Milling Trip 1: Day 1
Well our milling trip is finally under way, a few days late but no big deal. We were a little concerned about some rumors we had heard that the Kovol people were upset, but their enthusiasm dispelled these fears pretty quickly!
July 19 video update
Stanley news this July
The chainsaws arrived
Plan A had us going back into Kovol to start milling at the beginning of June. Helicopter maintenance delayed us by about 2 months, and a good thing too – our chainsaws just arrived!
So… where are our missionaries?
Our other means of communication is when Kovol people hike over to the Pal missionaries a 4-hour hike from them. Several times now Kovol people have come over to ask “So… where are our missionaries?”
Road Trip!
We know that in the coming months, we will not get these opportunities. Rhett will be gone more than he will be at home, and there will be days when patience and tears run dry. We were so thankful that the Lord gave us this gift of an actual relaxing family weekend together before all that insanity commences. He didn’t have to, but he did anyway. Author of all good things indeed.
Taking a holiday
This past 2 weeks of allowing ourselves to rest – to not look for work or productive things to do at all has been wonderful. No emails for 2 weeks (thanks in part to my antivirus updating and interfering with my email program :)) and lots of time to explore with Oscar.
Bilbil pottery
Culture events are one of the big ideas that we use as missionaries to learn language. Getting a notebook out and asking someone to list off every verb they can think of might help you learn a few verbs, but Read more…
Experiences in missions
Not only is the PNG culture constantly surprising even those of us who live here the fluid, logistically challenging work of our mission keeps bringing up ‘askims’ (favors). A missionary family is due to arrive back in PNG next week after the birth of a baby in the US. They shot those of us at Madang a quick email asking us to help them get the car road worthy so when they return they can head straight to the tribe.
God provides again
With it taking multiple times longer than we ever dreamed it would we’ve come up against a problem – there was to be nowhere for us to stay in Madang. The interface program was to begin and would be taking over the entire Madang centre and we’d have to go and had had no luck finding alternative accommodation. We still needed to paint our plywood sheets with more coats of varnish, the hardware store needs constant encouragement from us to keep processing our order and when they finally do deliver we need to be around to take delivery – but we’d run out of time.
We were fretting about this, but unknown to us the Interface team were fretting about being short on teachers.
Purchasing building materials – its hard!
Buying building materials takes AGES! Part of that is our own inexperience. None of us have managed a construction project before; or thought about an entire house’s plumbing needs; or anything else for that matter. We’ve managed to cobble together a list but is it all we need? Is the thing I just got a quote for something that was on my list? I need something to join PVC pipes together is that a join, coupling, union or collar; or something else? What do we call it in Britain, what do Americans call it and what’s it called here in PNG?
So we spent a few days getting quotes and familiarising ourselves with what we needed. The rest of the time though has been dealing with hardware stores here, and we can only sigh deeply when we think about it.