A different world

As we are heading out for our home assignment, you may think this post is about the different world we’re entering into, returning to Europe, but no, it’s not that. This is about how we feel about entering a different world while still here in Papua New Guinea! Goroka is so very different from Kovol.

Our family has been busy preparing itself for the transition. That meant cleaning, weighing, packing, giving away old clothes and spending the time to talk through the changes that are coming. Life in Kovol didn’t stop, though, and we needed to spend some time with the Kovol community.

A rumour has been going around along these lines: “Rhett went home and he left for good. Now Steve is going home and leaving for good. It’s because we are disturbing the missionaries. We all need to move away so that they are the only ones living in the village. If we don’t disturb them any more, the mission work will go well.”
Needless to say, that is the absolute opposite of what we want! We needed to spend some time in meetings dealing with this rumour, encouraging people to stay close to us and reassuring them that we intend to return and we don’t know of anything that would prevent that.
We think we have successfully dealt with the rumour, but Philip and Natalie will, of course, need to keep an eye on it to see if the situation develops any further. We’ve promised to send videos of our travels with Kovol language commentary to Philip and Natalie so they can show people as a way to stay somewhat connected.

As for ourselves, we boarded the helicopter and headed out to Goroka town. It feels like a different world. The biggest piece of that is staying at our support base in Sobega. Having spent a few months in the bush where it is just our small team, it’s so different to see so many other missionaries. On our first evening in Goroka a new missionary family had us over for dinner. The next day we had another dinner booked with another family prompting Oscar to ask “Why do we always have to eat with other people?” It is such a different experience from our isolation in the bush.

Our last 3 days have been booked with multiple visits and events each day. It’s quite tiring, but it’s just a taste of the faster pace of life we’ll need to adapt to returning to Europe. New faces, new places, new foods, new experiences – all here in Goroka. We are in love with the market here in Goroka. Fresh fruit, fresh broccoli, what a treat! Chicken, rice and fresh broccoli for dinner – wow, living the dream!

The culture here in Goroka is different as well. I went out for a hike and came across a pair of guys operating a Lucas mill. A home owner had hired them to slab logs into planks for a house build. Their saw blade had hit a nail and broken. They were waiting for their friend to return from welding it back together in their workshop. Such a different world from the subsistence farming of Kovol!

We’ve retrieved our suitcases from storage and have stared packing. We’ll be staying in Port Moresby for a night, meaning our first flight is a domestic flight with a lower baggage allowance: 5x 16kg check-in and 5x 7kg hand luggage. Our international flight goes up to 10x 23kg check-in baggage!
Leaving Kovol we weighed up our 49kg of baggage and packed it all in cardboard boxes. We carried each and every cardboard box out to the helipad in view of the entire Kovol community feeling unbelievably embarrassed about our decadence. When a Kovol family hikes out to the coast they take something like a single 8kg backpack each, and here we are making multiple trips to carry out box after box after box. I felt as though we were flaunting our wealth and the fact that we have such an easy road to get out to town.

Suddenly we’re packing suitcases with “western” baggage allowances and we’ll be using nowhere near what we could use – we’re travelling light! It only took a single 45-minute flight to go from feeling like we were carting around obscene amounts of possessions to now, with the same baggage, travelling light.

So how do we feel about it all? I’m feeling energetic and optimistic. Gerdine is feeling exhausted. Oscar is feeling sad. Playing with the kids here is different and confusing sometimes when it doesn’t work out as he expects. Alice and Millie are excited and confused. All of that needs time and space to work through. We have lots to teach our children, especially Alice and Millie — I’m thinking store etiquette particularly as they have grabby little hands 😀 It’s an interesting challenge to try and balance making the most of the one week we have in Goroka. It’s such a short time in which we need to pack in as much as we can, with the need also for rest, quiet and time to rest and process all the layered experiences and emotions.