Today when I started my morning language session it was a bit frustrating and discouraging. Nambi, a man who has some sort of authority in this village, came and wanted to tell me all the little names for rats, bushrats, birds, frogs, tree kangaroos and so on. My plan was to talk about pigs and I had already started talking Read more…
A Christian union group requested a few prayer requests from us and we shot this video in response. Silly Millie wanted to be part of it rather than sleeping 😀
Word on the street is that Qatar Airways has been keeping the world moving through the whole pandemic. I don’t know how true that is, but it was true in our situation. Normally we fly the “short” way around the world across the pacific, but this time we’d have to go the long way around.
It is really good to be back with our Kovol friends. However they are really busy these days, cutting new gardens and digging up all the yams planted last year. So there are not many people around but they keep coming by for a little break from work or to help us with language. Philip is planning on going on a two day work trip this week. They will be cutting big trees and bushes to clear a new garden area. This is a huge job and they normally like to do it together and help each other out in that way.
Regarding the future, we’ve decided to extend our home assignment 6 months and are now aiming to return to PNG in Feb 2021. Right in the middle of our exhausting newborn phase was the deadline for deciding what to do with our rental with our choices being to move to the Netherlands in July or extend our rental for 6 months. Since we don’t have a fixed, predictable income we need to pay for our rent in advance and agree with the landlord on the duration and the minimum we could extend was 5 months. Exhausted and just about coping we couldn’t face attempting to move our family to the Netherlands navigating both the Covid restrictions and the new Brexit restrictions on me traveling to Europe.
So now the plan is to head to the Netherlands in December instead. We’re very much looking forward to spending some time there; Oscar’s grandparents haven’t seen him for about 3 years!
Steve recently made a video for NTM UK’s Reach conference. We spend about 15 minutes summing up our last term in PNG among the Kovol people.
We’re very happy to welcome Alice and Millie into the world. Born on April 6th, they’re a handful! Double the baby is triple the work it seems 🙂 We received a card saying “It’s twins! Double the snuggles.”, which in theory is correct but we’re finding the practice to be very different. We’re so busy changing nappies and feeding them the number of cuddles is actually substantially reduced compared to a single baby!
How do I feel about being the father of twins? Not much, I’m too tired to feel anything! 😀
Before the soccer tournament should have finished, we heard from someone, that a young guy got injured and broke his leg. That stopped that hole event. They said there was some fighting and people fled into the bush. We are not sure until today what really happened. The people seem to avoid telling us what happened. We might never find out.
We’re eagerly anticipating the birth of our twins sometime in the next week or two. Wow, it’s getting close!
At this point of the process we’ve found our phonemes and allophones. Phonemes are the significant sounds that will need to be represented by a symbol in the alphabet and allophones are little variations of our phonemes that the alphabet doesn’t need to worry about.