Village views

Irue, the village I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, is always in view from Hiovabon (unless there are thick clouds). Here is a photo which shows the stretch of land that Irue is on, leading to ‘the point’. To give you a sense of distance, it took only 9 minutes to get there by motor boat.

From Hiovabon, we don’t have a very big view of open ocean to watch ships sailing past, only a small bit between the point and Teop Island (on the right in the photo below).

We could see Hiovabon from Irue too. In the photos below, Hiovabon is circled, with an arrow pointing to it (in case you can’t see the circle).

Teop Island is the land mass on the left in this photo.

Language learning - showing photos

The following are some photos of me showing my photos to the local people. I practice speaking in Teop by showing my photos to people and talking about them in Teop. People also ask us questions about our photos which gives us good exposure to the language and also the opportunity to talk some more.

This is me showing my photos at the beach in our village. We’re all laughing about something.

A close-up of me having a good laugh at something when showing my photos.

Our humble toilet

When we stayed at Hiovabon village previously, we went to the mangroves to do our ‘business’ as the village didn’t have a toilet. Now since we are living with them for a while, they built us a proper village toilet. It is built near the mangroves and it has a seat for us to use. They did a good job.

Here is a picture of the toilet close up. We are comfortable with its privacy level, people would not be able to see anything because there is a curtain and wall that provide sufficient cover.

Here is a photo of the toilet in the context of its surroundings. Now you can see why it needs to have a good level of privacy!

Our living quarters

Rebekah and I are sharing a house with Joyce, the Teop lady who has attended translation training courses and has been working on translation. We share a small room together, and with the two beds in there, it doesn’t leave a lot of space for our personal possessions, but we have been managing well with a small corner of the floor each.

My bed is the one on the left in this picture.

The kitchen and living area is really not in the house – we don’t spend much of our time in the house at all. We just pop in and out during the day to get things, and sleep there at night. It has a tin roof with no insulation, so you really don’t want to be there in the heat of the day as it is very hot. We spend a lot of our time in the gazebo attached to the kitchen building. There is a table and some bench seats there, so that is where we eat all our meals, and where we do our language learning sessions, and where we sometimes just sit and chat. Of course we don’t spend the whole day in there either, we can sit and chat at the beach, or walk somewhere and visit people.

Our house is on the right and the general sitting area is on the left.

This is a photo of our house from the other direction, facing the sea (you might be able to see it). You can see another kitchen building with living area in the background too.

Welcome to Hiovabon!

Rebekah and I went to Hiovabon village on 9 October and stayed there until 25 October, when we went back to Buka town for three nights to unpack the items we shipped over and to purchase more supplies to take to the village too. We are returning to the village tomorrow morning and will stay for three weeks, then return to Buka for only two nights to catch up on email and purchase more supplies, and then we’ll return to the village again for another three weeks.

We are staying at Hiovabon village which is opposite Teop Island, while we wait for our house to be built on the island. The village is between the sea and the road; there’s probably only about 100m from the road to the water, so both are really close. The name of the village, ‘Hiovabon’, means ‘Sit until night’ and when you see the views, you can understand why it has that name. Here are some scenes from the village.

In this photo you can see the bench that people frequently sit on and enjoy the view with chatting with others. I usually call Mum and Dad while sitting at this bench. The beach is enjoyed by all, as you can see the old man resting on the bench here, and a village dog sleeping on the sand.

And yes, here’s me!

Stay tuned to my blog while I’m away, I’ve set up a few posts to come up automatically on certain dates.