Do you ever get the feeling that everyone knows about something apart from you? It’s a common occurrence for us learning a new culture and language and I’ve lost track of the number of times a crowd of people have gathered seemingly from out of nowhere.
We’ve learned that the Kovol language isn’t particularly descriptive. I guess it’s because no one ever has to describe what a banana looks like, anyone you’d talk to in the Kovol language knows what one looks like. That’s my theory anyway.
As we look forward to teaching lessons we’re thinking about how we go about introducing new concepts. How do we describe new things? How do we introduce unfamiliar settings? When describing something where does detail need to be put and where can it be glossed over?
We’ve been advised to finish off our Grammar write-up before then so we don’t start identifying things we see as significant to the paragraph that are actually just sentence-level things we didn’t know about.
I’ve been feeling a bit dissatisfied then this week, feeling like making some changes for the upcoming months that will be healthy. Thinking through the feelings I wondered If I was homesick. Would life be better at home? Thinking through things I discovered that no, I don’t want to go home.
After returning to Kovol we’ve been getting back into language learning. I actually always find getting started a little difficult. Before our break, I was chugging away, but then you stop, return and think to yourself “where was I?” “what was I doing again?”. It takes a week or so to get going again and shake the sense of aimlessness.
We made it back into Kovol, and what a ride 🙂 We ended up being a full week delayed because of weather and helicopter maintenance issues, but NTM Aviation managed to cram a lot of backlogged flying together and got us in.
Getting used to living out of a suitcase is part of missionary life. We have our plans, but there are lots of ways those plans fall down! This week we’ve had to postpone our flight back into Kovol two times, each time we were in the midst of packing and being ready to go!
The plan had been 1. Hansen family fly in on Wednesday, 2. We fly in on a 2nd flight on Wednesday, 3. Philip’s Dad flys in for a visit on Thursday.
We’ve been enjoying a long break from ministry in the bush. We started with a week in Madang for the beaches and now we’ve spent 2 weeks in Goroka. Our last stint in the bush was a little long and so we’re needing the extra time to unwind, plus with our little ones we only get little snatches of rest each day in between keeping them entertained and engaged – it takes a while for those little snatches of rest to build up to proper rest 😀
For the last 2 months, we’ve been super blessed to have Graham and Carol Townley with us in Kovol. They have been volunteering and helping us with practical projects. With Carol being around Gerdine was able to quadruple her language learning hours and jumped up 2 levels in our latest check!
It’s amazing how quickly we can change our environment from being in the bush to driving around town and enjoying the tropical resorts. It’s only a 25-minute flight for us to be taken from our doorstep to the NTM centre in Madang where we can rent a guesthouse, rent vehicles and make day trips to resorts.