Survey

recently I helped go pick up one of our survey teams (3 young men and 1 young lady) and this one of the resulting stories:

Yesterday the survey team (two Johns, myself, and Janell) returned from a 12-day survey of three languages in the Watut River valley in Morobe Province. The hikes and work in the villages were both challenging and surreal, but I won't go into detail about them. We faced the usual mosquitoes and loud chickens, but also experienced an unusual whitewater rafting trip in
a 40-foot dugout canoe. Instead of describing the trip as a whole, I'd like to share a brief moment I had with a man from Uruf village where I was reminded again of why we do what we do.

We quickly completed all our work after we arrived in Uruf. That night we slept in a room in someone's bush house and since we had minimal travel to the next village, we woke up slowly. While we were in the room packing up all our stuff, an old man came to the window. I leaned my head out to see what he wanted and he whispered to me, "I have a coconut for the lady if she wants to come with me to get it." Essentially this man was asking me to get Janell and let her go alone with him into the jungle.

Immediately the sirens went off in my head. This would feel wrong at home, but here it is much worse. Men and women do not make these sorts of ventures alone unless they are married. It's highly unusual for someone to be so forward about something like this. I tried to deflect it by saying he should just bring the coconut to us and give it to her with all three guys on the team present. He was insistent on going with her, so I told him she was too busy and offered to go with him to get the coconut for her.

He was obviously disappointed at having me instead of Janell as we walked together to the other end of the village, but there was no other acceptable solution. When we got to his house and sat on his porch, our legs swinging in the breeze, I tried to make some small talk. Mid-sentence he interrupts me by placing his hand on my thigh (a sign of friendship), leans in close and asks me very quietly, "Are you Simon?"

Now the warning bells are really going off in my head. I say, "No, my name is Brian." He leans back and we sit in silence for a second. I have two options: forget about it because we'll be leaving shortly and I'll never see him again, thereby avoiding a conversation that could take me to some very weird places that may leave this man even more confused than he already is; or, pray hard and push the subject. So I prayed in that moment, not sure what to even ask for other than direction.

As the silence deepened and the sun rose higher, bringing the first of many beads of sweat to my forehead, I asked, "Who's Simon?"
"He is the son of the man whose house you are sleeping in."
"Did he die?"
He whispers, "Yes."

This is a common lie that swept PNG when the first whiteskins came over 100 years ago; that white people are the ghosts of deceased Papua New Guineans come back to bring with them a better life. I tried to explain that I am just a man and that all white people are humans like him.

His quiet and saddened response was, "So, the lady is not my Tia?" The light bulb went off in my head. He wanted Janell to come because he thought she was his daughter, not because he wanted to make inappropriate advances. What followed showed me that this man, a church leader, loved his daughter (who had died in childbirth three years prior) very much and that he was desperately grasping at any hope to see her again. He told me that she was a Christian and that he too is a Christian. So I talked to him about the hope of heaven and the joy that Tia is currently experiencing in a place so much better than this life. I encouraged him to put his faith in Christ and not the false hopes offered by a world devoid of trust in Christ.

I finished by praying aloud for him asking God to give him strength to deal with his grief and faith to believe that God is looking after Tia and will soon reunite them. When I finished he prayed for me, thanking God for the team coming and the truth God brought to him. He closed by asking God to look out for his daughter and to help him let her go.

Please join me in praying for Simon (his name is also Simon), who is a deeply grieving father. He is struggling with reconciling the reality of pain in this world with the reality of an all-powerful, loving God looking after us. Something I have yet to understand myself. Pray that soon he will be able to read the Bible in his own language to be better equipped to fight the father of lies and come to a better understanding of who God is.

 

it's working!

from our Director:

VALLEY ENCOURAGEMENT
Last Friday I received an invitation to a Monday Dedication at Aiyura
National High School. On Monday morning, I found out I was THE speaker!
(Never a dull moment!) However, this event was the Aiyura Valley Pastors
Fraternal and ANHS Principal re-dedicating ANHS to God at the beginning
of the year, with plans to do so every year! A number of the pastors,
ANHS board members and the principal prayed. What really positively
surprised me was that when I spoke and gave a Bible verse reference
there was a visible rustle of many people grabbing their Bibles to
follow along! I would estimate at least 1/3 of the students were doing
so! These are future leaders of the nation, so join in prayer for them
as students, and for ANHS. We do want to see PNGns knowing and living
God's Word, leading to changed lives and transformed communities.....and
the nation as well!

Why Technology Rocks!

We're way behind the times of say, California out here.  But I have to say technology is AWESOME for accomplishing work.

Here are two examples:
1 - today at 5pm I heard over IM that a flight from AUSTRALIA had landed.  Expecting an important piece of electronic hardware for the last few months, and having the entire weekend free, I thought 'how nice it would be to get it before the weekend'  But all departments shut down at 5pm.  So no one answers the land telephone line.  The alternative is I wait for the package to be loaded to a bus, driven from aviation to the post office, the post office staff to sort it, and put a notice in my mailbox.  Then I have to arrive during open hours (only work hours) and sign the package out.  BUT... instead.  I went to our internal website, looked up the cell phone number of a friend who works in Aviation.  Called him, and he's bringing the package to my house.  IM to WWW to CELL to home.  WOW.  Now I get to work on this over the weekend instead of waiting for Monday.  NICE!!

but the better example is here:

2 -  an email from a translator friend of mine.

 

Thanks for this. Last night Emil [a PNG translator in the village] and I [an ex-pat consultant in the U.S.] worked for about two hours together on translation.

Our Skype connection was very clear and so was my Bomgar connection to his computer. Paratext Live, which is now in Beta, allowed us to work on the same chapter at the same time, just like Google Docs. Thanks for all your work getting the VSAT set up! It is now doing exactly what we hoped it would do--enable me and the other consultants to continue to help the translators even when we can't be there at the translation center.

Awesome! Yes, thank you and all the  other CTS [computer IT dept] dudes!

 

Serving our King together

 

Armed Attempted Hold Up #1

Me and a friend (about my size) were driving down an old dirt potholed road, far outside of town, looking for a shop that had the car parts I needed. We have never been that far out of town and never really go there. As we hit a dead end we had to u-turn, and coming back, a man jumped out in front of us, aiming a revolver at us. He was about 10 yards ahead of us, we were traveling about about 5mph because of the road conditions.

Given that it was a dark skinned Papua New Guinean, with a black gun, it took about 2 seconds for me to realize it was a gun. Which, in moments like this, 2 seconds isn't a long time, but your perception of things seems to be heighten and time slows down for a few seconds. The driver, a good buddy of mine, is more experienced with guns than I, which is why we think it was a revolver.

Anyway, he was shaking the gun and aiming it at us, 2 seconds into realizing what was going on, I went to shout' GO GO' but the driver had slammed on the gas at that immediate moment. It was a diesel, so it was slow going. Right then we heard a POP and the windshield split in the corner near the driver's head. We escaped and were clear a few seconds later.

I checked the driver, no blood, the windshield didn't even get pierced. And in thinking about it later we realized that the gun was never fired. Out of the corner of his eye, the driver saw two men, one with a drawn slingshot.

So... thinking about it all afterwards (the attempted hold up took about 20 seconds if that).... and we got away clean.

Often times guns here are not loaded. So the strategy is for a point man to jump out , distract you with a gun, making all the noise he can, swearing, shouting, clicking the gun.... while guys from the side attack the car. The gun man is trying to get you to stop. If you stop, that's it, they'll pull you out if they can, and leave you on the side of the road as they run off with your car. Even a successful carjacking leaves the vehicle owners unharmed (mad but unharmed).

We realize our lives were never in much danger. Our adrenaline really didn't even get going because we both realized in mere seconds afterward that the gun hadn't fired.

They tried to make us think it did with the rock being sling shot at the windshield.

Even had they pulled us out, there likely would not have been any violence, unless we decided to fight back (which being alone the 2 of us, we probably would have).

This had been this 3rd attempted car jacking... in 10 years here. He knew what to look for, plus he's a gunhead missionary kid, so his instinct had him looking around. While I was recognizing there was a gun, he was doing that, and scanning left and right, which is how he saw the slingshot off to the right.

Silly side story -
the funniest hold up attempt we've ever heard of, was a guy walking into a bank with an empty handgun, and he pulled the hammer back to cock it, about ten times... making it obvious he had no shells... but he figured if he made the gun click enough people would get scared.

That's sort of what this shaking was about... he was shaking the gun, and then another guy fired a rock, trying to scare us. We were startled but never got to 'frightened'.

Like I said, it all happened a bit quick, we did all the right things. God protected us, it turned out fine.

The goal of the trip to town was to do some bargain grocery shopping and pick up the survey team (a team of 4 adventurous souls who hike the bush/jungle to find people in need of a Bible translation), but ended up having to pay for a new windshield. The cost of the windshield will come to around $500.

Overall, I found the experience to be far less dramatic than it sounds, and folks around here seem to be very calm about it too. Because we know that a carjacking usually winds up with the people being unharmed and finding their car in a few days.... the car might be damaged, but it gets found.

Praises:
- I didn't have my wife or kids with me
- we got out of it without so much as a bruise
- I have a much better idea as to what I'm looking for now as I drive around, it'll help me react even better.
- I can't think of a better person to have gone through the experience with as he both agreed on the plan of action, had discussed it in the eventuality of this happening, and then executed the plan well. As far as a first hold up goes... this was the best possible experience.
- It was the 1 final thing we haven't had happen to us yet in this country that at some time, nearly every missionary here has experienced here... so now we feel fully into the culture and now I know, that this event that sometimes terrifies and traumatizes others into leaving the field... is not really that traumatizing. I suspect had we passengers they might not even have realized what happened because it happened so quick and quietly.
- Thanks to God for keeping us safe!

Anniversary

Ride to school

Mud football

Son plays Davids dad

Best dressed

Lunch

Crowd

Bonfire

Uuplus

HF-email is a combination of an HF-radio which links to an HF-modem, which links to a laptop via serial cable. THEN the server has an hf-radio which scans frequencies waiting for a SEL call from another (client) hf-radio which then establishes a connection over the two modems.

The modems alone cost $1000 each.

Once the connection is made, bytes pass over the radio waves from a very long distance, and eventually form an email. The software that handles this rather tenuous communication link is called UUplus.

Once the email arrives, it acts as its own pop server and then you can suck the email down into your favorite mail reader application.


Along the way, you have to navigate weather, bad signal, interruptions, power outages, usb adaptors, serial cables, and ants.

IF you're among the fortunate, you will get the whopping HIGH speeds of 80 CPS. What is CPS?

CPS = Characters Per Second.

IT is such a slow connection, that you can't measure it in BAUD.
That is hundreds of times slower than the slowest modem you can buy today.


So you can imagine, you only use this technology if you have to.
You don't want anyone to send you large emails (anything over 50k would take 30 minutes to download).
It's prone to failure.
It is expensive.
It requires daily maintenance (by me and my team).

SO WHY do we do it?

Because in the village there is no electricity unless you have a solar system, there is no communications of any kind. There is no contact with the outside world. So you're willing to pay more per year than a high speed DSL link, for the benefit of getting 3-4 emails a day.

Today I pulled off a tiny miracle, in that we have a couple out in the village who want it all to work, not knowing themselves how many small variables need to come into play to get it to work, and not knowing the odds of getting it to work remotely are VERY VERY slim. We have to set it up here, get it working then transport it there and hope nothing fails in transit.

Today I built the software side of it, compressed it, uploaded it, and then a guy is downloading it, will put it on a dinghy which will go to a boat which will sail for 8 hours to get to the village, which will then be handed off to the translators, in the hopes that they can make it all work.


I'm pretty excited to find out if it worked... the odds are really against it, but we'll see what God does.

C+K on Valentine's Day

I've always been a fan of husbands continuing to woo their wives. I used to blog some of the more romantic ideas I've done in the past. Lately however I haven't mentioned many because there hasn't been many. Kendal dared me to try and go 1 year without being romantic. She did so because she thought I couldn't stop. She thought that the romantic side of me would be romantic no matter who it was for. But she was wrong.

I turned it off for a year.

This Valentine's Day marks the end of that year. And guess what, she missed Romantic Chad! She asked for him back! So, she got it. Albeit a lower budget version. (-;

Guys, continue to date your wives... unless they dare you not to... then don't... but then, do again.

See, Kendal didn't realize that she sparked the romance in me. It wasn't romance for the sake of romance, it was that I still very much love my wife and am excited by her.

She's a good companion, an intelligent conversationalist, a caring woman and a good wife and mother. So of course I am going to want to do romantic things.... FOR HER.

So this Valentine's Day I did something simple. I cut out 7 red hearts (with C+K written inside them) from construction paper (if she's reading this she'll be thinking - 'it was card stock Chad'), and I posted them all over places she will visit throughout the day.

I wonder how many she has found!

As she goes about her day she thinks 'I'll just get my keys from my bag...hey! a heart!' or.. "I'll just slip these shoes on... HEY!! A HEART!!!"

All day long it should be like that.

Anyway, that's the plan.

If she's reading this, it means she's already flip open her netbook to see another heart posted there.

Guess what, that picture above... It's another one. (-;

Reaching People

To hear what the Gibaio language group sounds like you can click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM_43ihR63o

The Jesus Film was dedicated in Gibaio this January.

Life changes when people get a hold of God's Word in a way they understand it.

Until you see it yourself, I'm not sure you can fully grasp the wonder of someone experiencing God's Word for the first time in a way they understand it.

I've heard many times "I've heard people tell me about God, I've even read the Bible in some other language, but until I heard it in my language, I did not think God cared about me. Now I know He does."

BTA server

I should have taken a photo while I did this.

Today was the final step in helping a partner translation organization.
A national run organization here named BTA has zero budget or staff for
technical issues, so I have been donating time and equipment to helping
them.

We replaced an XP desktop with a Windows 2003 server with RAID array,
AIT3 tape drive, duel power supply, more than twice the storage space,
and RAM.

Then I setup network printing for them, and trained everyone how to save
data to a network share, how to print to the printers, and several other
'how to's.' Then I had them do it to be sure my training worked.

Then I made videos so they could refer to the video training afterwards.

All in all, hopefully some of it will stick. One comment was

"I've worked here for 3 years and have never printed in this office
before. Thank you."

That's what we do often with our older technology. We re-purpose it and
donate it to local national Papua New Guineans who employ it in the
ministry they have a passion for. Rarely does anything get wasted.

Churchiness

I don't often 'preach' on my blog.... but today in reading through James during my devotional, I had these thoughts.

-Often times I run into people who dislike Christianity because they have been hurt by Christians or by the Church. This seems to be the number 1 thing people have against getting to know Jesus Christ.

It dawns on me that this makes total sense. For years I have been thinking 'wow, I wish Christians were nicer to people so that we don't give God a bad reputation.'

But now I'm changing my perspective.

-The church is like a hospital. Inside the hospital are people who are sick, but they know they are sick. They come to church because they are seeking something, they seek healing, or a diagnosis. Coming to know Jesus Christ doesn't instantly make us perfect, it makes us people who recognize we're hurt and broken and need healing. We're people in the process of being healed. So of course a wounded person is going to make mistakes. It's hard to be loving when you're still healing from hurt.

Outside the hospital are people who are sick but they haven't been diagnosed nor do they realize it.

If you see the church as a hospital, a place where people come for help and healing. Christ offering the ultimate healing, then you can see the label 'Christian' as 'sick, but being healed.' instead of 'perfect person who always gives God a good reputation'.

I am hoping that seeing a friend who is sick and broken and hurt, find healing is would be a huge testimony to the power of Christ. And that even if during that process we do bark and bite a bit and possibly leave a bad taste in people's lives against Christianity... that in the end, the transformation would give testimony enough.

Still... people are upset at Christians because they do expect us to be perfect.

Which to me is ironic, because it is this lack of perfection that is often used by those who want to discredit the Bible.

"The Bible is inaccurate because man is sinful and flawed." Is the statement I hear most.

Seems like a bit of a double standard.
Either forgive us our hypocrisy because we are flawed, and call our Bible inaccurate, or call our Bible accurate but consider us all hypocrites. It should be one way or the other.

If you get scorned by a boy friend... your tendency is to say 'all men are pigs'. So I understand the reaction 'all Christians are hypocrites'. It isn't necessary logical, but it seems to be a popular point of view.

You see these bumper stickers 'not perfect, just forgiven'. That's great, but Christians are supposed to be striving to be more like Christ. Not simply to be forgiven humans, but to be the best version of ourselves as modeled by Christ and Scripture teachings.

I think I would favor a bumper sticker that read 'not perfect, but forgiven and trying hard'

Anyway. Enough of my preaching.

Ratnest

When you've been in a place since the 1950's, you're likely to run into old wiring. This is a picture of a mess I've recently tried to begin cleaning up at our Aviation department. Cleaning one of these up is like defusing a bomb. You have to ask everyone to leave the building (because their network is down), and then you have to be VERY careful not to cross any wires.

glow night

Tonight we hosted a fun night for the 7th and 8th graders. IT was GLOW NIGHT.
We had brought some glow necklaces and bracelets from the dollar store on furlough, to use here for fourth of July. We used those now instead, with some borrowed black lights and played lots of games. It was good. Kids who have never come to our fun events came! It felt great to offer the kids a fun thing to do that is a little out of the ordinary for PNG.

If anyone out there wants to contribute to our next glow event, when you're at the dollar store, pick up a few glow sticks for us, and ship em on over. One of the things we love to do with these is on the 4th of July, the young kids LOVE the bracelets. It helps us feel like Aunt Kendal and Uncle Chad again.

God's Megavoice

Some of this blog is 'life here' and some of it is 'What God is doing Here'.
This is a 'What God is doing here' post.

The child above is holding a megavoice player. The Megavoice is an affordable, long battery life, simple to use digital audio player. We use it to put audio Bible's on and give to people who are illiterate.

The Pinai-Hagahai people aren't a huge people group, it has around 1000 people in it. Several years ago a couple moved here to translate the Bible into their language. They were met with all kinds of trouble and hardship. Their house was moved several times, then burned down. They were held up by gunpoint, and many other crimes and troubles. Their furloughs were difficult, their time in country was difficult, and if not for the prayer and support of others, they would have never made it through those tough years.

When they completed some of the books of the New Testament, they had them recorded into audio format. One of the biggest criticisms that we get is 'well great you translated the Bible but how are they going to understand it if they can not read?'

We handle that in 3 ways:
1 - we teach literacy. But this often excludes the elderly who most likely will never learn to rean
2 - we partner with audio based organizations
3 - we have our own recording specialists who go into the village and record mother tongue speakers reading the Bible that has been translated.

These translators, had rough times, and in a fit of creativity, bought 70 megavoice players, put the four Gospels and Acts on it and GAVE it to the nationals in the village. They gave it, because they had funding. It's a bit of a taboo to 'give' because it means that there is little value on the item. If they were charging for the item then perhaps the people would take care of it, and not abuse or lose the player. But, because of how remote the village was, they had no cash economy whatsoever.

So according to 'how we do things'... giving the megavoice players was not a wise move. It wasn't technically 'the right thing' to do. But they were finding the elderly and also young men were being excluded. The church was full of women and children.... and they wanted to do something.

So they distributed the 70 megavoices, not hoping for much and went on furlough.

Markus (the ex-pat translator) tells people that joining the goal of Bible translation is like joining the marines. It's hard work, lots of training involved, you're on the front line, and you may be in danger... but when you're ordered to go,... you go.

When they came back from furlough the results were beyond their wildest dreams. People had taken to listening to the devices as their daily devotions, as their bible study.

young men were turning to Christ
the elderly said 'we finally understand God's Word, it didn't make sense until we heard it in our language.'

They interviewed 100 people, which is 10% of the people group and every single one of them had changed their lives to Christ. The revival had begun.

And it was no act of man.

Since then the people have asked for more, and they have distributed 400 more megavoices (with funding from people back home).

God is great.

Right now, there is a two man team in a village far into the Sepik doing audio recordings so that we can reach more people who can not read.... in a different language group.

But it's a very hard location to get to, and they've been stuck there for much longer than they expected to be because of the road conditions and inability to fly in or out. They are separated from their families, while doing this work.

They could use prayer.

God's word endures. We're trying to get it to people in a way they will understand it. Through all the work, and hardship that happens, we know, because we've seen it so many times... that once people get the Gospel in their heart language, it changes their lives, and the enter into a meaningful relationship with Christ.

We pray for good discipleship of these people.

PNG situation

Political and military tensions have risen in Port Moresby, capital of PNG.   A quick summary of the background is as follows.  While long serving prime minister, Sir Michael Somare was under long term health recovery in Singapore, parliament voted in a new Prime Minister – Peter O’Neil in Aug 2011.   This was subsequently challenged in the Supreme Court of PNG, who ruled in December 2011 that this vote was not constitutional.  Parliament immediately had a re-vote, re-confirming O’Neil as Prime Minister.   That piece of political activity happened peacefully, with the police and military remaining distant.  

 

This morning, it is confirmed that  certain elements  of the PNGDF , led by a Col Yaura Sasa , have place the Commander of the PNG Defence Force, Augwi under “house arrest”. Col Sasa has stated in a press conference that this is not a coup  and that they are calling both sides to recall parliament and uphold the Supreme Court decision reinstating Sir Michael Somare. He reiterated that they are only trying to  protect the Constitution .

 

As always with these situations , any trouble or risk, is currently localized around the specific locations in Port Moresby.   Most business in Port Moresby are closed today and we have no reports of trouble in other towns.   Our Port Moresby staff are monitoring the situation and avoiding any unnecessary travel.   Air Niugini have cancelled nearly all their flights into Port Moresby as a precaution.   We have no reason to believe that any SIL staff would be targeted, if this situation escalates.

 

However, both side have weapons.  Please pray that a peaceful solution will be reached. 

da bridge

Many of you know bridges and erosion caused by rivers are a constant battle.  In this pic our industrial and maintenance folks repair our only bridge to on center.  They are putting on thick sheets of steel to help fortify the bridge and give traction.  The river beneath has been growing, but they also are putting gabian baskets in place along the edge of the river.

Missions within Missions

some of the high schoolers had a chance to visit a hospital in Angau. Here is one high schooler's take on it

Along with dropping off our donations we had a chance to go and visit with the families and patients in the children's ward. It was a challenging time to see these very sick kids in not the best of conditions, but also really rewarding. We passed out toys and prayed with the families. Our prayer is that we were able to touch these families and these kids would have a bright future following after our Lord. It was a true blessing to be with these little kids and from it the dreams of someday being a nurse/doctor were fueled even more for several teens

proud of my daughter

yesterday we were outside heading to school and a spider jumped onto my daughter. I said 'sydney there's a spider on you!!!!' pretending to be all panicky. She gave me a roll-your-eyes look, reached over, grabbed the spider with her fingers, squeezed and tossed it away.

The look said it all "dad... geez, don't be such a girl." I was trying to scare her, but apparently spiders don't give her cause to be squeamish. Neither do mice apparently. A mouse jumped out at her yesterday and she said "dad, I've finally seen the mouse, I think you need to trap it."

Could a dad be more proud than to raise a daughter who doesn't flinch at such things?

Ending the week

This was a weird week full of odd technical problems. One person had somehow created a nested loop of email automated replies such that when 1 person sent her an email, over the course of 2 weeks, her inbox filled to 170,000 "I am on vacation" emails. That took hours to fix, but on Friday we fixed it.

As I decided to move to plan B on linking up a satellite office, having tried to splice fibre and failing repeatedly (something we know how to do and have done).... I walked outside and saw this picture.

It may not look like much, but those cubicles are translator cubicles. The open doors mean there are people in there (you can't see them but I did) sitting down with books and translating God's Word.

Open doors, mean people, people mean work, work means translation. Translation means changed lives.

So it was awesome to take a moment step outside and see people translating God's Word right there in front of me.... as a little reminder "Chad, this week has been wierd, but this is what you're supporting!"

oh yeah!

I love ending the week on a good note, and I got a special encouragement today.
*GEEK CONTENT*
-------
we have a Dot net nuke module that has been complaining of 'max number of concurrent sessions reached" which has the server dropping email to people all over the world. We attempted to fix it earlier this week and couldn't find the root cause. I thought I had fixed it by boosting the max concurrent sessions in exchange 2007.

But it didn't fix the errors, and so, the 1 guy we have (our 1 webmaster) is going away for 6 weeks... we decided to leave it until he returns.

Then around 4pm today, I was looking at our network traffic graphs and saw an odd pattern. It hit me that email was having an issue, so I started digging through the queues. I found several emails from the same problematic server bogging up our internet connection.

It dawns on me after reading through the mail headers that I see that the SEND connector for exchange 2007 linked to another send connector on Exchange 2010... so I boosted THOSE numbers as well for the max concurrent connections, and.... bingo... the problem resolved itself within 1 minute.

I love it when good honest detective work gives you a theory and you test the theory and it works, and you resolve problems RIGHT before the weekend.

*end geek content*

I do not like going into a weekend with unresolved urgent issues. So long as there is a problem to be solved, my mind doesn't allow me to rest. My wife knows this about me, which is why she no longer says right before we go to sleep "oh yeah, and the faucet in the kitchen is dripping."

Because she knows that I will toss and turn all night as my brain works out how to resolve the issue and comes up with a plan.

Anyway, the point is, it was glad to end a week of weird tech problems with a few solutions.

Mud

My kids and I played mud football on saturday

Slicing fibre

Splicing fibre optic cable is no fun

going Dark

Sorry I've been less than communicative lately. The days fly by. I find that while I committed to myself to take more photos and videos to share to everyone, that I haven't done much of it at all.

My job is very busy, and I find I end up crashing on the weekends to prep for the coming week. We've found some new technology (a sim card wireless router the Global Surfer III) which is proving to be very handy here for the translators.

I'm still trying to get Buka online.
Send a couple out to the village last week with a radio setup, we spent a day on that, but when they arrived they found someone had stolen their solar panels. So they used plan B (a netbook with a cell phone modem dongle (huawei) ). They had almost no power because of the loss of solar panels, so the netbook was helpful to them.

I'm finding that the day to day work of running this place is becoming far too overwhelming. More people are returning with more gadgets and more needs and we simply can't keep up with the demand. We lost a good couple of workers not long ago, and are looking to lose a few more.

So Feb/March/April/May is going to be my 'dark' quarter. I will be overworked to the point of being unable to spend a lot of time blogging.

We have REALLY enjoyed the christmas cards/letters/facebook notes we've received. IT helps to know we haven't been forgotten.

Let's see. What's on this week:
-managing the network/helpdesk team
-planning youth events
-trying to restore 2 satellite connections that are down
-terminating a fibre run to a partnering bible translation organization (proving difficult)
-spending time with my kids (last sat played mud football in the rain, WAS FUN!)
-welcoming back friends
-bible study
-in spare time I'm working up a web site for an idea I have that might prove to be helpful to the community. I'm not a web master so I'm finding the project educational.
-twice a month our band gets together to practice. We have a fiddle, mandolin guitars, and my banjo now.. so we're getting a nice folksy sound going.

I know.. what kind of geek works all day at computers and then comes home to work at a computer? Well not me usually... usually I unwind by playing some music or playing a game or watching a show. But from time to time I get these ideas that I think would help the people living here, and I go for it until it turns out to be a good or a bad idea.

The good ideas often mean more work for me.... (-;

Anyway, the summary is... I'm tired. Work is transitioning to more of a managerial role which is taxing to me. I enjoy the interpersonal portion of it, but the amount of paperwork is overwhelming (at least at first).

I'm thankful to be here and doing work, and that I get to say even on the 'hard' days, that it's all a sacrifice of worship.

I sure do like that.

Back in the U.S. if I had a bad day, I had to drive home in congested traffic, in the city, and get home and grouse about the bad day I had.

Here, I have a bad day, go outside, see this beautiful country, get home and instead of grousing, I think 'when I have bad days, if I can handle it with a good attitude it's a sacrifice of worship to God'.

Knowing that God appreciates even the efforts that yield very little (at least for that day)... is enough to keep you going.

IF you want to pray,
pray that all our 'down' connections come online... specifically
BTA
BUKA
AITAPE

we need to get these places online quickly because we don't have the resources to be spending hundreds of man hours on it. We're coming to the end of the rope on these projects rather quickly.

thank you!

VBS

Every year Kendal and the kids help with a local version of Vacation Bible School. Kendal this year is in charge of the administrative tasks (registration, name tags, organizing groups, etc). Both kids are student leaders and helping out with small group activities.

It's a lot of work for a week, but it is very rewarding.

from the creator of the VBS here:

Thank you Kendal. About 60 kids were counselled for salvation today. Thanks again for your great organizational skills!

One fun thing Kendal told me this week was that she had three unique names:
Bathsheba and Rahab were two girls, obviously named from the Bible but we're not sure if the kids folks knew who those people were in the Bible and then, a boy named Debbie.

We often find the PNG naming practices confusing but interesting.

At first site it seems like something you can sort of chuckle about, something getting lost in translation. But deeper insite makes you realize that while these folks obviously read some part of the Bible, they didn't quite fully understand something about it.

That's what happens when you want to read the Bible but it's not in your heart language. You don't fully understand what is going on, you don't fully grasp the truth until it's in your language.

This week's VBS is about getting God's Word communicated to children. Often as translators we focus on the adults, because they are the ones with the full grasp of the language. But VBS is just for kids.

Another interesting fact. This VBS is for kids ages 5 to 8th grade. But on the first day they allow everyone in. WHY?

Because when word of there being fun training, Godly teaching for kids gets out, people come from long distances, all the nearby villages and further, and when they arrive they find out "oh high schoolers can't come? Our babies can't come?..but we came this far from the village?" And so on the first day, everyone is allowed.

Of course no one gets turned away, but VBS isn't a daycare or a preschool, it's meant to lead children down the path of salvation. So the rules are put forth with the hopes that a majority of people will follow them. And for the most part they do. But the response is overwhelming... hundreds of kids come.

Workplay

Saturday we helped one of our friends do some tear down. Another side ministry is the care of our single friends. Well really the care of all friends. Sometimes there is (pardon the sexism) "man work" that needs to be done. This time that work turned into fun. Our friend Donna is a single lady that seems to always find a way to turn work into fun. What's better than tearing down a building? Doing it with the community.

Making work fun

Our neighbor and friend threw an 'epiphany party'. I've never heard of this. She's a history teacher and one of my daughters favorites so we are always learning interesting new things

As a community we also tore down a rotting tree house and then turned it into a bonfire.

I brought my sledge hammer and had some fun.

We drank wassail. We ate 'damper'. It's an Aussie tradition of bread on a stick that you roast over the fire.

Epiphany is also called 'three kings day'.

Lightning

I didn't take this image, I wish I had. I seem to have plenty of opportunity to snap photos of lightning and never actually get one.

We were out in the valley with some of our PNG friends, supporting them with a visit and we saw a huge lightning storm off in the distance (towards our home). It's really a remarkable thing to be outside in the rain, on a plain, watching lightning strike the hill tops.

Lightning and electronics don't mix.
One time in 1990 we had a thunderstorm that killed our PABX (telephone switch) and left us down for 4 days.

This last thunderstorm did a little bit of damage as well, it took out a few telephones.

But the biggest damage, was a friend of ours whom I work with, was at home, in their living room when their house was hit with a bolt of lightning.

She said 'the entire living room lit up and it was like a bomb went off in our house' She is a really great christian Papua New Guinean lady named Lucy, and she has been working for my department while trying to find work closer to where her husband lives.

She said 'there was no hole in the roof, but the floor had a huge hole in it'.

Thank God they were all okay. What a thing! To have lightning hit your house, while you were home, right in the middle of your family... and no one get hurt!

Praise to God for protecting her family.