A concert, a mumu and a bush trip.

Hello Friends.

Here are some snaps of our week. Sunday, our girls joined the other MAF kids in a musical production called ‘The Story of the Three Trees’. Alison, a music teacher and the wife of the MAF finance guy has been working with the home school kids on this project, and we got to see it on Sunday. They all did an excellent job, and had a wonderful time performing for us.

One Wednesday, we celebrated our last class of language with a ‘mumu’. A mumu is a traditional festive PNG meal, where the meat and vegetables are wrapped in banana leaves and cooked with coconut milk. Usually it is done in a pit with hot rocks, but we chucked it in the oven….and it works just the same. Not pretty to look at, but good to eat.

Tomorrow we fly in the 206 plane out to our village where we will spend the next week doing our bush orientation at a village called Sanghapi. We will be staying at a Nazarene clinic, and will be hosted by a pastor and his family. We really have no idea what it will be like, so look out for our next blog to read all about it.

Please pray that we would have a safe and healthy week. And pray that we would be brave and thick skinned enough to use our limited pidgin. Pray also for our girls as they cope with culture shock, the creepy crawlies in the bush, and the fact that they won’t be able to communicate much with the other kids.

Thanks!

Mt Hagan Market

Here is where we get our fruit and veg - the famous Mt Hagan market.


 

Yep, we are still having fun!

 

Study week

Here we are with our Pidgin language group. 

It's all pidgin to me!

Hello Friends.

Sorry you haven’t heard much from us, we have spent the majority of the last week studying.

The new maf staff couples, Tobias and Anita (from Germany, Tobias is a pilot, Anita a pediatrics nurse), and Ed and Debbie (who are from Canada, Ed was in management and is hoping tot be working for MAF at the base, Debbie is a pilot) and Sandy and I meet at our house every morning from 8.30 till 12.30 where we have our language class. Nicki Duncalfe, (wife of one of the MAF pilots) is our teacher. She and her hubby Michael have been here for many years, and she is in charge of language and culture classes for new MAF expatriate staff.

We decided to be kind to ourselves and not attempt home schooling with Rachel and Megan for the two weeks of language. Looking over our week, this was a wise decision and I have stopped feeling guilty about it. We just couldn’t have done it. Nicki gives us about 2 or 3 hours of home work each day (which seems to take me 3 or 4 hours), and so by the time we shop and cook and clean and get our homework done, it is time for bed.

The girls are a bit bored, but have been spending their mornings keeping busy with books, computer games and dvds. Their afternoons are more fun as they get to go play with the other kids on the compound.

We have ten language lessons altogether, so only 3 to go now. It doesn't seem like much, but we feel like we are getting enough of the basics that we can continue studying on our own. We are finding Pidgin easier to hear and recognize words and understand, but it is much more difficult to speak it correctly, so we are working hard to get the rules locked into the brain.

The national ladies who live on our compound are fantastic – patient, encouraging and kind. They only speak Pidgin to us and are more than happy to help correct our many mistakes. We also practice when we are at the shops in town and at the market.

On Sunday morning we went to a church just down the road. We walked with Ben, one of the national guys from the compound. It is a Lutheran church, and fairly formal and all in pidgin. They have a prayer book, and they used lots of readings, so it was pretty easy to follow along.

Church was held in a big building with a cement floor, and wooden and grass walls. A dog wandered through near the end of the service, everyone just ignored it as it sniffed around. Our girls found this pretty amusing! Probably about 70 people, all the ladies sit one side and the men the other side. Our family, and Tobias and Anita were the only white skins. We had to go up the front and introduce ourselves and Sandy did a great job in pidgin with a bit of English mixed in. All the MAF families go to local churches, and then once a month they have a get together called 'soul food' - which is a worship service for the expatriates in English.

That’s about all for now. I have to go and translate a bible passage for today’s class.
Have a great day!

Arrival and Day One

Hi everyone – here we are in Papua New Guinea!

We arrived late on Friday afternoon in a torrential rain storm. The nifty pilot ducked and dived and found a spot through the clouds and got us safely onto the runway at Mt Hagen Airport. We were warmly welcomed by the MAF team and our host families, collected our (by now) soaked luggage and were scooted off to temporary home at a MAF compound near the airport.

It is wonderful to be here!

On our first day, we were up early to unpack and organise the house a bit. The house that we have been assigned to live in is being painted at the moment, so we are here for about 3 weeks until it is ready.

The kids were dressed and out the door by 8am to play. We were taken on a tour of the compound and we meet almost all of the families who live here. Three expatriate families, and five national staff families. Lots of kids and lots of dogs.

Sandy stayed home with the girls and one of the MAF pilots wives (Tina) took me for a drive into town to check it out.

They say there are about 100,000 people who live in Hagen, I reckon they were all at the shops this morning! It was wall to wall people. I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of stores and the stock available in the shops. Half way through our shop in one of the bigger stores, we noticed that all roller doors at the entrance had been rolled down. When we asked, the lady on the till said that there was a big fight outside, so they had to close the shop until it had cleared away. A few minutes later, the doors were up again and people carried on with their shopping. They say that there are often scuffles in the streets in town, but they are easily spotted and we are told to just stay away from the action. Apparently, it is very rare that they have guns, mostly sticks and knives. Keep clear of it and you’re fine.

After the trip to town, it was back to our place to do some washing and more sorting. Lots of our luggage had got wet, so we had clothes strewn all over our house drying out. They have had heaps of rain in the past couple of weeks, so the ground is really water logged and there is mud everywhere. We have been walking around barefoot as it is easier to clean feet than it is to clean shoes.

The kids rode their bikes around the compound, jumped on the trampoline, climbed trees, played 'flying doctors', had an afternoon tea party, and then decided to create their own mud slide. They collected buckets of water, poured then from the top of a great pile of dirt, then slipped and slide to their little hearts great delight. Their clothes will never be the same again! It took a bath, followed by a shower and three hair washings to get them clean. Our girls went to bed very tired, but oh so happy!

Today we have the morning free to organize ourselves a bit more, then we have been invited to the Hagen Hotel for lunch to celebrate Fathers day and meet some other MAF people.

They have got us on a pretty tight schedule for the next few weeks. Tomorrow is shopping day. Set ourselves with all the basics that we need to survive.

Then Tuesday we are setting up our drivers licenses, bank accounts, internet accounts, and getting tours of the MAF hangar and office and having meetings with those in charge.

Wednesday we start language. It is supposed to be a full load, so I am not sure if we will manage any school with the kids for the duration. But that’s okay. It is very important that we get a good grounding in the language. We have two weeks of lessons, and then we go and spend a week living in a village. All very exciting and exhausting!

Thanks to all who are praying for us.