What a week. I spent 3 days down and out with a stomach bug which meant Gerdine had to pick up the slack. She started not feeling so well, but didn’t really get sick – just super tired from keeping us all going while I was sleeping.
Houses take a battering in windy season. There are nights lying awake hearing the howling wind and feeling it shake our house about. It’s easy to imagine our roofing peeling away and the wind and rain coming inside… especially since that actually happened to Nate’s house over in our neighbouring tribe 🙂
If the wind gives us cause for concern I’m sure you can imagine how much worse it is when your roof is made of leaves! One of our friend’s roof was left with all kinds of holes and storm damage which needed fixing, and we got to see how it was done.
We’re pretty excited for Oscar to be getting a baby brother or sister, and it’s going to mean a trip home. Having a baby in the capital city here is (maybe) an option or Australia, but if we’re going to have to travel anyway we’d prefer to head home so our family can see our new baby (and how much Oscar has grown!)
The season has definitely changed; wet season has started and we’re suddenly seeing lots and lots of rain. There’s a double benefit to that though, one is that our water tanks are full (overflowing) and we don’t have to think about rationing our water any more (if it’s yellow…). The other benefit is rainy, miserable mornings where people just want to stay at home huddled by a fire. That means a chance to catch up on office work for us.
The Kovol people are always trying to think up fun things for us to do and this week it was hunting. It was one of those “Hey, do you think you’d like to come hunting sometime?”, “Yeah, that’d be good”, “OK we’ll be here next week, we’ll hike to the bush, stay the night and hunt things!”.
I’m so tired of being firm, controlled and ruled by my head, I just want to give! – but so often if I give into my desire to do something nice there are negative consequences.
Literacy feels a long, LONG way away, but I’m getting pretty excited about it nonetheless 🙂
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.
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)
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.