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!  

Back to School

We started our classes in Tok Pisin and Melanesian culture today. We will have class room instruction, then small groups with native PNG teachers, as well as field trips into villages for conversational practice. Next week we will be paired with our “wasfemeli”, literally our “watch family”, who will be teaching us as they share meals with us here and in their village, culminating in an over-night stay with them in their home. All this is to prepare us for the 4 weeks we will live in a remote village for total immersion training at the end of our course. We also met our outdoor activities instructor, who will be leading us on progressively more challenging hikes and swims, leading up to a 2 day overnight pack hike through the bush to a remote village and catching a PMV (public motor vehicle) back to POC. Kathy swam a half mile and I swam a mile in the ocean today as we began our conditioning and we are excited to begin all our courses in earnest!  

POC has begun

We moved in to the dorm for the Pacific Orientation Course yesterday. It is located on NobNob tribal lands 1200 feet above Madang on the northern coast of PNG. Nineteen of us traveled up a very steep pot-holed dirt road (7 are young kids) in an open flat bed truck for an hour to get here, and now our official instruction on the language and culture begins. We will have classroom sessions, physical conditioning hikes and swims, be paired with a village host family for weekend visits, and eventually live in a village for the last several weeks. Our dorm room will be our home for the next 2 months; the mosquito net is already set up!  

We've Arrived!

After 35 hours of travel, we touched down in Madang, PNG. It was a challenging transit (we learned important, expensive, lessons about packing when switching between different air carriers.) but God is so faithful and He provided everything we needed, including people along the way who helped and encouraged us when we were feeling overwhelmed. 

We are staying at the Lutheran Guest House for another day before the POC dorms open up, which is giving us precious time to begin acclimating to the hot, humid weather and to get over our jet lag. We will try to post an update once a week, but will have very limited internet for the next 3 months. We continue to ask for your prayers and support as we move ahead with our training and we thank God again for getting us this far!

Half Way There...

Thank you all for your prayers and well wishes as we embark on this mission. We literally could not have come this far without your prayers and support, and know it will be a great challenge going forward but "if God is for us, who can be against us"? A special shout out to all our friends who were instrumental in getting us moved out of our home and to the airport- we love you guys!  

We are currently in Hong Kong, trying to get our baggage transferred to PNG, and there are weight issues, so please keep praying!

5 Days to Go...

It is hard to believe, but we depart for Papua New Guinea in just five days! We're spending this week moving out of our house (which is still on the market), packing for our flight, updating our wills making sure that other important papers are in order. 

This last weekend was quite the blessing. On Sunday we spoke at Spruce Creek Church in Kittery, Maine and later that evening attended our last Youth Group at Dover Baptist. It really is hard to say goodbye to so many people who have made so much of an impact upon our lives, but we have no doubts about our call to the overseas mission field or God's provision. As we wind down our time here in New Hampshire, we are thankful that God has blessed us with so many friends and family who have encouraged us in this endeavor....now back to packing.

Fraud...

We just learned that there is an individual or individuals posing as us or our representatives. The subject(s) knows that we are missionaries and is trying to get people to wire money to himself under the guise of renting our home. 

Our attempts to rent or sell our home are being exclusively done through our Agent. If you receive a call about renting our home from someone claiming to be Kathy or I then it is definitely a fraud, as we are not nor will we be making any such calls. I also encourage you to always verify identities and information whenever anyone you don't know asks you to send them money. Remember, if something does not make sense than it is most likely not true!