SteveStanley

We got to know Carol and Graham during our training at North Cotes. They spent 12? years in Papua New Guinea, living in the bush themselves and so they’ve been able to jump straight in fluently speaking in Tok Pisin.

After a crazy busy supply flight day (Welcome Graham and Carol Townley, would love to chat to our visitors, but today is hectic!) Juli’s waters broke at about 6 pm. Of course, that’s not something to mention or let us know about and we only found out when we went to visit on Tuesday 🙂 She was definitely in labour now. There have been many times before where we were wondering if labour had started or not, but this was a clear change – finally, it was time for the baby.

Language learning isn’t a desk job. That’s what we had drilled into us in training, but starting with language learning again after Christmas I’m finding so much of my time is at a desk.

We’re finding that 3 months is the amount of time we can invest in culture and language learning before it’s time for a break. The stress builds up, the motivation wanes and the tiredness takes over. Smart people that we are we decided that this time we’ll do a 5-month stint in the bush 😀

There are other cases though, and on this last one we missed something. In the last blog I mentioned the 2-year-old girl brought with mouth ulcers. The reading I did on mouth ulcers said they weren’t much to worry about, but there was obviously something else going on.

We’ve not had a lot of flights recently. The last proper flight for us (as in not one that just came in to pick up Fiona and didn’t bring us anything) was a month and a half ago, so our pantry has started to look a bit bare.

After living in Kovol with us for the last 2 months our new friend and homeschool helper Fiona has left us 🙁 It’s amazing how close you can become in 2 months of daily life isolated out in the bush! We’re finding the sadness quite unexpected. When we leave a country (amazing that I can write as if that’s a normal thing, but for us it is!) we know we’ll be saying goodbye. We hadn’t prepared ourselves for it this time, and saying a farewell in the middle our our term in PNG has us processing all those same feelings.

One of the areas our language evaluation highlighted as needing some attention is our culture file. We use a cultural outline that breaks culture into just over 100 subcategories.

Last week we had our language evaluation, so this week is all about correcting all the mistakes we made! With the questions I struggled on in mind I sat down with the guys… And it felt a bit like cheating! I’d nail those questions if I was asked them again Read more…