Wedding Dress

When couples in PNG decide to get married, they face a difficult choice; church wedding or village marriage. Church weddings are usually pretty elaborate, and expensive. But Christian couples want to formalize their marriage in church, and a village marriage isn't really a wedding. It's just completing the arrangements between the families, and then they're married.

We have wished that couples could have a simple church wedding. One of the expensive parts of a church wedding is the dress. A couple of years ago, Judy shared an idea with Marilyn Willard, who was here as a member of a Work and Witness team from Medford, Oregon. Why not have a few nice, simple white dresses that ladies could use for their weddings, and then pass on to other ladies? Marilyn went home and made such a dress, and it arrived a few weeks ago.

Just the other day, Judy talked with Pastor Susan, from the Middle Ramu District, high in the mountains to the north of Kudjip. She shared that she is planning to marry Pastor Albert. She was asking a friend to make her a white "meri dress", the traditional dress of PNG ladies, but when Judy offered her the use of the wedding dress, she was overjoyed. Her response?

"Just my size!"