Word: wewak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plane, swooped down toward a clearing and made a smooth touchdown on another makeshift airfield. There to greet him were the local priest, a handful of native sisters, and hordes of near-naked natives. The pilot: lean, sandy-haired Bishop Leo Arkfeld, 47, Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic of the Wewak Vicariate, a 20,100-sq.-mi. area (more than twice the size of New Jersey) in Australia's hot, humid New Guinea territory...
...Airman Arkfeld, this trip from the coastal town of Wewak to one of the vicariate's 38 inland stations was routine; he logs an average of 30 flights a week, carries such diverse cargo as day-old chicks, bull calves, building material, engine parts, Australian beer, food, nuns, priests and mission helpers. Now and then he flies armed patrols, native cops or doctors to trouble spots, and he is always available to transport the sick or injured to the nearest hospital. Furthermore, says he, by plane "I am able to make many of my confirmation trips with less effort...
Runways with Pigs. Raised on an Iowa farm, Arkfeld was ordained in 1943 in the Society of the Divine Word, the worldwide mission order founded in Germany in 1875. Five years later he was consecrated a bishop in Chicago, was assigned that same year to war-ravaged Wewak, where bombs and bullets had destroyed all of the society's mission houses and killed half of its priests, nuns and lay brothers. Tall (6 ft. 3 in.) Missionary Arkfeld lunged into the task of reconstruction, bought an English-made Civil Auster, then the first of three Cessnas, personally air-speeded...
...honor. In the 340 mission schools taught by 34 white and 393 native teachers, almost a thousand pupils learn the three Rs, taught in pidgin English. The vicariate also has two maternity clinics, a 400-bed hospital for lepers, a sawmill, machine shops and a cathedral at Wewak-New Guinea's first since the war -built in concrete and hardwoods...
Cannibals with Manners. Five years ago Bishop Arkfeld launched his most ambitious experiment by founding the Sisters of the Rosary of Wewak. Today the roster includes 30 native sisters and novices (average age: 21) whose royal blue habits and white headdresses do not conceal the facial tattoos of their tribal origin. As nurses and teachers, they help the white nuns in the region, who constantly fan out to outlying parishes, get around on horseback, motorcycles or Jeeps, ford streams on oil-drum rafts, shoot snakes and birds of prey that threaten the mission's poultry flocks. So pleased...