We’ve been blessed to be able to take some good time off to spend as a team and a family this last week. As always it’s never a complete break as things inevitably come up.
We’re very grateful that our Christmas package came in on the flight the week before Christmas. There isn’t a great selection of kids toys available in Goroka. If we’re lucky we find a few things here or there, but the quality and longevity of the toys is really lacking. I remember one time Oscar saw a little red firetruck that transformed into a robot. He fell in love and we thought “Why not?” and bought it for him as a treat. He broke it taking it out of the packaging as it was made of the cheapest plastic around!
To avoid guaranteed disappointment we’ve taken to ordering toys in the UK at my Mum’s address and having them sent via DHL. It’s pricey, but having some good-quality toys and books is worth it in our opinion. The problem this year was that even though we’d ordered in September delays in shipping meant the package hadn’t arrived. We called the supply guys the day before the flight asking if a package had arrived for us, but it hadn’t. We prepared ourselves for delayed Christmas presents, but amazingly the next day our package was delivered to us on the flight 🙂
When Christmas day rolled around our desire was to take our time unwrapping presents, preparing and enjoying food, reading books and building lego with our kids.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that a dozen or so people are sitting outside our houses waiting to see us though. 4 or 5 people had come with medical concerns that they wanted us to check out, others wanted to buy soap or worm medicine from us.
Several emotions ran through me seeing this. Tiredness “Can’t we just have 1 day to ourselves?” Guilt “How wrong is it that we’re inside opening presents when poor people are outside waiting for our help?” Compassion “Isn’t Christmas supposed to be about giving and not family festivities?” Stress “How are we going to get lunch ready if we’re out dealing with medical for hours?”
In the end, we diagnosed several children with malaria, sold the medicine and checked several other aches and pains that we couldn’t do anything about. It only took Natalie and me an hour and a half and we were able to do it with a joyful attitude.
Lunch ended up being quite late at 3:30pm with the medical interruption, which meant we were all hungry and very grateful to stuff ourselves with food. I can’t remember the last time I stuffed myself with food like that!
We followed lunch with a game of football with the kids and the Kovol kids joined in as well. This was a real blast and helped us feel like part of the community again after sequestering ourselves off for private family time most of the day.
We took a few more days off and braced ourselves for the new Year celebrations. New year is a bigger deal for the Kovol people than Christmas. It is important for them to get together and “clear the air” of any “heavies”. This involves long chats into the night where they all agree that there are no heavies followed by killing a pig and eating the meat together. As each village kills their pig they always set aside some meat for the white people for a few days so we have a steady stream of people coming and giving us chunks of meat. The meat we receive also gives me mixed emotions! I’m glad to receive it because it’s important to do so culturally, while at the same time, I wonder “How long ago was this pig killed?” and wonder if the meat will make me sick, while at the same time wishing they’d keep it for themselves as they need the protein more than we do!
Our village invited us for a meal on New Year’s day and we had a nice, relaxed time eating a bowl of soup with them.
With the new year, we’re all back to it. Oscar is back to school and it’s time for me to get back to translating literacy books and Bible translation. I spent my first workday drafting “How the Jews lived” which is a 100-page reader that gives some cultural information about the world of the ancient Israelites. Unfortunately, I struggled. By 10 am I was wondering to myself “How did I manage to do this day after day these last months?”, followed at 3 pm by “I hate this stupid book!”
I don’t think I’m ready to get back to grinding out translation. I’m concerned I may burn myself out if I force myself to sit down and continue grinding it out. For now, I’ve decided to just stop working on it until my desire to work on it returns. I don’t think the 4 days we took off for Christmas were enough for me to feel rested. Thinking to the medium-term we have a literacy kick-off at the end of this month which will be intense, and our next break is scheduled for March. That’s quite a while. I hope a few more days of rest will have me back to productivity so that these next few months can be productive ones.
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