Jonathan Wilson grew up in Papua, Indonesia, where he spent most of the first seventeen years of his life.  

His parents were missionaries among the Yali people, who had been first contacted in 1961, and were still eating victims of warfare when Jonathan was a boy.  On one occasion his village was attacked by warriors and his mother would not allow him to leave the house to watch.

Jonathan still speaks Yali and still considers the tribe and its mountain habitat to be his home.  His life there instilled in him a love for wilderness, a holistic worldview and a commitment to life in community.  Through his anthropologically-studied father and the Yali he learned tribal folklore and sacred myths.  His witness of warlike people being positively transformed convinced him that personal and social redemption is both a possibility and a reality.

Jonathan had many misadventures in Papua (and South East Asia) in his years there and on return visits: he survived a major earthquake, spent weeks recovering from the scorching he got after a day adrift on the ocean, held his stomach in while the small plane fell a thousand metres in turbulence, explored mountain and lowland jungles where no-one from the outside world has otherwise been, and (while at boarding school in the Philippines) was held captive by aggressive gunmen for a few tense hours.