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We’re in the middle of no where, but it doesn’t feel like it when you have an internet connection

Gerdine, a month ago

Gerdine said the above the literal day before internet was to disappear and not return. There’s a Digicel tower nearby, in fact on a clear day we can see it spearing up into the sky on a distant ridge, which provides us with phone signal.

When it suddenly disappeared one evening we had no idea how problematic it would be for us! 😉

Now it’s not just because we’re internet addicts (though we are) it’s the fact that most of our communication with our support team is email and what’s app. With Digicel down we’ve had to rely on our inreach satellite messenger with which we can send 160 character text messages.

Coordinating flights and supplies became much harder, the medical clinic felt much further away and of course no blogging and keeping you guys up to date on what’s going on.

We’ve come out of Kovol for a 2 week trip to Australia. Gerdine needs to have wisdom teeth extracted and has been having dental pain for months now and Oscar is due a check up and ultrasound scan.

It also means we’re able to let everyone know that we, the Hansen’s and the Stous’ are all doing fine. The last week’s have been more of the same. Building things, cooking root vegetables, picking up a few Kovol words and helping out medically every now and then.

Lende has received treatment in town for the broken leg, turns out the femur was broken all the way through but, it’s set to make a full recovery. Unfortunately Lende wasn’t the only serious case we saw and we saw a 6 month old baby who had been dropped in a fire and has horrific burns over his entire right arm and left hand. Sadly there wasn’t much we could do apart from apply antiseptic and bandages and pray for the best. Last we heard he’s still alive and kicking and we pray he can recover – people are pretty tough here.

We’re pleased to report that our house is ready for us to start full time language learning. We’re happy to put the projects that are left on evenings and weekends and transition into full time CLA (culture and language learning). Our coworkers get the next 3 weeks to catch up and finish their houses because when we come back we’ll be bringing CLA consultants with us for our CLA kick off. CLA kick off is an on site refresher on the language learning techniques we learned in training and some ‘steer talk’ to help us get started learning language effectively.

On my last day in Kovol I took my camera and got a quick update video from each of our family’s, so look out for that being posted some time soon.
Just a short blog to say we’re still alive – we’ll post some more soon!