Why Toys and the Jungle Don't Mix

During our exploratory trip to PNG in 2012, we stayed with a missionary who has been working with PBT for over 30 years. Let me paint a picture of her house.

She lived in an Americanized house made of bush materials. The inner walls were woven bamboo, but the floors were covered in linoleum and the roof was tin. The outer walls were load bearing 2x4s filled in with screen wire to allow the breeze to pass through but to limit the number of bugs that came in. The gutter system feed into the water tank, which daily had to be pumped up the the head tank on the roof to provide gravity fed plumbing to the house.

And the house was filled with stuff. There were bags and bags of empty pill bottles waiting to be reused for people who needed a large quantity of medicine. There were stacks and stacks of empty bags. Every sugar bag was cut neatly at the top to salvage the bag and stacked to the side waiting to be reused. Durable flour bags had the top stitches carefully removed and were gifted to women in the village. Used paper was kept in a stack to make little medicine packets or for any purpose they might serve. A filing cabinet was bursting with old maps of places she had traveled on furlough. Books and books lined the shelves.
If this were found in America, one might cry "hoarder". But in Papua New Guinea, where things are hard to come by, where every ream of paper consumes some of the 400 kilo cargo allowance allowed on the helicopter, where you couldn't run to Walmart every time you needed something and any trash you had had to be burned, you keep everything just in case.

Now our collection of odds and ends will be more petite for a couple of reasons.

1. We haven't yet had the years to accumulate the things she has had. 
2. We love digital things and digitizing physical things, reducing space consumption. 

This being said, we are thrilled that we have so many people interested in sending us care packages, but we want to ask something to save both our generous senders money and us space.

Please, please, please, do not send us toys. When we arrive in country and have some time to figure out what we need and what we miss, we will provide a list of items that will be great to send in a care package. But I know that when there is such an adorable little baby in the jungle, you just want to spoil him rotten with toys!

But:

1. Shipping to PNG is not cheap. We want to respect the time and money you put into your gift to us. 
2. We're not sure what things James will like! In America, kids see things their friends have, things on TV, can go into a toys store and look around and decide what they like. James just won't have been exposed enough to know his preferences. 
3. Even if James loves the toy, eventually he will outgrow it. Then what? There can be big problems with regifting it to someone in the village, choosing one family over another. There aren't an abundance of thrift stores in the village. We have to burn our trash in the village so we can't just toss it. Leaving us with baby toys around the house where hoarding is already a tendency for the next 30 years or so. 

(Now, of course, with a single toy, this won't be that big of a deal, but if everyone throws in a single toy, we'll be up to our eyeballs!)

Additionally:

1. There's the cultural aspect to consider. In a village setting, there's a communal idea. If James becomes attached to toys and doesn't let other kids have them, he'll be viewed as selfish and not willing to share with The Village. 
2. If he does allow children to take toys, there's the concern of perpetuating the Cargo Cult mindset, that white people have things because they worship God and if you worship God, you can get things, too. This is not the gospel, nor a perception we wish to feed. 
3. Other children don't have toys. James will have a number of things that will differentiate him from his friends. He doesn't need more. We recently watched an episode of the Gilmore Girls, where Emily furnished Rory's dorm. Her reasoning was that Rory now owns the space. It gives her the upper hand among her suite mates. We don't want James to have friendships based on manipulation. "It's my toy and I say how we play with it," whether that's an attitude he assumes or a perception that's shoved on him by his peers. We want him to engage in relationships with humility, in a fraternal relationship not a patriarchal one. 
4. He doesn't need toys! He lives in a rain forest! I know my fondest memories weren't playing with my many toys as a child but playing outside! Climbing crepe myrtles, catching fireflies and caterpillars, hiking through the woods at my grandparents house. With so many cons to toys in our context, why distract him from the true joys in life?

So, I will send out a wish list, and I'm sure that there will be times a toy or game will be added here or there, but they will be very intentionally chosen based on interests, longevity, and transfer-ability. 

If the number of toys we post don't meet your spoiling needs, we have a solution!
We opened a savings account for James. Please feel free to spoil him financially!
We hope to give him access to this account at some point when we feel he will truly know the value of a dollar. Whether as a wedding present or a nest egg or a house warming gift. We doubt we'll give it to him as college money as we'd like him to never perceive education as a free ride and only value it as such, but we have nothing written in stone.

Checks can be made out to "James Smith" and sent to:

712 Pritchett Rd. 

Lula, GA 30554

This will one day be a gift that he will really appreciate when he can truly value a gift and the value of a dollar.

Care Packages can be sent to:
Pioneer Bible Translators
Attn: Jacob and Elizabeth Smith
Box 997
Madang 511
Papua New Guinea

Good things to include in care packages are always consumables.
Spices, spice packets, pretzels, goldfish, french vanilla creamer, Starbucks Via, individually packaged jelly (for PB&Js in the bush), Chick-fil-a Honey BBQ Sauce, and always silica gel packets to keep our dry goods (like those yummy spices) dry.
When we get in country and have a chance to look around, we'll let you know what else we miss dearly.

Thank you so much,
Elizabeth