Visitors

After being on our own for 6 weeks it’s been a busy time of comings and goings. Two weeks ago we had language learning consultants visit us for 2 days and this week we have a double whammy of visitors.

We have a trio of support workers who have come to build an extension for the Hansen house. After having twins earlier this year the Hansens realised that their house might be a little small for their liking. They drew up some plans and sent them off to our support team. The support team has taken care of buying and shipping materials and are now taking care of building it for them! Aren’t they amazing? Three-quarters of the Hansen house porch is being converted into an extra room and the guys have been making very quick progress.

It’s amazing to see the different skills and tasks that we each have. I’ve decided to mostly stay out of the way and let them get on with it! I’ve been working on spell-checking the document I put together of 20,000 words of Kovol text. I’ve been discovering brand new verbs, correcting things in our dictionary and playing parts of audio recordings to figure out what that mumbled part was saying. It took me about 28 hours of work in total, but it’s done! I now have a document of consistently (but not necessarily accurately!) written Kovol words. It should be good enough to serve its purpose as a syllable frequency count so we can figure out the most productive syllables to start with in lesson 1 of the Kovol literacy program.
Meanwhile, Bill and Jeff have been hammering, drilling and cutting away.

As I’ve been sitting with some Kovol guys, laptop in hand, checking word after word, text after text, I look up and see the guys at work and feel like I’m lazy in comparison! I feel guilty for focusing on my own task and not taking the time to swing a hammer with them! I guess anyone who works from home who hires a plumber probably feels the same! Then I remembered that Philip would probably prefer that a good job gets done at his house rather than that I participate with my shoddy work 😀 What a blessing it is to be supported by such a dedicated, skilled and varied support team!
At least I can use my skills and talk to the guys around Bill and Jeff in Kovol to joke around with them. “Are you keeping an eye on these guys? They’re doing a good job right?” I can say without Bill and Jeff having any idea 🙂

With the hammers and crashing and bashing drawing curious Kovol people in to see what is happening it’s been a good time to take some of them to the side to continue to help me translate literacy books. We finished checking through “Peter gets malaria” today. In the story, a father in a PNG village is taught about how malaria spreads and how they can reduce the mosquito population by removing all the standing water. Part of that is to take all of the empty tuna tins scattered around and crush them so they can’t hold water. I worked with some helpers to figure out what to use for tin. We went with “hombol ta umi hot” — “eel short bamboo bone”. That’s a funny phrase but hombol ta is fish and umi hot is water bottle since people used to carry water in bamboo. A few weeks ago we all agreed it was a good phrase to use. After reading it to the current group I asked them what had been said and they told me that all the holes that eels live in had been filled! Oops! That didn’t communicate! That’s the reason we do multiple checks. After I have spent some time discussing a phrase with one group they get an idea of what is supposed to be communicated. What gets written down doesn’t necessarily carry with it the clarity that the first helpers got from discussions about it though. In this case, it is one of the times where it’s time to borrow a word from Tok Pisin. “hombol ta tin” is in. Borrowing the word tin instantly communicates what we’re talking about and is better. I’m still learning after all this effort spent learning the Kovol language that sometimes using Tok Pisin is the better option for communicating clearly.

We’ve also been joined by a second trio of visitors. A young couple and their 4-month-old baby are spending the week in Kovol to see what tribal missionary work looks like. The couple wants to be involved in missions somewhere and have come to PNG to see if working as we do is a fit for them. It’s been fun to show them around and answer their questions. They watched me for an office session earlier in the week and I was able to show them how I sit down behind my computer and check language data… and that’s what I do all day 😀

We did get out and about, though, going to a nearby tobacco garden and going hunting for mountain crabs in the bushes.

We’re grateful to have some visitors and be able to spend some time with them and we hope their time here is memorable.