme with him and left behind a chapter at Mingende with those he had trained.
After some years in Goglme, Fr Sakitey returned to Mingende where is now based and to oversee the programme which is flourishing in different parts of the country.
The Gutpela Sindaun is an informal programme. It is based around a hands-on demonstration of skills with interested people watching and doing it.
There is no textbook, written syllabus or formal teaching involved.
Fr Sakitey or his co-trainers simply demonstrate to the participants the various ways of handling food while discussing other matters of community interest such as sexual health, violence and good community living.
Fr Sakitey said food handling was a vessel in which other important messages were imparted to the people.
He said while people were interested to learn the different methods of handling, they subtly learn other important matters too.
Through the programme, Fr Sakitey said he had helped educate over 20 young Simbu girls up to university level and many were now working after obtaining their degrees.
He said this was part of the programme’s focus on empowering women as well.
He said the feedback he had been receiving since the programme began in 1993 was that people were surprised to realise that while learning the different techniques of handling food, they were also learning other important issues as well.
The Gutpela Sindaun programme is a hit among different communities nationwide so much so that various groups, including mothers from the Seventh-Day Adventist church in Port Moresby and prisoners at Beon jail in Madang among others, have invited Fr Sakitey to introduce his programme to them.
It has since been adopted into the curriculum of Kundiawa Lutheran Day High School.
Fr Sakitey is building a training centre at Mingende to have a formal home for the programme and he has just enrolled in the part-time PhD studies at Divine Word University to conceptualise what he has been doing practically with the people since 1993.
Columns