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.
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.