Q&A #1 - What Do We Eat?

This is our first post in our Question and Answer series, so if you have a question you'd like answered, ask away!


How do you eat? Meaning, go to grocery store, grow or gather? 
  
Great question! The people of Papua New Guinea are mostly hunters/gatherers, so their diet mainly consists of garden vegetables, fruits, and the occasional meat that they get from wild pig, large bats, the cassowary bird, or other small mammals. Some also raise their own pigs or chickens for meat. People who live closer to town have access to stores, so they can get rice and canned tuna or mackerel.  

We, however, eat more of a Western diet. There are grocery stores in the main towns that carry a fairly decent selection of common Western foods, like pasta noodles, flour, sugar, canned goods, frozen meat, eggs, and dairy products. Although it can be a bit frustrating because you often have to go to several different stores to find the exact ingredients that you need.

A fairly modern grocery store

And we can get fresh fruit (and occasionally vegetables) from the open-air market in town.

Lots of home-grown food

Right now, since we're living on the mission base, we have easy access to town and stores. When we move out to the tribe, it will be a bit harder to get our supplies. There will be a missionary on the base whose sole job is buying groceries for the missionaries in tribal locations. So we'll send an email to him with our list of needed supplies. He'll go to town, buy what he can, package it all up in boxes, and send it out to us on the next available airplane flight. We're so thankful for this guy's hard work to help us out!

A bulk foods store in town

We can even get toiletries in country

We helped buy and package supplies for missionaries for a few months while we were there

Fun fact: the word for "eat" in the trade language is "kaikai". And it's also the word for "food". So it can be both a verb and a noun depending on context!

Question Time!

Many of you read our blog updates and receive our monthly newsletters, but we probably don't get to answer a lot of the specific questions you have about our life and ministry in PNG. So, what do YOU want to know? Ask away! No question is dumb. :) You can comment below, send us a message on Facebook, or write an email. We'll post the answers right here on the blog, so stay tuned!

Our Top 20 Reverse Culture Shock Observations

Since getting back to the States in July, a lot of people have asked us, "What's been the hardest thing with adjusting back to life here?" It's funny how many things there actually have been. Things that we didn't expect because they seem so insignificant when you live here and we still kind of feel like America is home. It's a phenomenon referred to as Reverse Culture Shock.

Now that we've been here a few months, I think we've had time to process a lot of those differences. Here are a few that really stood out when we first arrived.


1. Stores have so. much. stuff. And like 10 different brands for 1 item.

2. Americans don't drive on the left side of the road. Obvious, maybe, but a very key point to grasp.

3. Digestive issues... Our stomachs reacted to many of the foods that we loved before heading to the mission field. We never thought that we'd have to adjust back to "normal" food again.

4. We felt sad that people we passed on the street didn't greet us or ask what we were doing.

5. It felt weird to blend in again. We suddenly weren't a minority anymore, which meant nobody really noticed us. 

6. People are clean and (generally) don't smell of sweat or smoke.

7. Not to mention the streets are (generally) clean and don't have garbage strewn all over.

8. While we're at it, everything is (generally) clean!

9. We found ourselves stumbling over our words at times, knowing the sentence or phrase we want to say, but not being able to think how to say it in English.

10. Or else accidentally throwing a Pidgin word in our English sentence and not even noticing until we saw blank stares.

11. Also, just because a person is black doesn't mean they speak Pidgin (oops).

12. When we first arrived, it felt weird that it stayed light past 6:30 PM.

13. Air conditioning! Oh my word, for the first few weeks, we were freezing if the inside temperature was below 78 degrees!

14. And with that, Kyler was cold at night but he didn't want a blanket because he's so used to sleeping without one.

15. Roads are smooth, well-marked, and nicely paved (mostly).

16. Church is loud. Or at least the music is. And drums! (don't worry, that's a very excited observation) And it's all in English!

17. Finding out that how you pay for things with a credit card can be different now if you use that funny little chip thing (why change a good thing when you've got it?).

18. Not recognizing certain areas because new buildings had gone up or been torn down.

19. Not recognizing any of the songs on the radio because they're all new.

20.  It's easy to plan a menu because you can pretty much guarantee that the grocery store will have the items that you need for your meals.


I'm sure there are more things we could mention, but those are probably the most noteworthy. Reverse Culture Shock is a strange thing, because you don't really expect it coming back to you "home" country. But it's definitely a fact of life, and it was kind of fun in some ways to see our culture again in a whole new way.

And now that we feel adjusted back, we'll be heading back to PNG in just a few more weeks. :) I'm sure I'll have another Top 20 list for that...