So what to do with all our rubbish? We can throw the food waste in the bushes. The village pigs find some of it, and the rest decomposes. What of all our plastics and tins? The answer to that as been burning and landfill. We want to try and keep our area as nice possible and so that’s what we’ve been doing. Since moving in in 2020 we have now filled 3 rubbish holes and this weekend it was time to dig a new one.
The guinea pig cage is a microcosm of jungle life. It’s a tough environment where things wear out quickly. I grew up in the UK where problem solving is usually about finding the right product. It’s all about Googling reviews to find the best quality product for the best price that solves the problem. If that product breaks you get a different one or a replacement. We live in an ideas space where we think up solutions. Once we find a solution we move on to the next problem.
What does a literacy class in a minority language of Papua New Guinea look like?
After learning to speak the Kovol language the missionary team is now teaching reading and writing in the Kovol language. What does a day of class look like?
Arriving back into Kovol after our break feels like returning home. Our break was fantastically refreshing and we really enjoyed it. As good as our break was arrival back at our bush home feels like coming back to where we belong. The Kovol community greeted us warmly, but at the same time our arrival was run of the mill, normal life which meant we weren’t overwhelmed with attention.
The first of hopefully a few 30s videos giving a glimpse of missionary life.
Being as isolated as we are taking breaks is a really important habit. After 3 months in Kovol our time came for a 2 week break out at our support centre outside Goroka.
Something we’ve been wanting to encourage living here is more playing between our children and the Kovol children. There have been a few hurdles that have made playing together with Kovol kids hard for our own children.
Bible translation is a challenging task. It’s not just a case of finding the right words to translate the words in the original.
I asked one of the LLMs (Large language model), to translate Genesis 3:1-6 for me to see what it came up with. It had access to our Kovol lexicon and grammatical notes. It came up with this for Genesis 3:1 (translated back into English):
“The wild Satan python was big big bad. This python God will make, that all the wild animals skin was big bad. Python here to the woman I will speak he said “Did God say which garden trees all i will not count them?” he said.”
Genesis 3:1 LLM version
Writing evangelistic Kovol Bible lessons is a huge task. The Gospel has never been presented in the Kovol language before. Where do you start? Well, we start at the beginning. Our lessons start in Genesis 1 and tell the story of the Bible to the end. We aim to pick up the big themes of the Bible and use its narrative to teach them. Doing so has several advantages. Firstly in an oral culture like we find ourselves in stories are important. The Kovol people are used to hearing and retelling stories and using them to make points. Teaching chronologically allows us to do just that.
I’m spending a lot of time in my office under the house. The idea was to have guys sit alongside me touch typing while I worked on whatever I was doing. The result has been better than expected. Two of the guys are addicted to improving their touch typing score and they’ve been coming every single working day. The program has them typing out a set of lines, requiring them to reach a certain speed and accuracy. If they reach the right speed they progress to the next level which adds more characters. One of them is up to lesson 4 already and is typing with all his fingers.