I’m not saying that, in remembering, you allow the past to negatively affect your present. What I mean is that the thought of that brutal moment of long ago remains embedded in your mind.

I have read heart-breaking stories of my Bougainvillean brothers and sisters who endured the travails of the civil war on their beautiful island. I feel for them but also know that time has a way of putting things in perspective.

Some of us have gone through almost insurmountable difficulties in this world, often not of our own doing.

I had my moment of monstrousness as a teenager. It crept into my life and robbed me of happiness. It exerted its ominous presence over me and held me prisoner for a decade.

It happened suddenly and unexpectedly on a beautiful January morning in 1997.  I had completed Grade 10 the year before and was spending the Christmas break in my village awaiting an offer to continue into Grade 11.

We left the village on the Simbu side of the border and sped off towards Mt Hagen in a Toyota Hilux Double cabin owned by someone from my village.

I knew the guy behind the wheel was a novice but I was too clumsy to give this serious thought. Three young men in a sleek vehicle - too appealing.

So off we went, cruising west at high speed. I sat beside the driver while our stocky henchman had the back seat to himself.

We pulled up to a roadside tradestore at Kudjip Junction and asked for an empty cardboard box from which the driver cut a rectangular piece and wrote a capital ‘P’ on it before sticky taping the novice driver’s sign to the back windscreen.

Then we recommenced our journey across the fertile Wahgi plains toward Hagen.

The landscape raced past in a blurry haze as the driver had his foot flat to the floor. We moved moving so fast I felt a mini tornado swirl along the dashboard. A piece of cloth became airborne and hurtled towards the half open window on my side.

The driver, distracted, leaned sideways to retrieve the object. In that split second, the Hilux went off the road. The driver made a frenzied attempt regain control and get the speeding monster back onto the bitumen.

There was a BANG followed quickly by another BANG.

The Hilux rolled and then somersaulted again just inches from the asphalt before plunging into elephant grass. We were stuck in our seats like frozen chickens as the car lay sideways , a mangled heap of twisted metal, broken shrubs and uprooted elephant grass.

Friendly locals from Tuman Nazarene College came to our rescue. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. God saved our lives that day.

A few weeks after the accident, I was still nursing a small bruise on my left ankle when I received a package informing me I had been awarded a scholarship to attend secondary school in Australia.

A month or so later, as the last rays of the Queensland sun casting a gentle light over the cane fields of north Queensland, my fellow Papua New Guinean scholars and I were motoring along the Bruce Highway bound for the township of Charters Towers.

I was stunned by the picture perfect homesteads and endless savannah that rolled by as the bus raced into a Queensland night.

Unfortunately my schooling in Charters Towers was short-lived. I succumbed to mild depression in the following year. I would spend every day dreaming and imagining things that were not immediately within reach.  Sometimes I would experience severe headaches.  The more I daydreamed, the more depressed I became.

One day during an English class, my English teacher, Ms O’Leary, caught me daydreaming and issued a stern warning, “Paul, I don’t care what the future holds for you but in my class you’ll have to concentrate.”

Well, concentrate I did not as I became more depressed. I called it quits and returned to my beloved PNG highlands village.

I intended to stay there for a month. Months turned into years and years into a decade and I had become a villager.

Despite the love and care of many kinsfolk, there were others did not understand my situation so I became the butt of their jokes.  I tried as best I could to be a respectful member of my community by cultivating gardens, helping the needy and so on.

Finally, I tried to go back to school in 2003 but my depression had deteriorated to a state where it triggered other complications. I lost the ability to write. I could not hold a pen in my hand to write a single word. Whenever I attempted it, I felt I was suffocating and dying.

I was doing all the hard jobs in the village using both hands but I had lost the ability to write. I was clearly afflicted with some kind of anxiety disorder. I had lost a lot of weight and had tingling pains in my joints.

Some days, I would be holed up in my house for hours on end. I resorted to binge drinking homebrew and ultimately became a nobody. At night I roamed neighbouring villages in search of homebrew.  There was no love in me. Coursing through my veins was hatred. I was a time bomb waiting to explode.

I did not explode. In that year of 2004, the Good Lord came into my life and turned my world upside down.

I heard God’s salvation message of repentance from sin. I attended a church, got baptised by full immersion and was filled with the Holy Spirit. I was miraculously healed right there and then.

The depression and hatred evaporated. My life of suffering was gone and I felt as a new born baby. Today I have peace in my heart. God has made my heart overflow with love.

After almost a decade in the village, I attended the University of Goroka and graduated in 2009. I am a secondary school teacher now.

I write every day. My hand is normal. I am no longer a drunk. A transformation which is a testament to God’s incredible power. I thank God with all my heart for changing my life completely.