SteveStanley

You never know what’s going to happen when you start a day of language. Yesterday I decided I’d hike down to a nearby hamlet to check out some sentences I’d created. I’ve been working on figuring out Kovol clauses, but there’s a little complexity to it which I think may be explained by calling them dependent clauses. Anyway I had some sentences I’d come up with to check out my ideas on dependent clauses.

I get 20 seconds away from my house and see a friend swinging his machete at a banana tree. “Good morning, what you you up to?” I ask, “I’m removing my pig’s balls” he replies. Obviously then I switch to Tok Pisin to check in a language I’m more fluent in if he said what I thought he said. Sure enough, that mornings work was castrating his pig. I ran to get Rhett because I know he’s into his things and we settled in for the show.
First a ‘fence’ was made which looked like a little circular wicker drum. Some leaves are pointed out that will be used to “take care of the blood” – but not as I thought for wiping or absorbing blood to keep the workspace tidy – more on that later

ew bit of language am I going to after today, and what should I practice speaking about?” Usually that’s the first thing on my mind when I wake up as I’m groggily pulling myself out of sleep.

Yesterday I fixed the ethernet connection to Rhett’s house and I felt like a man. Today I feel like a little boy 😀

Late last week friends of ours from another Kovol village came and said “hey, we’re going to do a bride price exchange ceremony next week. Would you guys be interested in coming to see?” Of course, we were! The village in question is a 2 to 2 1/2 hour hike Read more…

One day of language learning is easy; 5 is Hard (with a capital H!).

Returning to Kovol didn’t feel like an overwhelming, crazy experience. When we moved in the excitement among the Kovol people was so high we were rushed off our feet the entire time. Now that our team has been living full time in Kovol for 2 years and people have gotten used to us and the boundaries we’ve set things are a lot calmer.
There was a big crowd of people here to greet us of course, but we actually spent most of the day inside playing with our kids, unpacking, cleaning and fixing. The pressure to spend every waking moment outside is gone, and it just helped us immensely as after a year of us being away our house needs a bit of attention!

ith our flight set for next week it’s time to shop for our 2-5 months in Kovol (we don’t have plans for when we come out for our first break). We generally plan 2 months of supplies at a time and we’ll request a helicopter supply flight when our supplies of pasta get low 🙂

We find it quite amazing how quickly we’ve settled back into things feeling ‘normal’. We’ve been here just over a week, but we’re feeling fully recovered from our journey and we’re feeling well settled already.

stop watch as we left the house in England, and stopped it stepping into our guest flat in Papua New Guinea and our journey clocked in at 38 hours and 10 minutes 🙂 It was a smooth journey though, smooth as a buttered seal – which I imagine is pretty smooth.

This next term promises to be hard graft in language learning, but as our coworkers write the linguistic papers furthering the development of the Kovol (or is it qobol?) alphabet the light at the end of the langauge learning tunnel is dawning and we can see teaching literacy and teaching God’s word on the horizon. There’s still a lot of work to get there, but we’re heading back knowing that we may just get there in this next term in PNG.