Well it’s that time again, time for another language evaluation. These happen ideally every 6 months, but this time the schedule worked out for 4 months after our last evaluation, so after 4 months of full time language study how’s our progress?
Oscar turned 5! What a big boy he’s become 🙂 What a cliche to say we can’t believe it’s been that long – but there it is 🙂
Thinking back we realised that we’ve been in 5 different places for his 5 different birthdays: Goroka PNG, Cairns Aus, Bracknell UK, North Cotes UK and now Kovol PNG. I guess the chance that one year we’re somewhere he’s had a birthday before can only get better 😀
We take project days once every 2 weeks on Saturday for our home improvement, maintenance and decorating tasks. A big, ongoing job for the last 6 months has been working on building Oscar a room above ours. Progress has been pretty slow going at that pace, and so it’s been incredible to have Graham here visiting as he’s been taking these projects on for us.
As I’m aiming to move into the capable level of using the Kovol language it’s time to get into working with longer texts. If I manage to go up a level during our next language test in a month or so I’ll be at the stage where I’ll need to do discourse analysis.
*Fair warning, this blog post is about a pig with an injured penis. There are many pig penis pictures and much pig penis humor (or at least attempts at it). * So, as you may know, we got a pig Read more…
Life in Kovol goes on and we’re starting to get used to the annual rhythms. We only have 2 seasons here wet (Oct-Apr roughly) and dry. I remember our first years in PNG feeling a bit like a timeless sameness. I missed the 4 seasons and how winter going to spring, to summer, to autumn and to winter again gave a sense of the progression of time. With just 2 seasons that should be renamed to wet and wetter rather than wet and dry all year round felt the same.
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 😀