Retail Therapy

This morning, Sandy and I popped up to the Mt Hagen Market for our weekly fruit and vegetable shop. The new market is such a pleasure after experiencing the old. It is a lovely place to shop! People sell everything from bananas to billums (the bags that people use, made from colorful wool) to Mari blouses (the traditional dress of the ladies here). You can get a live chicken, tobacco leaves, sticks of sugar cane, and every imaginable fruit and veg.

Blessed are the amusement deprived

We love that our girls are learning to live a simple life here in PNG. There are no fancy parks to take them to, no toy stores to visit. Their bikes, a plank of wood and a stick of sugar cane to chew on is all they need for a full afternoon of fun.

Mum is rather relieved they have moved on to this activity.

Last week the local kids on our compound were going through a fire-lighting phase. They have a old tyre, and a hidden box of matches somewhere, and get a fire going. Our girls thought this was great fun. They raided my cupboard, took half a loaf of bread, a roll of foil and margarine and peanut butter, and made toasted sandwiches over the open flames, and sat around the fire having a picnic with all their friends. Now and again the fire would get a bit big, so a couple of the boys would load up their water pistols and shoot it until it died down. Great fun, but rather hard on Mums nerves.

And you can see from the state of the lawn that we are in the middle of our wet season. Sandy has recorded 200mls so far for January.

Polopa New Testament

Last week, Sandy had the privilege of flying Ken and Helen Macnaughtan to a place called Mount Tawa.

Ken and Helen were the first white skin missionaries to walk into that community in the early 70’s. Back then, cannibalism was still practiced in the area.

SIL translators, Neil and Carol Anderson have recently completed the Polopa New Testament Bible, and the dedication celebrations were last week.