Delivering Rice and Christmas Cheer
The “Beras Natal” (Beras = Rice, Natal = Christmas) flights are something that is unique to Papua. Churches and villages purchase literally tons of rice for their Christmas celebrations and the MAF facility in Wamena has stacks and stacks of rice waiting to go out to villages. During Christmas, churches in the interior will have a celebration where they have a “bakar batu” (“bakar” = fire, bake, grill, cook and “batu” = rock). They get an outdoor fire going and everyone brings a rock about as big as a softball and tosses it into the fire. As the rocks get hot, some of them pop and explode! When they are hot enough, they are transferred to the pit that has been dug out of the ground. Here, they layer the rocks with banana leaves and the food, which can have meats, like prized pork, or for the poorer people, chicken; sweet potatoes, sweet potato leaves and other leafy vegetables, and sayur lilin (“vegetable candle,” because it looks like a wax candle) and all get steam cooked together. You could think of it as a giant crock pot meal. If the rice makes it to the village, it would be cooked separately in huge pots of the five gallon size or so.
These celebrations could be as small as a local church congregation of 50 to 100 people up to a whole village composed of several separate neighborhoods coming together, with hundreds to a couple thousand people. After everyone has gathered and helped assemble the “bakar batu” and it is slow cooking away, they gather together for a worship service that usually includes singing, praying and a message from God’s Word, and more singing.
After the worship service, the top layers of banana leaf are peeled off the “bakar batu” to reveal the delicacies below and everyone is served a scrumptious and bountiful feast!
I’ll attach a few pictures that I took of yesterday’s “beras Natal” flights I did to Darakma and Silimo in one of our Kodiaks, PK-MEC. Each of the big sacks of rice is 50 kg or 110 pounds. At Darakma, I delivered 670 kg of rice, or 1,477 pounds. At Silimo, it was 750 kg, or 1,653 pounds of rice.
As a pilot, sometimes it seems tedious to fly and unload all of this rice. But, when I imagine the festivities that it will contribute to surrounding the celebrations of our Lord’s birth, it becomes a joy.
Story by Alan Discoe, MAF Papua