E VISIT r o
TARUBUNG by Ann Flory, Overseas Missionary Fellowship
H ow w o u l d y o u l i k e you wouldn’t have to go to school or wear shoes. You wouldn’t have to make your bed or keep your room straightened. You wouldn’t have to run to the store for your mother. You’d have no chores such as wash ing dishes or setting the table. You could run and play all day long and go to bed at night whenever you wanted. Now you are wondering just where this place is, aren’t you, so that you can go there to live? Tarubung is not a city or a village; it is just a group of seven or eight grass-roofed houses resting on the side of a hill in Mindoro, one of the is lands of the Philippines. The people who live there are called Hanunoo. There are children there, too, just like you. Each family lives in a one- room house. They sleep on mats on the bamboo floor and in the morning they simply roll up their “beds” and put them in the comer. Then the floor is ready to be the breakfast table. All sit on the floor to eat. The dishes are filled with nice vegetable soup and flat baskets hold enough rice or sweet potatoes or boiled green bana nas for all the family. Each person reaches for some rice or potato or banana and eats it out of his hand or crumbles it up in his soup. Then he drinks some soup with a big noise. The vegetables and rice are picked out of the soup with the fingers and popped into the mouth. When the meal is over, the dishes are rinsed off and put back into the basket in the comer. Then the children can ran and play until time for the next meal while the parents go to work in their fields. “What is that noise?" you would no doubt ask if you were in Tam- bung. “And what does it mean?” Let’s ask Marta, one of the children who live in Tarubung. “That,” says Marta, “means that it is time to go to school. Oh, we don’t have to go to school; but we want to. You see, before the mission aries came we didn’t have any school to go to. I was almost eleven and I couldn’t read or write before Ana to live in Tarubung? If you lived there,
started the school. Now I can read and I can write and can even add some. Ana taught us about Africa, too, from a pretty picture book she has. I like school. We sing songs about Jesus and then we hear a story from God’s Word. We don’t have any Bi bles to read, so we must listen very carefully to the stories. After the Bi ble story, We study our reading writ ing and numbers and before long the sun is straight overhead and it is time for school to end. I like school because I want to leam to read and write real well so some day I can go to a school where I can study all about God’s Word. It will take me a long time to leam that much because we don’t always have school. We have it only in the mornings for about two weeks and then the missionaries are gone for months and months because there are so many Hanunoo and they all need to be taught about the Lord Jesus, too.” Have you changed your mind about living in Tarubung? There may be lots of things you wouldn’t have to do — things you don’t like to do — but think of all the things you would miss! You couldn’t go to Sunday School every week and hear a new story about Jesus because there would be no one to ' teach you. You would have no books to read because you couldn’t understand the books there even if you learned to read. You would have no Bible to study either, and you couldn’t go to school every day if you wanted to because most of the time there is no school. I’m sure you would rather be where you are now, vyouldn’t you? You can pray for Marta and her cousins who study with the missionaries when they are in'Tarubung. These children love the Lord Jesus just as you do, and they want ,to grow up to serve Him, too. But they need a Bible to read to help them. You can pray, too, that the missionaries will soon have some parts of the Bible translated into Marta’s language. And maybe some day you will come to Tarubung to tell the Hanunoo people about the Lord Jesus and teach them from God’s Word. This is an invitation!
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