Learning from Life

By now, you know that the biggest time-consumer in our lives right now learning the Uriay language. We’re making progress, which is really exciting! But we sound like two-year-olds, which is not so exciting. Saying “ani demyae (It’s raining)” or “mo teta mawi (I’m going to my house)” definitely gets smiles and nods from onlookers who are thrilled to hear you speaking their language. But, they don’t make the best conversation starters. Thankfully, the two-year-old stage shouldn’t last too long.

Listening to a visiting political candidate give a speech

 Along with language study, we are working hard to learn as much as we can about Uriay culture. Here, culture and language go hand in hand. So many words are only understood if you know the cultural context for them, so it’s vital that we learn both.

Going into the jungle to get some sak sak (a staple food) and morota (roofing material)

Thankfully, living in the village gives us plenty of opportunities for culture study! Almost every day, we opportunities to observe and participate in cultural events. Events could be as elaborate as a wedding (which we haven’t observed yet), or as small as building a fire. When an event occurs, we observe what the people do, participate as much as we can, and take pictures. Then, at home, we write down our observations of each event and store our pictures so that later, we can print them out and use them as a sort of “photo book” to get more words and sentences.

Clint didn't get much sleep but had fun on the overnight jungle camping with the guys

We’re basically getting to kill two birds with one stone. We’re learning language, but we’re learning as much as we can about their culture at the same time.

Here are just a few of the events we’ve gotten to observe so far: building a house, making bows and arrows, diving for fish, preparing sak sak (a staple food in their diet), a funeral for a baby, and shooting a pig.

Trying to shoot a bow that the guys helped Clint make. I wasn't very successful :)

 

It may seem like a bit of an overkill doing so much work to learn about as many aspects of their lives as possible. But our goal is to understand how the people here think and interact so that we can clearly communicate God’s word in a way that will make sense to them. It’s a lot of work, but we’re having a lot of fun in the process!

A Hard Week

Last week was an absolutely crazy emotional roller coaster.

It started out so well. Monday morning, we hit the ground running with language and culture study. The day flew by. We felt like we were making good progress, and we put in a good, full day of language study.

Tuesday, things went downhill fast. We were going about our daily schedule when a lady knocked on our front door. She mentioned that a new baby had just been born and asked if I could come with her. I grabbed my stuff and headed out the door, feeling excited about the new little life I was about to meet. That feeling quickly died. A guy I met on the trail mentioned that the baby had been born but wasn’t breathing. My heart sank, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been summoned to meet this baby. I had been summoned to revive it.

And we tried. We tried so stinking hard to revive that precious little boy. My coworker, Laken, and I did CPR for what felt like hours, crying and praying that God would bring that little life back to us. But there was nothing we could do. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life… stopping the CPR and telling that momma that we couldn’t save her baby. She was so exhausted and looked so hopeless. My heart broke for her. For all the ladies in this tribe who have had their children die but have no hope of ever seeing them again. It was so hard, but it also gave me such a renewed sense of purpose and urgency for learning this language.

Wednesday and Thursday were exciting days again. Clint and our coworker Jason got to do an overnight hunting/camping trip with a bunch of the Wabuku guys. Their stories of going out in the middle of the night to stalk miari (a nocturnal marsupial that lives in the jungle) were entertaining and exciting. It encouraged our hearts that the guys had such an awesome opportunity to further strengthen their relationships with the Wabuku guys.

Then Thursday night, the heavens literally opened and we had one of the worst and loudest thunderstorms I have ever experienced. One particular lightning bolt struck our radio antenna, snapping the cable and frying our HF radio, several fans, and almost all our lights. It also knocked out the internet at our house, something our coworker Jason had just got running after weeks of work. We’re thankful no one was hurt, but it was pretty discouraging.

It’s been rough. We a bit like we were run over by a bus. But we can totally see God’s hand through it all, protecting us and giving us renewed grace to face each day. He is completely sufficient, and He is so worthy of our lives, no matter how hard it gets!

Learning Uriay

We’ve been in Wabuku for a total of 2 months now. Our lives have changed in so many ways since moving in here. Most of them have been good, including finally having a place to call our home. A few have been difficult. But overall, we are loving it in here!

Our main focus since moving in has been culture and language study. We spend a lot of time out with the people in the village, learning how they live and interact. Our hope is that all the information we are gathering will one day allow us to effectively communicate God’s truth in a way that they can understand.

For language study, we can use the trade language that we learned when we first arrived in PNG as a bridge to help us gather nouns and common, useful phrases in Uriay. We are mostly learning words right now, and later we will move to constructing sentences.

Uriay has a lot of words, but most of them are fairly easy to obtain. They are based in what you can see around you. Many things that we have in English don’t have names in Uriay because the people never use them, such as computer, stove, sink, bath tub, etc. They could come up with a rough translation, like “place for washing plates” or “place for cooking food”, but it makes it a bit simpler for us to learn their language because they don’t have as many nouns as we do.

The one thing that is a bit tricky with Uriay is that many words sound and look alike, which can potentially be embarrassing depending on your situation. For instance, “una” and “uma” are very similar, but the first one means “sago palm” (which is a tree that provides a staple food in their diet) and the second means “poop”. Don’t want to get those confused.

Overall, most of the words in Uriay look and sound nothing like English. It’s going to take a lot of time and hard work to learn this language. Our brains often feel like mush at the end of a day of studying. But we know all the work will be worth it!

Land of the Unexpected

Papua New Guinea is described by many as the land of the unexpected. We definitely agree. From the moment we first stepped into the sweltering blanket of PNG humidity a year and a half ago, we have experienced countless revisions to our plans. This month has been  no exception.

Most of you know that we were planning to move into Wabuku on January 16 (with a small work team going in a few days prior to work on our houses). But, we’re still not moved in. The grass airstrip where we fly in to flooded just before we were set to depart, so we couldn’t go. When we finally received the OK to fly, our coworker, Lisa, had to go to Australia for some very important meetings. So, the work team (3 people besides Clint and our coworker Jason) decided to do a quick trip, just to get some work done on our houses. The original 5-day trip was shortened to 4-days after some rescheduling done by our mission pilots. And, last minute, I was asked to go in to help cook for the team. So, our whole family ended up traveling in to Wabuku for 4 days. We loved being there and didn’t want to leave. I guess that’s a good sign since we’re headed back in six days on February 7! Or, some of us are anyways.

Ok, so after our work trip, we anticipated a full week and a half out on the base to pack the rest of our things and get ready for our move. Nope. We got word that our coworkers’ batteries might not have been hooked up correctly to their solar system, and it could potentially destroy the system if left alone. So, Clint and Jason quickly packed and headed back into Wabuku after only spending the weekend on the base. They decided to stay in the tribe since it doesn’t make much sense for them to come back out and go back in only a week later. We got word that the batteries and solar system are totally fine, and the guys are continuing to fix and clean our houses (trust me, they are filthy!). We miss them, but we’re thankful they can get so much done before we head in.

We’d definitely appreciate your prayers as we prepare to move in on the 7^th. We definitely sense that Satan has been attacking our team in various ways. He’s trying hard to discourage and distract us. We know he doesn’t want these people to learn what it means to walk in fellowship with Christ. He has held them in bondage for so long, and he is fighting to hang on to his domain. It’s scary sometimes what he throws at us. But praise God, He is so much stronger than Satan! And He will protect and guide us as we go. Thanks so much for praying for us each step of this crazy journey! And please, don't stop.

A Picture Post

Ok, I know I've slacked off on posting pictures on here. I'd like to say it's because I've been busy, which is true. But I mostly have just forgotten. Oops. So here's a bunch from our past few months here, with some descriptions.


We made it back to PNG in early December. It took almost 40 hours of traveling to get here, but it was so good to finally be home! At least, home on the mission base. :)

It was so fun to decorate for Christmas this year. We feel like PNG is home now, so that made it a lot more special for us. And it was fun to start some of our own family traditions. We put up all our Christmas decorations pretty much right away after getting here. We bought the tree and lights in town (yup, you can find Christmas stuff in town).

These little string bags are called "bilums" here in PNG. Almost everyone carries one around when going places. They act as a purse/wallet and come in all kinds of colors. We made these smaller versions as a fun way for our family to do Christmas stockings.

We had a really fun Christmas celebration with our teammates! The kids' Aunt Lisa spoiled them to death! :) So thankful for missionaries who become like family here to make the holidays special.

December also meant lots of meetings with our teammates to continue talking through our strategy for moving into Wabuku. There's so much to talk through, but we are grateful to be unified as we begin this ministry together. We seriously love these guys so much!

And Kyler loves being back with his little friends! Our teammates, Jason and Laken, have two little boys who are close to Kyler's age. It's going to be so fun for these three growing up in the jungle together!

 

Kyler has done great with all the transition back to PNG! He probably transitioned better here than anywhere for the past five months, so we're so thankful for that.

We feel spoiled living on the mission base because we literally can see the beach from our house. We love going down there every once in a while to swim. It's so beautiful here!

 

After all the New Year's celebrations, we started preparing for moving into Wabuku (since we originally thought we were moving in on January 16... more on that later). Everything we take in has to be weighed and labelled (for the plane flight) and wrapped in black plastic (for the canoe trip).

Here's one of the spots on base where we store our supplies after we get them all packaged up.

And here's our team Wabuku mail box (the box above the sign)! We really love getting mail! :) Side note: Thanks SO much to all those who sent Christmas cards! We so loved getting those!

Amidst all the Wabuku prep, these two kiddos have been so good! They have been growing and changing so much, and are doing awesome with all the change. Kyler's language abilities have exploded, and he has added a bunch of new words to his vocabulary. He even says a few short sentences. He runs everywhere and hardly slows down. He loves anything with wheels. We're also trying to work on potty training him... we'll see how it goes. :) Brooke is a little sweetie. Everyone who meets her falls immediately in love with her cute little face and chunky little thighs. She rolls all over the place and loves playing in her Jolly Jumper. She also passed a milestone this month with starting to eat solids! We gave her some mashed bananas, and she loved them!

Well, there you have it. I could post so many more pictures... but there's only so much space in a blog post without going completely crazy. :) Thanks so much for praying for us during all this transition! It means so much to us!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas... Or Not

“I’m dreaming of a…. green Christmas??”

When you live in the jungle, a lot of popular holiday songs start to sound a bit strange. Wishing for cold weather seems like a foreign idea, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the Christmas bustle of a big city. It’s a bit difficult to get into the “Christmas spirit” when you have sweat dripping down your back.

Celebrating the holidays in a hot climate has forced me to examine my views of Christmas. Our first Christmas here was actually really difficult, mostly because it didn’t “feel” like Christmas. It wasn’t cold out. I didn’t want to curl up by a fire and drink hot chocolate. And bundling up to go Christmas caroling sounded like a terrible idea. It was tough last year. We missed family, and we didn’t really feel in a Christmas mood. 

This year, we still miss family. But something has changed in the way we view Christmas. Being here has helped me see that so many of my ideas of what Christmas is are completely false. 

Christmas isn’t a feeling. It isn’t something that should change based on my location or the temperature outside. It isn’t about snow and fires and hot drinks. It isn’t about being with family. All these things are wonderful and beautiful and special. But they aren’t really Christmas.

Christmas should be Christ. It should be celebrating His birth. It should be a thrill that comes from realizing that God came down to earth to live among us. To wage war on sin and death and evil.

I thought I knew that when I lived in the States. But I don’t think I really understood it until many of the things that I usually associate with Christmas were stripped away.

Don’t get me wrong, I love decorating for Christmas and all of the traditions that we celebrate as a part of the season. I will still put up a Christmas tree and wrap presents for my family. But I hope that each year, I can learn a bit more of what it means to truly celebrate Christ during this season.

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...

Last Day

Today is the day we leave Georgia. I don't quite know how to process all the emotions swirling in my brain. Excited to see more family. Broken-hearted to lose the precious face-to-face relationships we've had for the past three and a half months.

This aspect of missionary life--the goodbyes--is one I think I will never master. I don't think saying goodbye will ever be easy, even though I love my life and coworkers in PNG.

It's especially hard with family. My heart aches to leave them. I'm so thankful for the precious memories we've made and the special fellowship we've shared. It has ended too soon. We love you guys so, so, so much!!!!


And our churches. The precious people who have welcomed us with open arms and hearts while we've been back. They have celebrated God's work with us, cried over the lost with us, and loved us and our kids to pieces. We love you all so much and are thankful for each of you.

Our hearts are full. Full of joy. Full of memories. Full of sorrow. Full of anticipation. Full of excitement.

Thank you, Georgia family and friends, for a very special and memorable time. We are richer because of it.