I saw the first white man I had ever seen in 1964. "If you say anything against that tomo hundpi, you had better be careful, because he has some thing with many eyes and ears that picks up everything we say and reports it to him," I was told. This was what the village people I grew up with thought about this white man and his radio set. As time went by, however, I became well acquainted with this tomo hundpi ("red-skinned spirit being"), as he turned out to be my first schoolteacher. Our village was 12,000 feet up in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, in a remote area. It was called Nipa and had a population of 35,000 to 40,000 people.
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