ABSTRACT
The first person to mention bfaa to the author had been Confidence’s mother, during the very first interview he conducted in Tabenken, when she called her child’s illness bfaa in Limbum. Shortly after this Pius and Fai Nga Kontar both used the word “bfaa” as a synonym for “ngang”. They said that the illness which people now called ngang had previously been referred to as bfaa, but that the latter term was no longer fashionable. Pa TaKwi agreed with Manasas Yangsi, that ngang and bfaa are different, but he did not describe the difference as one between different stages in one illness process, but as different phenomena. For him ngang is an illness which starts in the stomach and appears on the skin like scabies, whereas bfaa is related to suicide; ngang attacks young children whereas bfaa only affects adults.
