A day in the life...

Friends and family have asked us what our days look like now, so we wanted to share what a typical day entails. On weekdays, we are often up at 5:30 am, especially if it is our week to start a fire in Martha, the wood-fired furnace that heats our water for bucket showers (literally, a pail with a shower head on the bottom, on a pulley system, that you fill with water heated by Martha, providing about a 4 minute shower). Then, it’s on to kitchen duty, if it is your day, to help set up plates & utensils for morning breakfast or prepare fresh fruit, oatmeal, or granola. We soak our fresh fruit and veggies in a bleach water solution before peeling and cutting them, to kill any bacteria on the surface. We have a scheduled rotation for kitchen duties, so some days we’re on set up, and some days clean up, for the 35-40 people eating each meal. By now, it is 8am, and time for language class. We meet for devotions, singing and Tok Pisin lecture, and then break out into small groups with our national PNG language teachers. These times we spend listening alot and trying to speak the language in a variety of settings, from story telling to watching traditional craft demonstrations and asking questions. Then, after tea-time, we often have an anthropology lecture to help us understand more about Melanesian culture. After lunch, we have physical conditioning two days a week, consisting of several hours of hiking or swimming, or preparation for meeting with our wasfemilis. Last week, we walked to our wasfemili’s home and share a meal with them, and this week we will go again for a meal but also sleep overnight there, in preparation for village living in a few weeks. On weekends, we now cook meals for ourselves over an open fire in our “haus kuk”, which is an open air kitchen structure, with a table and bench seats we built from bamboo poles. We learned bread making yesterday, so we have yummy rolls to eat this weekend with the food we cook over the fire. Sundays, we go to church either in the village or town, to expose us to more spoken Tok Pisin and give us the opportunity to worship God among the PNG people. Sunday afternoons, we have gone snorkeling a couple of times, which has been a huge blessing. At night, we work on our reading and writing assignments, and meet with a fellowship group once a week. It is all of these new experiences, shared in a wonderfully multi-cultural environment with other families learning the same new skills with us, that are stretching, growing and preparing us to serve the PNG people better, for God’s glory, and we are grateful to be a part of it!