Cultural Humor

We have a photo board here, and I'm one of the resident jokesters.
On this photo board today I found a picture from 5 months ago, and a picture from today at 12:50.
The old photo was the river low, with a PMV crossing (a pickup truck with a ton of people riding in the back of, the PNG equivalent of a public motor vehicle). The new photo had the water that had risen about 3 feet or so.

So I mocked up a really bad photoshop photo of the pmv in the water up to their necks as a joke, put it on the photo board.

The subject was
"don't try to cross the river today"
so I replied,
"why, I saw a pmv do it moments ago" and put the picture up, as a joke and even put it was a joke.

So the ex-pats laughed.
THEN I get this email,
apparently the national employees here laughed hysterically at this photo thinking it real, and not knowing about photoshop. They laughed because PMV drivers have a reputation for being crazy and this photo proved it.

The ex-pat managing hardware wrote me "it took a bit of explaining for them to realize it was a joke photograph... good one."

I didn't mean to cause confusion, but I don't think I did. I wrote "do not try this" in big letters so they would know it a joke.

Still that's the first joke I've ever made that crossed boundaries... usually I can get the nationals OR the expats laughing, but rarely both at the same time.

Communicating

Today, ten minutes before closing, there comes a very polite little knock on the door. A Korean gentleman had been wandering around seeking help and one of the ladies directed him to me.

I had no idea what he wanted, his English was poor and my Korean doesn't exist.
After a few seconds I said,
"Yu save tok pisin?" (do you know tok pisin)
he did, so we spoke in tok pisin.

5 minutes later he was happy and gone.
He apparently was trying to sign up for network services home DSL, and didn't know how to say it in English, what he kept saying in English was "I want an email alias".
which wasn't true.

In tok Pisin
"me laikim yupela givim me sompela ..uhm... DSL i go long haus bilong mi "(I would like you to give me dsl to my house).


Using a third language to bridge the gap to computer related issues... who knew! oh yeah.. God knew.

pretty nifty.

a Little thing I like to call "stock take"

This pic is of where I live, back in 1968, it has changed a lot since then.

The departments here close for stock take every 6 months.
So, the situation is, for the next week (or so), you can't purchase computer parts, groceries, electrical supplies, hardware, or any other work that you need to get done. Imagine if Mayberry closed for a few days.

Normally that's fine, and it is fine, except that because of the rain we also can't escape off centre if we wanted to simply be... AWAY.

If any of you have experienced the living-up-on-the-hill don't-have-electricity, huddle in the rain storms... it's fun as a kid.

As a kid I was thinking about the thunder and lightning. As an adult, I'm thinking about how to keep the kids entertained over the weekend and not go stir crazy (-;

Still shooting marbles in the dark with my dad is a grand ol' memory.
Although, the power hasn't gone out, and if it did, we have generators, so... it might be a nice weekend of curling up by the fire, listening to the rain, watching the lightning and reading books.

Ever get in that mood... the ... rainy day mood. Well, this place has the rain... a LOT of rain... I've lived here 1.5 years now and I'm still amazed at how hard it rains.

God has created some marvelous things.

The Rain She Comes

well it looks like the hard-to-define "dry season" has ended here. For 3 days it has poured BUCKETS of rain, taking a break for an hour here or there for intense sunshine.

The river is rising, and the bridge seen above is not yet repaired. We've been bypassing the bridge with a ford, but the river is far too high now to pass. We were hoping the bridge would be repaired by now.

It looks repaired, but is still impassable. We hope the rain dies down again so work can progress. Until then, we're confined here and supplies will be very difficult to bring in to us. Without being able to cross, we have to carry supplies across. You'll notice trucks on both ends of the bridge here.

But the water fills our tanks, and we are thankful for that!

Eating Grasshopper

Yesterday I came home after helping a neighbor raise his antenna tower to find my son and daughter huddled on the lawn over a plastic cup.

It was Sunday.

"Dad, we caught a grasshopper and he's perfect for eatin!" -says my son.
both he and my daughter were excited about this.

The back story was that they came running into the house to get a cup from Kendal who said "go outside until your dad gets home because I'm not cooking up any grasshoppers!"

So they did. I saw the grasshopper and said "son, your catch, your kill" and handed him a knife.

I honestly thought at this point he'd chicken out. But no he says

"first you cut off the head, then pull off the legs, then the wings then you skin it and fry it up"

So I let him do that very thing, and he did too.
So I, thinking he'd still chicken out, followed suit, we went inside, skinned it, and then I fried it in a pan.

Cut it into 3 pieces and him, Syd and myself all ate grasshopper.
I'm not sure we did it right, but we did it Calvin's way.

You know people have told me they taste like peanuts... but to me honestly it tasted like grass.

I am not sure we prepared the meal the right way.

So now, if folks ask me what the most exotic thing I've eaten while over here is...
I'm not sure what it'd be, but grasshopper definitely ranks near the top.

Choir and Crash

My daughter has joined the P.C. singers and had her first choir concert the other night. It was very enjoyable watching her sing her heart out and, even though a proud dad, I went assuming things would sound slightly off key. They were really good! The song choice was fun, the kids had a lot of fun performing as did we watching. There was a lot of humor in the songs, and I appreciate the music teacher that came to teach the kids how to have fun while learning how to sing in choir.

Also the 9th grade health teacher sent me an email with 13 others asking us to mock up a car crash so that her first aid students could practice. So we all hammed it up, fake blood, stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. I thought that I might be over the stop as I put together a home-made device to make it look as if I had impaled my arm on a tree branch, but when I showed up, others had chicken bones sticking out of their knees, head injuries, etc. It was really quite grim, but excellent practice for the youth.

I do enjoy when a community can be creative together.

Heavy Load

a PNG Meri (woman) carrying firewood on her head. This is a large load but not an uncommon site.

Moving

I am here to fix computers. But that's not all I do. Recently I was given a project that few wanted, to show if I was capable of handling a large scale project. We need to move our programmers into a new building. Or rather a very old building.

Which means there needs to be construction, electrical, networking, air con, and telephone work done.

So managing the entire move is my side project for the past few, and next couple of months.

Construction begins Monday.
It is interesting because I'm learning a lot about how to interact with the different departments here and how the mechanics work.

But this morning I woke up thanking God because I realized, that with EVERY single job I've had since graduating college, I've been involved in a move or expansion. Typically I'm only handling the network side of the move, but there have been times when I was in charge of almost an entire move.

I was thinking "wow it seems like I've done this a lot" and sure enough, every job I've had, I did it.

I'm thankful to God because even this tiny forgotten part of my experience is being put to good use here.

Bit of Sadness

This week was a bad week for pets in our household.
On thursday my son's guinea pig died, but it wasn't too traumatic for him.
Today, (Sunday) someone broke the lock on rabbit cage and stole my daughter's bunny I think while we were at church.

My daughter said to me through tears, "Daddy why did the raskols steal him on Sunday?"

I said, "honey, sometimes the bad things or the bad people come and they want us to forget who God is, they want us to stop loving God by making us angry or sad. But we don't let them win, we love Him even more, because He loves us so much."

The kids are doing okay, never to miss an opportunity they are trying to parlay this loss into a new puppy. (-;

You get these moments in life, when you are living, and they come unexpectedly. We didn't have the heart to tell her that the rabbit was someone's dinner now. And I hope I said the right thing when she asked about Sunday.

Syd is fearful of earthquakes too, and we had a small one this week, she needed a little bit of comforting and then went back to sleep.

Sunday was a very interesting day as I looked back on it. In my mind raced a lot of Scripture about hope, joy, suffering, love, and I had a lot of thoughts regarding our situation and lives.

And this is what I came up with.
First, I am so very thankful to God for a very clear calling. Not everyone has that, not every 'missionary' has that. But this calling is so clear to us, that when the bad things happen, we aren't rocked onto our heals. We don't pray "God am I doing the right thing?" Our call, God's leading, gives us strength. We are convinced repeatedly that this is the right place for us.

Second, today we laughed, and we cried. We had a great family Sunday, we played charades and catch and soccer, and tears were shed over the loss of a bunny. That's living right there. A day where you are drawn closer together, laughing, crying, asking tough life questions, and glorifying God. ALL that and it was our day off !!! Imagine what God is doing on the weekdays!!!

So we're thankful for the unexpected, sometimes sad, weekend.
We're thankful for the words of encouragement and the prayers we receive.

I think our biggest requests right now, are for the people living here to have a sense of security, and unity. I personally sense we are on the verge of something and the enemy knows it and has turned up the heat a bit. We need to pray and not tire.

This week

This week has been pretty quiet. A small little knock on our office door and I opened it to find a petite translator lady from Taiwan. She had limited English and I understood that her email in the village wasn't working. So we sat down and got it working. Later she said in her English

"you'll be here long term?"
I replied, "I'm here for a while, yes."
she clapped her hands.

that was a nice little encouragement, as she went out the door, the issue resolved.

Yesterday I was on the phone to a place called Wewak, which is very north. They had a computer crash and were unable to get email. After an hour of troubleshooting the problem was resolved and they were able to continue working. The gentleman I was working with was in his 60's and wrote a simple little note of thanks over email.

That was encouraging too.

It is nice to be able to from time to time, realize that fixing these things for people has significant value.

Land of the Unexpected

Today I expected to work from 8am to 5pm like usual. Last night the kids reminded me it was sports day, and could I come see them compete? Then at 9:30pm I got a call, "can you help move cargo across the river?"
So a friend lent me their truck. I arrived at 8am and was asked to come back in an hour.

A big truck was making its way from LAE (a port) with cargo sent via sea, to Ukarumpa, but couldn't make it over the broken down (and being repaired) bridge. So the call went out for guys to drive and load cargo and bring it back.

Since the bridge was out, the trip required crossing a river. FUN!

Then I got back from that, had a quick bite for lunch, realized it was raining and I had missed most of sport's day, and now I see at 4pm I need to show up for worship service practice.

Because we have no volunteers to run church, some people are volunteering last minute but unable to do the normal Saturday practice. (I run sound).
SO... 4pm today.

Ironically my manager leaves for a week today, and I was in the office all of 3 hours by the time it was all over.

Oh and now we have dinner at a friend's house planned, and tomorrow I have volunteer fire training. In the middle I need to construct a PVC puppet show stand, and finally I should be able to rest up in time to play my banjo for the preschoolers next week.

ALL of this I had not planned as of 8pm last night. It never gets too dull around here! The cool thing is, that all of this is helping someone else, and all of THAT is helping Bible Translation.

I REALLY enjoy how things change-up around here. Always some way to help. Once you get used to things changing frequently, it's a decent way to live.

Sydney's Essay

My daughter wanted me to post this, it is copied directly from her paper:

Our [organization] Involvment

Me and my family have been helping [org]. Do you want to know why? Sure, ok I'll tell you. Their is over a million people who can't read the bible. they want to but they don't have one. Imagine over a million people don't have a bible so they borrow English Bibles, but they don't understand, wouldn't that be silly? So, my parents help. My mom teaches preschool. Why preschool? because My mom Likes to.

How does it help? it helps so that when the kids grow up they can help too! My dad works at Computer tecnical servecise How does that help? it help so that translators can use their computer to help with diffrent Languages.

My brother and Me help by going to school. How does that help? so that the workers at School get money and don't loose their job, and so that my parents can work, and so that when we grow up (if we want) we can help [org] too!

So, that's my involvement in [organization].

Kuman NT Dedication

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej50P5cbMkQ

Click on the link to see the latest video. This is the one I've been promising. We drove 6 hours to Kundiawe to see the 3rd largest language group in this country receive God's Word.

The impact is a major one for a culture, some cultures recognize it at the beginning and throw big cultural shows, others have no idea how greatly their lives will be affected by God's truth.

I liken this dedication to that feeling you had in high school when you knew graduating was a big thing, but you really weren't quite sure how big the world was yet, how much life ahead of you there really was.

These people in this video know it's big, they jsut aren't sure how big and they seem almost cautious. It is interesting to watch. Enjoy.

Through Her Eyes

Sydney's 4th grade class was asked to present at chapel this morning. Each morning a different grade organizes a 30 minute chapel. The theme this time was "how our family helps Bible Translation".

Sydney wrote a paper in class about our family and how her mom and dad help in translation, but then was asked to write a sentence to read in front of chapel.

Her teacher asked me to borrow a video I had done of the dedication we went to (as a hobby), and so Syd said to me;

"Dad you didn't tell me you made a video for my chapel."
"huh?"
"Miss Kirkham said she was going to show a video you made. Dad, you should have told me."
"oh, well you've seen the video."
"you should have told me dad."
"I'm sorry Syd. I should have."

Apparently she held this chapel thing quite dear, I had no idea. Kendal told me "In Chapel she's talking about you. Not us, jsut you."
"why me?"
"I dunno."

Sometimes you jsut don't know what is going on in the kid's mind until it comes out in a surprise.

So one of the fabulous parts about living here is a 2 minute walk and I'm at her chapel, interrupting the work day for a whole 34 minutes is perfectly acceptable for reasons involving children.

This is what she said at the microphone, in her own words, I had no idea what she was going to say, she wrote it out and later handed it to me, so it's verbatim:

"My dad works at computer tecnical Servisces, so that translators can use their computers for studying about different Languages."

Of course it isn't 100% accurate but it reflects me in her view which is always a precious thing to see. I think she got it from when I was telling her that one way (amongst many) that computers are used here is that the translators can search other language projects and look for similar languages to help them construct an alphabet.

1 and a half years

Yesterday our P.O.C. group threw a "We've been here a year!" potluck. Although we have been here almost a year an a half, we were still invited.

After the eating and socializing, the organizer asked everyone to share:
10 things you miss
10 things you are thankful for.

Kendal suggested also "10 things you thought you'd miss but don't".

For example "I thought I'd miss Starbucks, but I don't." was hers.

I was surprised by this because I hadn't read the email that told us to prepare, so I had to think quickly on the spot about these things.

Always at the top of my mind of things I miss, is family and friends. Things like "hot dogs, movie theatres, pavement" these don't come to mind very quickly because they are trivial but always whenever someone starts thinking about things they miss, the family and friends comes to mind.

Seeing ya'll babies born. Seeing your children grown. Nieces and nephews. Deep conversations and fun times with you all. Hugs.

Stuff like that.
There's a place in me that gets sad when I look at photos, and I let myself go there rarely but I do go there to remember.

So that is what we did this weekend.

One thing I shared with the group was how thankful we are to be here. Our needs are met, and many of our wants. And then I encouraged them with some good encouragement we received.

At the 1 year stage, around that time, there is a "wall". An emotional barrier of some kind that you hit that says "I don't like it here any more, I want to go home." I was warned about the wall by several people. It is as if the honeymoon suddenly ends, and you come to grips with the reality of living in a different culture. You get tired of the adjustment, and you feel like giving up.

I didn't expect we'd hit that wall because we were loving this place so much.
Everything about this place made us very happy.

And then, without warning, about 5 months ago, we hit the wall.
I remember conversations that are best kept private between my wife and I where we were both utterly discouraged.
Lack of close friends, frustration with the culture here, a desire to contribute more, do more, missing family and friends, confusion about our kids' future. All these things.

It was all roses until that time.
But the thing was, we knew what it was. So we didn't even once talk about giving up or heading home. We talked about how much of it was valid and how much was an enemy attack. We prayed, we felt bad, and we jsut waited.

At the end of it, if I can call it a trial by fire, we simply seemed to understand more maturely. More deeply, the work that we have here.

I liken it to a ride at Disneyland.
As a kid, the ride is magic, you don't know how it works and it's fun.
As an adult you understand the mechanics, you don't see the magic, but you appreciate the work put into the ride and enjoy it.

Each way you enjoy it differently. One way you enjoy it, with your eyes open.
That's where we are now.

We are enjoying living here and serving here with our eyes much more open now.
Many people do not get through that wall, and they do go home.

We encountered that while trying to raise support to come here. There was trepidation that we might give up, the statistics show that it happens a large percentage of the time, and a growing percentage with each new generation.

But we haven't yet, I believe we've pushed through that wall, with prayer, drawing close to God, and with the support of friends and family like you.

So now, 5 months later, I look back and am thankful we went through that. I'm thankful we can warn these friends of ours of what is coming, and hopefully prepare them like we were prepared.

God is amazing us daily still! We see his hand at work. I'll blog a story soon about some encouraging aspect of life here.

Until then.. this again was too wordy.. but was a long time in the writing.
God bless and thank you!

uplifting story

You know we're here supporting Bible translation, and you know we do that through our jobs as well as our side ministries and personal relationships.

One of our friends, a translator, told us this story.
But first some background.

Translators here go about their work in a few different ways. One of the ways is that they build a team of nationals who understand the language and are willing to work on Bible translation. These people are essential to the ex-pat understanding the language and the side-result is the relationships that form. Sometimes it takes a very long time to build such a team, and sometimes these teams can fall apart.

But our friend has a good team.
One man through this process has had his life changed by Christ.

Here's the story.
In a culture where wife-beating is acceptable on man's wife was giving birth and he did a remarkable thing. He stayed outside the house all weekend singing praises to God and praying for his wife and new baby boy. He was tender with her, devoted to her, encouraged her. That is a very very rare thing to see in this country and is evidence of Christ changing lives.

Slightly embarrassed at his own tenderness he told none of his friends about the birth or his actions, but raced to my friend and secretly told him. You can spend your life working to share Christ with a nation, a culture, a people, a person, and not get this kind of reaction even once in your life.

He said, "I've never felt close to God like that, God truly does answer prayer, I prayed that my wife would be okay, and that she would give me a son, and she did!"

What a great encouragement! What a remarkable testimony!
Kendal and I get excited to see the translators excited! There truly is a lot of passion that goes into this work.

Prayer Please

There is a translation workshop that has been going on. This is where the translators get together with the local language speaking people who are working with them (nationals) and work on getting books of the Bible translated.

In one area, there is a lot of trouble going on during this workshop. The specifics will be too much for this posting, but I'll stick with generalities.

Evil is still very prevalent in this place that's been working on the translation of the New Testament for 5 years now. The translators are coming under a lot of "hevis".. a lot of problems.

A national from the village had his head cut off. We haven't heard details or of it is true yet.

The man with the burned down house, over the last week has calmed down a bit, thanks to prayers for peace. In his own words:

"(1) Prea long mi
==>Reason: 5-pela man ol i bin pasim tok na kukim haus bilong mi.
==>So mi Joe ilaik take revenge anytime bihain long translation woksop.

Prayer Requests
(1) Pray for me
==>Reason: Five men all agreed together and burnt my house down.
==> So I, Joe, am about to take revenge anytime after this translation
workshop.

Just a clarification: [He] is not asking for prayer to help him take revenge.
He is asking for prayer that God would help him do what is right and not
take revenge, and that he would know how to respond to this offense.


I am always cautious what to share here because I do not want to paint the country in a bad light, or make it sound like what my family is doing is very dangerous. This is the experience of a translator couple we support in their village. This is going on far away from my family but still a reality as we support these people and pray for them.

Evil is strong here in many places, which is why we strive to bring God's Word as it transforms lives, cultures, nations. We've seen it happen, that when a New Testament gets translated, and people are taught to read it, that they change from violent and evil cultures into God fearing ones of peace. It is truly a miraculous thing to witness!

Pray finally, that whatever the outcome that the translation workshop continues to progress and that nothing stops it. Often times, if there is a problem with someone working there, then the workshop can become targeted as well.

Thank you.. and I know it's a long post, thanks for reading.

Good Enough

Last night, I fell asleep, it was nice. I was woken up by a beeping that indicated full power failure.
I got dressed, 11pm, and headed up to the network room.
Groggy headed, I shut down all the servers (when the power goes out I have 30 minutes to bring all the servers down before they reach critical temperatures), made a few calls to get the industrial guys to bring the generator online.
Soon power was back on, the fire drill was over, I brought the servers back online.
But then couldn't sleep until 2am because once the adrenaline gets flowing....

Power has been out for 3 days, the generator had been running all weekend and the fuel ran out.

Anyway today I helped some translators, and I don't know how this escaped my attention until now, they live on "Goodenough Island" and for some reason until today I had pronounced it "Good E Know"... for some reason it jumped out at me today and I laughed..

Energy

School started yesterday!!!!
Calvin is excited about 2nd grade.
Sydney is cautious about the teacher change, but said "I'm glad I'm going to school because when my kids ask me questions I need to know the answers."

Kendal started teaching again, I can see the smile on her face.
And we have had a bit of a quieter week than last week... well we had 1 interruption in the network... well two.. but still today was quiet.

I have been meaning to send out a newsletter soon, but I have not. If anyone has feedback as to what they'd like to see in a newsletter let me know.

If you have a chance, pray for energy for us, we need to get a little bit more of it.

War Memorial

Another thing we saw was the LAE war memorial. 2806 souls were buried here, all contributing to WWII efforts against the Japanese invasion of LAE. Most of them were Australian. It was a pretty and somber place in the middle of an otherwise busy and cluttered city.


And to conclude our tourism we went to the Rainforest Habitat maintained by a university outside of Lae. It was the closest thing to a zoo we've seen in a while. Imagine a very small zoo, with no one around. And then add to that the oddness of being in a manufactured rainforest, inside a rainforest country. It did have the benefit however, of having a lot of really beautiful bird species all in one location.

The kids enjoyed the parrots who mimicked laughter and said hello as well as other things in Tok Pisin. The equivalent here of "polly want a cracker" is "koki kaikai".

Pictured here are two tree kangaroos we watched for a bit.