Learning Tok Pisin together! Many thanks to Mavis and Crystal (John's left and right, respectively) for all of the grace and patience over these past few weeks. John's excited to be working with Mavis in the CAM (Construction and Maintenance) department on the other side of our orientation.
A picture of Katie taking a picture of us on our 2+ hour hike to Ama Munta for the night. We hiked the whole way, but the kids got dropped off closer to the village and just hiked the last little bit. Everyday is either beautifully sunny or beautifully rainy in the Eastern Highlands.
Mama Jenny and her husband hosted our family in Ama Munta over the weekend. She had this kau kau mumu waiting for us (in layman's terms, sweet potatoes cooked in the ground).
We drew a crowd at the house.
We drew a crowd when we visited their church building too (which is the first thing that Mama Jenny wanted to show us, pretty cool!). Apparently I said "wow" a couple times as I was looking around. This nice entourage reportedly began saying "wow" a bunch as they followed us around.
Banner made friends fast.
The kids played many different games that all had one common denominator: throwing mud balls. The smiles were enormous all around.
The village girls decorated the pulpit before church on Sunday and it was surely picture worthy. An Australian short-term missions team erected their church building over Easter this year. It was exciting to hear the story of God's provision repeatedly from the proud and grateful people in the church. They still need to finish the concrete for the pulpit (in the picture), paneling for the walls, windows, and hook up the lights, but they are content to wait until God provides for these things. God has been tugging on my heart to help with this; please let me know if you want to help too.
It was a joyous surprise to run into Steven (and his wife, Tina) who we befriended at the Translators Training Course in the previous weeks. We had no idea that this was his village!
See anything lurking on my hot sauce?
What about now?
Nori found this flower and wanted to share it with her friends back home :)
And this one...
So Friday morning we will be leaving the Training Center at Ukarumpa to spend 3 weeks in a village with a host family. We may go radio silent for this period or we may have great mobile phone service, it's hard to say at this point, so please forgive any lapse in the blog. Also, please forgive this picture of a projector screen, but I wanted you to see this great visual representation of all the different languages in just a small section of Papua New Guinea. We will be down in the Wampar region.
From one of our great discussions preparing us for our village stay. There ended up being many goals, but the first one seemed to be the most significant.
Thanks to David Howard for these two great pics of our future bush house in Tararan!
And thanks to the Lord for the big mango tree to give us shade in the heat. We are going from an elevation of around 4,900 ft. in Ukarumpa down to around 400 ft. in Tararan, so hotter and stickier it shall be.
And Millie didn't want to miss out on this post, so here is one for fun :)
Thanks for all of your prayers and support!
Much love, John & Kristi and the gang