Lots of areas of Kovol culture can be investigated by asking questions. I ask questions with my voice recorder on and learn all kinds of cultural tidbits and vocabulary. The best way to learn though is to see cultural events happening as a fly on the wall, and I got a great opportunity to dive into the justice system this week when a village court was called.
Gerdine hiked down to a Kovol garden 3 hours away and spent the night there as part of her language study. She filmed a little bit of her journey and talked about it – in Dutch, but don’t worry there are English subtitles 🙂
Can you believe that near the end of my language learning journey, I had no idea what the Kovol word for “laugh” or “funny” was? It’s crazy the gaps there can be in vocabulary and it’s another reason our system of learning language by making sure we cover all aspects of the culture is really helpful.
As I near the end of my culture and language study and my ability to use and understand the Kovol language keeps increasing I’m able to dive into some deeper areas of the Kovol culture. A big, important area for the work we do is that of gods and spirits.
Our coworker’s cat cookie is a kitten-making machine. She’s been having 2 to 3 litters a year for as long as we’ve been here. At 4-6 per litter, it’s incredible the number of kittens she’s produced and young kittens tumbling around by our houses is the norm.
We’ve finally given in and we’ve taken one for ourselves. After many days of umming and aahing, we finally said why not?
The first step was to gather all 4 surviving kittens (2 went… on holiday with a village dog) and look up Google images of how to tell males and females apart. We were sure we wanted a male kitten so we don’t end up doubling the flow of kittens around here!
Wednesday and Thursday’s flights went without a hitch meaning we moved all the groceries both our family and the Stous family for the next months came in. A day later our family made it in. A crowd of Kovol friends of course greeted us and we were able to let them know how glad we were to be back.
Good news, we’ve been given flights for this week. The fuel crisis is still ongoing, and the aviation team isn’t flying at full capacity, but they are finding ways to prioritize essential flights.
A break out in Goroka has been very refreshing for us. We came out of the bush and were in awe of how many people there were to talk to at our mission base, amazed by all the choice in the stores, revelling in the sunshine and generally feeling excited and energized by all the things we can enjoy out in town. After some good times out here we’re almost feeling ready to get back to work in Kovol. Almost! It feels much the same as when you’ve decided to go running, but it’s so hard to get yourself out the door and do it, knowing that once you get started you’ll get into it and you’ll find you quite enjoy it 🙂 Unfortunately with an ongoing fuel crisis in country it’s not looking like we’ll be able to fly in.
We’re happy to report that the weather improved and we could fly out! The pilot was only an hour away from calling off the flight for the 2nd day in a row, and we heard that the following day was another terrible Kovol weather day, which left us very glad to be out!
We made it, it’s break time! We’ve been limping along recently looking very much forward to a break. We’ve realised that we haven’t had a proper break for about a year because the last 2 times we were out of Kovol were “working breaks” where we mixed days off with conferences and workshops. The weather isn’t cooperating though and we’re unable to leave Kovol!