The rainbow never sets

I was just about to offer to take them in my car, when something in Itja's voice stopped me from talking.

"What happened to your wife?" he asked. "She has a cut on her arm."

"And how did she get the cut?" "Oh, this is too long a story, please come quickly otherwise she will bleed to death."

"Not untill you tell me how your wife got the cut." "We had an argument."

"Yes?" "And then I struck her with the parang." "So you brutally attacked her?"

"Yes." "Then you can take her on your shoulders and carry her the eleven kilometers to Kupang by yourself."

"But Itja, please?" "No. God will forgive you only if you do some penance." With that the distraught man was dismissed.

I marvelled. I would have jumped into this without thinking. But Itja knew that if the man carried his wife through Tarus and all the suburbs of Kupang to the hospital, everyone would know what he had done to his wife, and this might hopefully stop him from doing it again. What wisdom!

The rice grew and looked fine. Unfortunately, though, since the fence was in such a poor state, some cattle got into the rice fields and caused a lot of damage. I urged our mission board to hurry up with the approval of our project, but such things never seem to be done in a hurry. It took months of letter writing and detailed submissions until it eventually was approved.

Barbed wire was bought in Surabaya, Java, through John Rossner, an American missionary, who had supplied Itja with a lot of material for the farming school. It turned out that the small tractor for ploughing was far too expensive. Instead, the school bought an ordinary plough to be pulled by a bullock. Soon a strong fence was erected and a small patch of paddy field bought, to straighten the fence line. But by the time all was in place it was too late for that season.

The plough caused an unexpected problem. There was no one in the village who could use it, and no bullocks which knew how to plough were available. We came across a strange phenomenon: the plough had never reached the island of Timor! In addition, we came up against a social problem. Usually, one farmer in Tarus supplied his herd of cattle to trample down the soil after it was flooded. For that service he would get one third of the rice crop. When he heard what the school intended to do, he objected so strongly, that no one in the village dared to go against him. The plough remained unused in the shed. I had never thought that

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