Lurchi scurried along the windowsill and up the screen behind the slatted window panes until he found a spot where the sun streamed in. I liked to call our geckos after the German shoe company’s mascot, even though I knew they weren’t the same. Jonathan had a whole collection of their comic books with Lurchi the Salamander as the hero who wore leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora on his many missions to save boys and girls from all manner of perils. Giving the geckos this name made them more endearing and helped me pretend they were pets; the best kind of pets, since I didn’t have to feed them or take care of them except to protect them from the children, and yet they served us as a moderate pest control.

I paused for a moment to watch Lurchi-the-gecko-not-salamander as he clung to our fly-wire, eyes closed, heart-rate slowed, soaking in the sun like a solar panel, unperturbed by the clouds of dust that rolled our way after each Personal Motor Vehicle (PMV) roared down the dirt road, nor by the loud and gregarious groups of men, women, and children that passed by our house on the edge of town in an endless stream. Not even the loud raucous that was coming from the direction of Kama Market to our left, which was slowly but steadily drawing nearer, aroused him.

I caught a first glimpse of the excited crowd as they reached the edge of the back side of our garden. Since our living area was one flight up from ground level, I had a good vantage point and could see as far as the first 6 to 6 shacks that lined the road between our house and the neighborhood market even over our two meter high pit-pit “Banis” (fence). It wasn’t unusual to see such a large crowd. Sometimes a mob of between a hundred and two hundred people could run by our house in angry pursuit of someone that allegedly had just made off with an item that didn’t belong to him. “Stopim em! Stopim em! Em giaman, tasol! Em no gut! Kissim em now!” “Stop him! Stop him! He’s a liar and a thief and no good! Get him!” the mob would yell as they stampeded off down the road. Other times there could be a large crowd that had gathered around two women who were really going at each other in the vicious way only women do. One of the women would most likely be a wife from somewhere else who had discovered that her husband had taken another wife here in Goroka. Officially, that kind of thing was now illegal, unofficially, it happened all the time.

But this was not that kind of crowd. It was a fairly large group, but less than a hundred, of mostly men and some women, which built a kind of cosmos around an epicenter of commotion. By the time they had reached the side of our garden which was directly in front of me, Naguru’s curiosity had brought her to my side. As my haus-Meri (maid) and I stood there, we could make out what was going on. In the center of this crowd there was an angry Highlands man who had a woman strong armed in a headlock. In this way they, and the entire cosmos, moved some paces along, he yelling angrily and she wailing and pleading. Then he let her go and tried to move on, only to have her follow him, still loudly wailing and pleading in the most desperate and haunting tones, grabbing him, falling on her knees, throwing dirt on herself, and begging. We could not understand what they were saying since everyone in the crowd was loudly voicing their opinions of who should do what, and that in some mixture of Pidgin and “Tok-ples” (Talk-place, or local language). Then the Highlands man grabbed the woman again in a headlock and began punching her head with his free fist while they turned the corner and moved to a standstill directly in front of my gate.

At this point I had seen enough and moved to go out and try to stop this violence. It would not have been the first time I had intervened in the family affairs of strangers in my host country of Papua New Guinea. Already in the first week we were in Goroka, a city of about 25-30 thousand, before moving into the house designated for us by our mission, the one year old of a young family living on the grounds of our temporary housing had a severe ear infection. When I went to see what the problem was in the middle of the night after the child had been screaming for hours, the young family, who were charismatic Lutherans, told me they were trusting God to heal their child. Thankfully they were able to interpret my intervention with fever reducing pain medicine and a ride to the clinic the next day as an answer to their prayers. Often we would simply stop the car when we passed a child with an obvious ailment, like a huge abscess or an open wound, and politely insist that they let us take the family to the 2 Kina clinic (fifty cent clinic). Once it was necessary to harbor our neighbor who was being assaulted by her adult, mentally handicapped, male relative whom she helped take care of.

On these and many other occasions, my mere being caucasian and the wealth that was associated with it, was all that was necessary to gain invitation, entrance, and compliance. That and the ELC-PNG logo on the side of our car, which signaled that we were Lutheran missionaries and not business people. But I had not yet waded into a physical altercation involving men, though I had witnessed plenty, and in certain heated situations, like bumping into the PKV ahead of me one day while out shopping, I made sure to communicate an exaggerated deference and profuse apologies, so as to avoid escalation, to the driver -who was mostly play-acting at being furious. We both knew that he had hit pay-dirt and would pocket a high compensation price from us.

Now, as this scene unfolded outside of my window, it was just Naguru, myself, our older gardener, Paul, and my two young children at home for the week that my husband was away on a bush tour, but my instincts moved me toward the door anyway. I guess I thought I could slip into a pair of leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora and exorcise the authority I seemed to have as a white woman in PNG, and perhaps as one who had a closer claim on the gate they happened to be standing in front of. But before I could take a third step, Naguru grabbed hold of my arm and, without words, let me know that the color of my skin could not save this woman. I should stay put.

So I did.

The malignant crowd moved up the road toward Donald’s house, the young man who had worked in our garden, looked after Jonathan, and had been an indispensable cultural bridge for us until he started his own gardening business. He was the adopted son of the church’s District President who lived up the street, and the next day I asked him what he knew about the incident. What Naguru and I heard broke our hearts. The husband had suspected and accused the woman of being with someone else and had taken her young child away and given him to his relatives in his village where she would be unable to retrieve him.

As I was taking this all in, I hung my head, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that my daughter, Charis, had crawled across the floor and cornered Lurchi. By the time I could reach her, it was too late. The gecko had darted away along the bookcase, leaving his tail in the tight fist of my delighted one year old.