Christianity, Calamity, and Culture: The Involvement of Christian Churches in the 1998 Aitape Tsunami Disaster Relief

In the early evening of Friday, 17 July 1998, three giant waves, each fifteen meters high, crashed into an isolated part of the coast in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. The disaster event was sudden and devastating. With practically no warning, about fifty kilometers of the coast became inundated by the waves: houses were smashed, coconut trees were uprooted, and people were flung, helpless, into the sea. The Aitape tsunami, as it came to be known, killed over 2,000 people, and many more were left suffering. Such disaster events are relatively common in Melanesia and the Pacific generally. Indeed, there may well be a close connection between increasing vulnerability to disasters and “development” in the Pacific (see McEntire 1999). The number of organizations that seek to provide relief in disaster situations also appears to be on the rise. These organizations are diverse, operating on a variety of scales and within disparate organizational types and sociocultural frameworks. In the wake of the Aitape tsunami, one such group was the Combined Churches Organization (cco)— a small, ephemeral conglomeration of Christian organizations that provided a distinctive form of relief aid, informed by the local Melanesian culture and the Christian faith of its workers. In this paper, we aim to highlight the paucity of scholarly research exploring the relationships between Christianity and disaster relief in the Pacific. This task is set in the context of the relationships between Christianity, aid, and development more broadly, which is a limited but growing field. In seeking to address this gap, we provide a case study from Melanesia focusing on the Combined Churches Organization and its