Learning Journey

On the evening of September 19, 1994, 16-year-old Ivy Bruder was at home with her mother and siblings at their home in Rabaul, East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea; her father was at a priesthood meeting. They were watching television when suddenly they noticed that outside, the usual sounds of birds, insects, and dogs had ceased.

“Everything just went still,” she recalled. “And then the earthquake started, and when it started, it did not stop.” Ivy and her two brothers, two sisters, and mother ran from the house. Passing trucks took them to Vudal Teachers’ College on a mountainside. From there, they and hundreds of others watched the eruption of two local volcanoes, Vulcan and Tavurvur.

As they huddled under a pavilion, watching a thick cloud of poisonous gases expanding in their direction, Ivy’s mother, Claire Charlie, said, “Children, Heavenly Father listens to prayers.” They gathered together as Claire prayed. “As soon as she said, ‘Amen,’ this huge strong wind came and blew the cloud away,” Ivy remembered.

This wind brought in a storm. Mud and pumice stones rained down, and the lightning was red. Later, Ivy’s father, Michael Bruder, joined them, bringing their grandparents. The family was safe, but the town had been completely destroyed. The high school was buried, and their home had been looted. Ivy’s father, Michael, stayed behind with his oldest son, George, to help family members rebuild. Claire, who worked as a teller for the Bank of Papua New Guinea, was reassigned to a job in Port Moresby, the national capital.

Ivy, who had been just about to complete 10th grade when the eruption occurred, eventually began to work as a hairdresser’s apprentice and stayed at the job for three years to help support her mother and her younger siblings in Port Moresby. Many of Ivy’s classmates from Rabaul simply stopped going to school. But Ivy was different. Claire had a love of reading, writing poetry, music, and art that had rubbed off on her children.

In 1997, Mosese Naeata, the new president of the Port Moresby Mission, told Ivy and her younger sisters, Marissa and Marianna, about Liahona High School, a Church-run school in his native Tonga. The three sisters were among the first group of Papua New Guinean students to attend Liahona. Already 19 years old when she began 11th grade, Ivy graduated from Liahona.

Marianna, Ivy, and Marissa Bruder with Irene Leggett at BYU–Hawaii, ca. 2003.

Photo by Monique Saenz (BYU–Hawaii)

After serving a mission in New Zealand (Wellington), Ivy attended Brigham Young University–Hawaii, along with Marissa and Marianna. She married James Stiefvater in 2003 and graduated in 2006 with a degree in information systems. Now raising children of her own, Ivy says being a Latter-day Saint has helped her deal with being far from her family in Papua New Guinea: “The Church brings people into your life, and they stay with you for the journey. Mine are with me for eternity.”