One thing I always expected to do on the mission field was to have strange and exotic animals as pets. But besides sugar gliders we haven’t really had any. Instead, we’re stuck in the suburbs of Wewak, surrounded by the wild and wonderful country of Papua New Guinea and yet we’re unable to go out and experience it much. Maybe my desire to have strange pets is my way of bringing some adventure into my life.

Sugar Glider Update

I mentioned sugar gliders so I feel like I should give you an update on what happened to ours. When I gave them to my language helper, Jeremy, we had four of them. I was told two were pregnant but I had no way of knowing if that was true. I figured that wasn’t any of business. I didn’t really care. I was tired of them.

When I dropped off the sugar gliders at Jeremy’s house, I took inventory of the mangy dogs with bony ribs lurking underneath the house, which was up on stilts, and gave the sugar gliders a very small chance of survival – not that I cared. It wasn’t my problem anymore.

Fast forward a year and I asked Jeremy how the sugar gliders were doing, expecting a report full of woe and carnage.

“Great,” He said, “ There’s eleven of them now!” 

He had put their cage at the bottom of a banana tree. Every evening he opens the cage and they all scamper to the top of the tree to frolic and thumb their little noses at the neighborhood dogs who can’t climb trees. Then in the morning they all come down the tree and go to sleep in their cage. Jeremy closes it up and everyone is happy, except the neighborhood dogs.

Clearly I was unsuccessful at raising sugar gliders because I didn’t have a banana tree. 

The Eclectus Parrot

Then one day I was hanging out with a German missionary who’s occasionally more PNG than some of the locals. We’ll call him Heinrich Franz Hildebrand because that sounds very German, and I don’t feel like asking people’s permission to mention them in my newsletters so I’ll just give them different names. He mentioned he had recently acquired a green parrot. I mentioned we had been looking for a green parrot. He suggested he was willing to part ways with the green parrot because he already had a Cockatoo and having two parrots is so much fun that it’s almost illegal, if not slightly immoral, to keep all the fun for himself. He suggested I take his parrot out for a test drive and I agreed. A parrot was an exotic pet, after all, and I had always kind of wanted one.

This was a brilliant green Eclectus parrot, which means it’s a male. Females are bright red. These would sell in the States for around $2,500 which makes them even more exotic than sugar gliders, at least to me. Eclectus parrots are native to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea and so around here they sell for several jugs of diesel. In fact, a missionary kid told me they used to go hunt them in the jungle with slingshots. One man’s treasure is another man’s lunch.

We ran into a minor problem when Heinrich and I tried to load the parrot’s homemade cage into the ambulance, which was what I was driving at the moment, and found it wouldn’t quite fit. Not taking no for an answer, we laid the cage on its side and shoved it through the back doors until the bottom half was wedged tightly in the door frame. The top half was still sticking out the back like a rocket engine. Just for safety’s sake, which both Heinrich and I take very seriously, we sandwiched the cage between the two back doors and then lashed it all together with the strap part of a ratchet strap (the ratchet part was long gone). Now the bottom of the cage, which was open and didn’t have any wire on it, was pointed towards the front of the car. Obviously the parrot could walk right out. We solved this problem by shoving an empty dog food bag over the opening.

“There, that should be OK,” Heinrich said. “His wings are clipped so he can’t fly very well.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Boy Boy, but you can call it whatever you want.”

I had driven down the road for thirty seconds before the parrot had exited the cage and was hopping around the back of the ambulance, squawking like a car alarm. This was a little unsettling since every time he squawked, my incus’s (which, in case you didn’t know, are the little bones connected to your eardrum) would swing into my brain, shorting out my fight-or-flight circuits and playing havoc with my motor skills. I was also a little concerned the parrot would exit the back of the vehicle – either voluntarily or involuntarily – so I wanted to get him in the front seat where I could keep an eye on him. No sense in paying for a parrot I no longer had! I once met an African Grey parrot that had tried to crack my finger like a walnut and almost succeeded so I wasn’t keen on having my fingers close to Boy Boy. Heinrich had showed me how Boy Boy would hop onto a stick if you held it in front of him and then gave me the stick for emergency use. I stopped the ambulance on the side of the road, grabbed the stick, and chased the screeching parrot around with it for a few minutes before I got him on it. He quickly climbed the stick and reached for my fingers. I dropped him like a hot potato on the front seat where he pooped on my lap and screeched in my face, then settled down for the ride home, seemingly happy with the arrangement. I drove home past palm trees and oceans while singing pirate shanties and feeling very much like a pirate indeed.

Janice was pleased with the parrot as well, until it bit her finger and screeched in her face.

“Huh, kind of loud, isn’t it?” She accurately observed. If science is observing the world around you, then Janice is the most scientific person I know.

“Yea, but Google says that it will get quieter once it gets used to a new place. They also squawk less when they’re not stressed.”

We named the parrot Kiwi, because it’s green. I wanted to name it “Pekpek” which is the Tok Pisin word for poop and an English description of something that pecks a lot. I thought it was clever because it does both of those things. Janice thought it was immature.

Owning a parrot is like having a child. They squawk when they want attention or when they’re hungry, or when you’re trying to talk the phone. They poop everywhere and occasionally they bite you. They require training to be usable. I was certain that one day I would come home from work to find Janice had hung the parrot on the wall with a kitchen knife.

Inevitably the parrot starts screeching when people get loud. This is inconvenient in a family with children.

Let’s say Janice would yell something like, “Oliver, put down that knife!”

“SCREEEECH” the parrot would say.

Then there would be a burst of crying and Janice would yell something like, “Adi, go get a Band-Aid!”

“SCREEECH! SCREEEEEEECH! SCREECH!” The parrot would say.

“SHUT UP YOU STUPID – “

“SCREEEEEETCH”

I imagine I would step in a with a voice of reason, “Stop yelling everyone, you’re stressing out Kiwi!”

“SCREEEEETCH”

Sometimes Janice’s screeching and Kiwi’s screeching blend together, making it hard to tell what either one is trying to communicate. Maybe that’s for the best.

A parrot will out-screech you every time, I guarantee it.

In an effort to make the parrot comfortable and therefore reduce its screeching, I built a parrot cage and filled it with branches and perches and peanuts and ropes, just the sort of things you’d expect a parrot to like. Instead of frolicking with the good things I’ve given him, Kiwi spends his time at the door of the cage screeching.

“You’re spoiling that bird,” Janice said.

“I’m trying to,” I said, “But he’s so focused on the fact that he’s in a cage that he can’t have any fun playing with all the fun stuff I put in it.”

And just like that, God taught me a lesson. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard an audible voice from God, but I feel like I’ve stumbled into situations where I’ll say something off-the-cuff about a parrot or a bottle of ketchup, and suddenly God will take the stupid thing I said, apply deep spiritual meaning to it, and drop it back into my stomach like a bowling ball. My brain was not involved in the formation of the idea. The realization is so profound and the understanding is so instant that it feels like the idea was downloaded, absorbed, and understood as quick as a shock of electricity. It’s like a concept was communicated to me without the burden of words and sentences. If I could psychically communicate with someone, I think it would feel that way. That’s why I feel like it was God communicating to me. And I felt He was telling me that I was acting exactly like the parrot.

They say the 18 month mark of the first term as missionary is the hardest. We’re closing the 17th month of our term here at the beginning of October and I think I’ve become more pessimistic about life with each passing month. It took a stupid parrot to show me that I have become so focused on the cage I’m in that I haven’t been enjoying the good things God put in it. Hopefully you’re not doing the same thing.

From my cage in Wewak,

Josh