Village On The Edge

Kragur village lies on the rugged north shore of Kairiru, a steep volcanic island just off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. In 1998 the village looked much as it had some twenty-two years earlier when author Michael French Smith first visited. But he soon found that changing circumstances were shaking things up. Village on the Edge weaves together the story of Kragur villagers' struggle to find their own path toward the future with the story of Papua New Guinea's travails in the post-independence era. Smith writes of his own experiences as well, living and working in Papua New Guinea and trying to understand the complexities of an unfamiliar way of life. To tell all these stories, he delves into ghosts, magic, myths, ancestors, bookkeeping, tourism, the World Bank, the Holy Spirits, and the meaning of progress and development. Village on the Edge draws on the insights of cultural anthropology but is written for anyone interested in Papua New Guinea.

Kragur village lies on the rugged north shore of Kairiru, a steep volcanic island just off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. In 1998 the village looked much as it had some twenty-two years earlier when author Michael French Smith first visited. But he soon found that changing circumstances were shaking things up. Village on the Edge weaves together the story of Kragur villagers' struggle to find their own path toward the future with the story of Papua New Guinea's travails in the post-independence era. Smith writes of his own experiences as well, living and working in Papua New Guinea and trying to understand the complexities of an unfamiliar way of life. To tell all these stories, he delves into ghosts, magic, myths, ancestors, bookkeeping, tourism, the World Bank, the Holy Spirits, and the meaning of progress and development. Village on the Edge draws on the insights of cultural anthropology but is written for anyone interested in Papua New Guinea.

A Hut at the Edge of the Village presents a collection of Moriarty’s writings ordered thematically, with sections ranging from place, love and wildness through to voyaging, ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. These carefully chosen extracts are supported by an introduction by Martin Shaw and a foreword by Tommy Tiernan, a long-time admirer of Moriarty’s work.

Being a missionary in Ivory Coast, West Africa is not only about dangers, hard work, and culture shock, interspersed with moments of high joy and deep sorrow; it is life found in the small and daily things, the quotidian experience which renders familiar a vastly different way of life, a life at the edge of the village. This book collects Lisa Leidenfrost's sketches of missionary life, compiled from letters sent home from Ivory Coast to her church in the United States, and they tell of the ordinary and extraordinary, the solemn and the playful, the mundane and the exotic, together creating a down-to-earth portrait of the Gospel at work in a family and society. For over sixteen years, Lisa Leidenfrost has lived, served, and raised four children in Ivory Coast with her husband, Csaba Leidenfrost, a Wycliffe translator to the Bakwe people.

This collection of vivid photographs tells the story of citizens who spoke up against the nuclear power industry, who refused to be nuclear neighbors, and who fought for years to stop construction or to close reactors in their backyards. The photographs also introduce us to the victims of nuclear power, among them the children who developed cancer and other grave health problems, even generations after the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl. Through Lionel Delevingne’s record, we can see for ourselves the tragedies of the worst accident sites: Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in Russia, and Fukushima in Japan. We hope that this collection and history will help take the story of atomic energy “to the village square,” that it will generate discussion and a renewed sense of urgency, and remind a new generation of the battles that have been fought and are still to be fought to protect the beauty and health of our world.

BEN SUC was a relatively prosperous farming village thirty miles from Saigon, on the edge of the Iron Triangle, the formidable Vietcong stronghold. It had been “pacified” many times, but because of security leaks no Vietcong were ever captured, and it always reverted to them. Therefore on January 8, 1967, American forces launched a surprise assault kept secret even from their South Vietnamese allies. The plan was to envelop the village, to seal it off, to remove its inhabitants, to destroy its every physical trace, and to level the surrounding jungle. Jonathan Schell accompanied the operation from its beginning to its successful but dismal end, and reports it in depth as he saw it. This time no one slipped away. The story of the bewildering task of separating the V.C. from ordinary villagers is the dramatic core of the first part of this book. The 3,500 villagers were moved to a refugee camp in Phu Loi, a barren, treeless “safe” area, with only what possessions they could carry. The bulldozers went to work and flattened every building. For security reasons no advance preparations had been made, and the move became a human and administrative nightmare. The people of Ben Suc were farmers, and there was nothing for them to do at Phu Loi, Mr. Schell offers vivid portraits of one individual after another—women, children, old men—as they are pacified and sink into apathy and despair. Here is an overwhelmingly affective narrative of American skill and good intentions squandered in a cause made hopeless by misunderstanding, by resistant traditions, and by cultural gaps not only between ourselves and the villagers, but between them and the Saigon government. Mr. Schell’s report is devastating.