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 Murder charges filed after woman burned alive in Papua New Guinea. Simon’s eyes widened as he read page four of the Guardian Weekly. A photo showed a crowd gathered around a scrap heap, all staring at a fire burning in the middle of the mound. 

Bystanders watch as a woman accused of witchcraft is burned alive in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea after being tortured. A 27-year-old woman and mother, accused of bewitching a six-year-old boy, died recently in hospital. She was publicly stripped, tortured with a hot iron rod, doused in petrol, and set on fire. Police were present at the time of the killing but made no arrests, saying they were outnumbered by the unruly crowd.

        There were over thirty people, watching the fire as if it were Guy Fawkes night. Some looked as young as ten. A boy was filming it on his phone. Maybe to show his family and friends, like sharing a dance move. Christ, it looked so normal.

 On the outskirts of town, Sister Bernadette O’Brien, a nun from Massachusetts who has lived in Papua New Guinea since 1976, immediately understood what the excited children were running to see. “We always had sanguma [witchcraft], but not to this extreme, nothing like it is now. It used to be that they’d push someone over a cliff, or something like that. They still ended up dead, but there wasn’t the torture, not like now. This interrogation, this public stuff, with kids watching, it becomes a spectacle.”

        The children he’d known in the Highlands back then wouldn’t have watched. They would’ve been scared and horrified.

 Since the 1980s, sorcery-related attacks have been on the rise. Pentecostal Evangelical missionaries and social media have accelerated the spread of witchcraft accusations.

Simon put the paper down, but the image wouldn’t leave him. That fire. The inert crowd. How could the Pentecostal church keep spreading these lies? Somewhere, in the hidden corners of their minds, there must be doubt. A flicker of conscience. A part of them that knows this is out of control.

Clouds drifted past the open window. The white noise of wind in the leaves. An incessant screech of cicadas. Until today, Tagola had felt far away. Sometimes, when he looked at photos from then, it felt like it had happened to someone else.

In those early days after leaving Tagola, he’d dream he was back in the jungle and the horror would come back. When he first arrived in Wellington, he’d wake up and there’d be nothing. He hardly said a word about it to anyone until journalism school. Then it all came out in his first newspaper article. Weaponizing Kindness - One Missionary’s Message Transformed a Community in Papua New Guinea. He had thought it might make a difference.

       It was twenty-five years ago, while teaching at Tagola High School, that he’d met Trevor Hawthorn, a Pentecostal Evangelist missionary and his closest neighbour from overseas. Trevor’s energy was impossible to ignore. He spoke like a man on fire. And truth be told, it was impressive. He’d made a difference. The villagers adored him.