Steady progress

Into month 6 of language learning and I’m starting to see that progress is settling down to a steady speed. Steady progress is still progress though 🙂 Figuring out grammatical rules, putting clauses and attempting to express thoughts is much more difficult than pointing things and saying its name after all.

Learning about family

Kinship and family is a much bigger deal here than it is back home. Concepts of clan and tribe have deep, deep meaning and it can be fairly hard to understand as an outsider. When I think of family I think of nuclear family – mum, dad and children, but here family is much bigger. So when it comes to learning about all the different terms that are used it’s no surprise that this is a huge challenge! Earlier on we learnt some basics – “ina” (mum), “inda” (dad), “undum” (child) and “mo” (wantok – person of the same language)

Mixed feelings

After working so hard to get into the tribe; all the training, all the preparation and the months of slogging away at building a house in the jungle you’d expect us to be excited to return to Kovol right?

I have to be honest that I wasn’t feeling very positive about returning to the bush, despite loving what we do and not wanting to change it. Being out on break is nice, slogging away at language learning is tough, tough, tough.

Refreshed and ready

Having lived for a year or two in Goroka in some ways its back to life as it was before, but the time to just sit back and not do much has been great. Lots of naps, a few movies, lots of books and lots of trampoline time for Oscar.