October 3, 1999

We start school again on Wednesday after our two week break between the first two terms. We have 4 terms with a long break between each one. Around Christmas there is 4 or 5 weeks. Just a few years ago that is when the school year changed, like in Australia, but now they switched to a more American year starting in July and ending in June.

Things are going well with my roommate Rebekah. She is my closest friend here. She is from New Jersey and teaches math at the high school. She is about the same age as I am. We are younger than most of the other singles, but not by much.

I went out to show the Jesus video this weekend. It was a neat time of experiencing more of what life is like in a village. We arrived and there were a bunch of kids there to greet us and stare. No one in the village spoke much english, so I tried to communicate with them using the tok pisin that I know. Generally for me the problem isn't not knowing how to say something, it's not knowing what I want to say. I went with a Finnish family. The husband, Juha, had shown the film before, so I didn't have any responsibilities except praying and experiencing everything. I'm thinking that after going along with people a few times I can get to where I could lead a team, but I'll see how God guides me. The rainy season is starting soon and we only go out during the dry season I think.

We moved into the house where we would be sleeping. It was a round house with a dirt floor. The walls made of a stalk woven together called pitpit, the top coming to a point and made of kunai grass. There was a fire in the center of the house for cooking and warmth. Around the outer rim was an area about as high as a chair and extending into the center about 6 feet. This is where people sat and where they slept. There was one half of the house for men and another half for women and children.

We ate a supper of kaukau (sweet potato), white potatoes, corn, and kumu (leaves) cooked two different ways. Some of it was cooked inside of a bamboo shoot with ginger seasoning and some of it was boiled in water. I asked them how they knew it was done when it was in the bamboo and they said that steam came out and when it smelled right, it was done. They had enough forks for us whiteskins, but they ate with their hands.

Then we walked to the site where Juha had been setting up the equipment to show the video. The screen was a cloth stretched out between sticks. During the video if there was wind there was a rippling effect. We played some videos of animals so that people would start coming. Because people don't generally have watches here, we can't just set a time and say that it will start then. Juha was having trouble with the VCR. It would only show in black and white. We prayed about it and he kept fiddling with things trying to get it to work. Some of the local leadership of the church led in some songs in Tok Pisin and a pastor preached for a few minutes. He sometimes talked in Tok Pisin and sometimes in their tokples, Kamuna-Kafa, their mother tongue. While he was preaching, Juha thought of one more thing he could try with the VCR, so he swtiched one of the cords, and when he started the Jesus video, we had color! God answered our prayers and the prayers of people back in the United States that I had asked to be praying for the event. Not only did we have color, but it didn't rain the whole evening. We saw lightning in the distance, but we didn't have any rain where we were.

By the time that everyone arrived there were between 150 and 200 people. Some of them were church members and some of them weren't. At the end many of the women cried. The people said that it was so much easier to understand the message when they heard it in their own language instead of pidgin or english. The family that we were staying with said that people would be going home and "tingting planti" (think about it a lot).

We went back to the house and talked for a little while and they made tea by boiling water and putting in some leaves that grow around here called komamufa, I think. It was a very good lemon flavor. Then we went to sleep. I slept surprisingly well considering that after the lamp went down, the rats were crawling on the walls and squeaking. I purposely didn't open up my eyes so that I wouldn't see them.

In the morning we went to the pastor's house and they made a mumu for us. We weren't there for the preparation of it, we just arrived and sat around and talked while it cooked. This was a different style mumu than the one I went to before. They cooked it in a steel drum and covered it in banana leaves and a cover of material with dirt on it for insulation. The food was cooking bananas (not as sweet as regular bananas), kaukau (sweet potato), corn, asbin (a root of some kind), and taro root (tasted like a potato but not as flavorful) , with sugar cane for dessert.

As the food was cooking the kids played on their version of swings, which were belts of tire-like material tied around a setup of branches sort of like a swingset. They climbed into the crook of the belt and swung up and down.

After the mumu we went home over the bumpy roads overlooking the breathtakingly beautiful valleys. Now when I go on trips to other towns I can look at the villages and know a little bit more of what life is like there. I still have a lot to learn, but I have two years.