Breaks are awesome 🙂 We’ve been enjoying time as a family, enjoying nice food, enjoying privacy and enjoying good company.

Oscar loves this store

Having previously lived for a year or two in Goroka, in some ways it’s back to life as it was before, but the time to just sit back and not do much has been great. Lots of naps, a few movies, lots of books and lots of trampoline time for Oscar.

We bought marbles! And we’ve been fishing them out from under the sofa ever since.

A new cafe in town has provided us with the tastiest doughnuts in the country, the school’s library has provided us with some nice children’s books and Sunday football (cough, soccer) has been a real highlight. Kovol people are really into football themselves, but playing on the top of a small mountain ridge is not quite the same as on a proper sized grass field 😉 Kovol football reminds me of a pinball machine where the game has to stop every time the ball goes out as a kid climbs down the mountain and searches the jungle for the ball!

Mongolian beef- PNG style

Two weeks of doing as little as we can (which with a toddler is still quite active!) has been great.

I finished reading some interesting books. “Dominion ” by Tom Holland was an engaging read. The author traces the contours of Church history and shows how the Christian world-view provides the framework for western morality. I’ve read books like this before, but Tom Holland isn’t a Christian and was quite free to (rightly) criticise some of the moral failures of the church; while being perceptive enough to realise that to make those criticisms he was invoking a Christian ethic. By the end of the book it seems to me that he agrees both that absolute morals can’t exist without God, and that absolute morals do exist.
It was a joy to read, and I found it quite powerful when it came to the modern era.(Maybe it’s my familiarity with it that makes it so.) It’s unsettling that he’s able to put you into the shoes of a Nazi.

I also found a game that Gerdine has been playing more than I have! “Slay the Spire” is a pc game where you build a deck of cards and use them to battle monsters on the way up a spire. I’ve been trying to get Gerdine to play games for a while – turned out it just needed to be a card game 🙂

Turns out Gerdine loves this game

I myself have been loving the chess-like strategy game “Into the breach”. Ordering about a trio of giant robots to defend buildings from giant bugs is great fun. This game is super focussed on what makes it fun and I’ve had many, many ‘aha’ moments where I figure out the perfect set of moves to deflect a seemingly unavoidable set of attacks.

Lots of thinking involved…

We’ve loved having the time to just sit back and enjoy things like this guilt free, and we’re now really excited to get back into Kovol. Two weeks off seems to be exactly what we needed. 🙂

Wednesday we’re due back in. We’re looking forward to seeing Philip and Natalie again and part of us is looking forward to starting language learning again. Then again part of us would also love to continue napping, reading and gaming :p

Categories: EnglishStanley

2 Comments

English Editor · 18/08/2020 at 11:01 pm

I am very glad you have had such a refreshing break. Enjoy the flight tomorrow!

Bryan · 27/08/2020 at 7:47 am

Happy to see you having a good time!
I really liked “into the breach” myself!
Though I don’t game as much anymore as I used to!

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