Peter & Grace Make a Difference

by Anton Lutz

It began with a single conversation.

I was at the police station, arguing with one officer after another about why they should go try to intervene and rescue a citizen of Papua New Guinea who was being tortured. They had lots of excuses and, like the white man I am, I was getting more and more frustrated. 

Just then a young girl came walking along, perhaps 8 years old. She overheard us and then said,

“Oh, you mean the woman up at T_______? They tried to force her to eat tinfish, but she didn’t want to, so they stripped her naked and began to burn her with red hot irons.” 

She smiled. 

I was shocked. This little child thought it was good that an old woman was being treated this way? She thought it made sense? 

She had no understanding of the laws of PNG, obviously. She had no understanding of how this behaviour is deeply immoral, even evil, in God’s eyes. She had no ability to comprehend the way that the ideas about evil spiritual beings inside humans have moved into her province just within her lifetime. For this little girl, it made total sense that some old women deserved to be treated like this if they didn’t want to eat tinfish. 

Like I said, I was totally shocked. 

Can I just say it? 

The child had been brainwashed. 

It is absolute child abuse to teach a child these things! What if this child grows up to be a mother who teaches her children these same crazy, nonsense things?

Many children in PNG lack access to basic information about Sorcery Accusation Related Violence (SARV). They don’t know what the law says. They don’t know what the Bible says. They don’t realize that different people have different beliefs and that it is good and normal to ask tough questions about what we believe and why. This is the whole point of being educated! 

I’ve tried arguing and debating with adults, but have found that many of their beliefs are firmly held and challenging them results in lockdown instead of critical thinking. 

The result, tragically, is that hundreds of people are tortured each year, the numbers only increasing as more and more little girls and boys are taught and shown that it’s okay to accuse people of sanguma and torture them to death. 

So, how do we reach the children? Are their schoolteachers going to do it? Parents? Pastors?

If not, it’s up to us. We have to take a stand and make a difference. 

So, I wrote a simple story called Peter and Grace Make a Difference. It is about children who are lucky enough to have a teacher who helps them learn about SARV. They learn about the law, God’s word, and the history of other people’s expired superstitions. They learn about helping one another and about standing up for what is true. They gain the support of their parents, classmates and community and take a stand against the conman who was spreading lies in their community. 

What happened next was just amazing. Llane Munau was working with youth in her community in Bougainville to take a stand against SARV when she got a copy of my story. 

Within the week, she contacted me. “Hey man, can we make your story into a movie?” 

To make a long story short, what happened next was almost a miracle. My story is about children who have an amazing teacher. In real life, the children had Llane. In my story, the children met a policeman who explained the law to them. In real life, Llane took the children to meet a policeman who explained the law to them. Down the line, what I described in the book became reality as the children really did the things described. They met a doctor, they met a missionary, they talked to a pastor. They did research. And on top of all that, they wrote a script and cast the parts and did rehearsals and built sets and props. 

Thankfully, they invited me to come and help them do the filming, and I spent an amazing couple of weeks with the young people – true heroes, in my view. This is a hard issue to talk about and these young people and their families were so bold and so fearless as they stood up to give a message of hope and change to their island and to their nation. 

The film can be found here and it is also available on YouTube here . As of January 2022, it has had almost 40 thousand views. 

We also conducted interviews with the cast members and their parents, trying to understand what this film meant to them. One of the fathers gave an especially heartfelt interview:

“I want the people of Bougainville to listen, these are our children talking. If we don’t want to listen to the adults, then at least let us listen to the children.” 

As the author of the story and Llane’s assistant in producing and editing the final movie, this was a truly powerful experience. I dreamed that someday, somewhere, a teacher would see this simple story and be inspired to stand up and boldly teach his or her students the truth. It came true. The young men and women who were our cast and crew for this project no longer believe what they once did. They are not at risk of torturing or murdering anyone, just because they suspect them of being a sanguma. For these kids, now growing into young leaders in their own right, their future will be different because they met Llane and engaged with these ideas through this story. 

The story doesn’t end here – we want you, the reader, to help share the story of Peter and Grace Make a Difference as much and as widely as you can. Share it with your own family and their children. Share it with your friends, neighbors and community people you know. Share it with your school. 

We’ve gathered the resources together, so please click here to find the Peter and Grace Make a Difference book, film and some related goodies to share around!