With heads bowed and eyes closed, nobody saw the geckos fighting on the ceiling directly over the table. Nobody saw a tail from the little reptile drop off and fall...landing in the bowl of noodles. But when the family opened their eyes, everybody saw a detached tail writhing in the middle of their dinner.

It was supposed to be a special meal, made with hard-to-find ingredients, that would remind the Kim family—Namsoo, his wife Duckshin, and children, Heeran and Hanna—of life at home in South Korea.

“The girls would have cried if I threw it away,” remembers Duckshin.

So she did the only sensible thing she could think of—she scooped out the gecko tail and proceeded to serve the delicious meal.

Adjusting to life on Papua New Guinea’s hot, dry southern coast, more than 5,000 km from their Asian homeland, wasn’t always easy for this family serving in Bible translation. But the acclimation was helped along by a past that fuelled the Kims’ deep-seated commitment to help provide God’s Word for a Bibleless language group.

From 1910 to 1945, Japanese forces occupied and ruled the Korean Peninsula. During this period, Japanese authorities attempted to stamp out Korean culture, history and language. However, the Korean Bible, which was translated in the late 19th century, is credited as a major factor in the spread of the Korean church and the survival of the Korean language and spirit during this period of foreign domination and severe persecution.

Great Personal Significance
Growing up in the generation following the Japanese occupation, Namsoo and Duckshin learned about the importance of the Korean Scriptures to the Korean church and culture. More than that though, the Bible took on great personal significance for each of them.

As a child, Duckshin read the Bible frequently—she loved the Psalms in particular—and remembers making a choice to follow Christ based on her reading of the Scriptures. She cites John 11:25 as an important verse in her decision: “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

In the early 1970s, American evangelist Billy Graham preached to crowds of up to a million people during his South Korea crusade. Unknown to each other, Duckshin, by then a young woman, and Namsoo Kim each attended the crusade and committed their lives to missionary service.

The couple eventually met, married and began preparing to go overseas as missionaries. In a student group, they saw a video about Bible translation in Papua New Guinea, and they learned that hundreds of languages in PNG did not have the Bible.

“I [had] thought everybody had the Bible,” Duckshin recalls. She and Namsoo wondered how anyone could be a Christian without the Scriptures.

The Bible was so important to them as Christians and as Koreans that Namsoo and Duckshin say they had “no doubt” about their calling to participate in Bible translation.

The Kims were one of the first few families in a movement that eventually became known as Global Bible Translators (GBT), which is the South Korean Wycliffe organization. Today, GBT has dozens of translation teams serving all over the world.

Not Quite White or Brown
The Kim family arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1987, and they began work among the Waima people near PNG’s capital city, Port Moresby. The couple can laugh now as they remember some of the struggles they faced in the early days—struggles that went much deeper than finding gecko tails in their meal.

When they first arrived in Ere’ere village, for example, there was a prevalent belief that white people were ancestral spirits come back from the dead. But the Kims explain that they weren’t quite white and they weren’t quite brown, much to the consternation of some of the villagers. In time, the family was adopted into the Waima family relationship system and given Waima names.

Namsoo and Duckshin spent many years working with pastors and other leaders to translate parts of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament, which they completed in 2003.

They also helped the Waima people establish their own radio station, which—powered by three solar panels and a small windmill—reaches nearly 20,000 people with Christian music in many languages and Bible portions read in the Waima language.

Some of the Waima translators are continuing work on the Old Testament. They would like to have the whole Bible in their language.