Living at Teop Island

Sorry it’s been a while between blog posts. I hope you had a good Christmas and wish you all the best for the new year.

We lived at Teop Island for four weeks and we were comfortable there – after our toilet was finished. The first week without a toilet was a challenge! They did build us a very nice toilet though. Here it is:

We stayed in a lovely couple’s house. They are Christians whose faith and love for the Lord is very evident in their speech and actions. Here are some photos of the house:

I did our cooking up on the verandah – I felt a bit like a TV chef on a stage!

This is the back of the house:

The Teop people also built us a nice shower house:

We stood on this concrete inside the shower so that our feet didn’t get muddy.

Yikes! Falling tree!

One day as I was showering, I heard this loud noise very near, which sounded like a tree cracking and falling. I was undressed and all wet and my greatest fear was that the tree would land on the shower walls, exposing me! It didn’t really cross my thoughts that if it came that close, being injured would probably be of greater concern!

It was a coconut tree that had been leaning across the road that fell. If I had looked up, I surely would have seen it, but I was just focused on the wall that might come crashing down. It fell in the direction it was leaning and was really of no great threat to me. But it was pretty scary – I could hear the sound, didn’t know where it was coming from, and couldn’t run!

The base of the tree was only about 3-5 metres away from our shower house. Here are some photos, our shower house is the metal structure with orange curtain.

Clearing the coconut tree off the road. They had the road cleared within half an hour, they were very quick at moving it.

The basics of life

Food, shelter, a toilet, and a place to wash are some of the basics of life which we relied on other people to provide for us when we were on the survey trip. I’ve already talked about the food, so now for the other three.

Our living arrangements were very varied. Sometimes we stayed in a house that was made out of modern materials and was fully screened, so we didn’t need to use our mosquito nets. Other times we stayed in a traditional bush material house.

We stayed in bush houses similar to this one in some villages:

The toilets in most places had been provided by World Vision, and were little huts, with a concrete floor, and a ceramic toilet bowl with plastic seat and lid, over a pit. Thank you to World Vision and everyone who donates to them. Not only does their work benefit the locals, it benefits the foreign visitors too! Two places we stayed had even better toilets – one was a fully functioning flush toilet, and the other one was similar, but you just had to fill the cistern manually.

Here’s the inside of a western style house:

We didn’t have any showers with hot water on the survey, but the best shower was like a normal shower, just that it was only cold water that came out of the shower head. Everywhere else, we had a bucket filled with cold water, and a dish to pour the water over ourselves. The shower rooms had varying degrees of privacy – from full privacy, to fully open (no shower room). A lot of the places had just a simple, small square frame with tarp around it as the walls. I have a skirt that I can wear to cover myself while bathing, which means I don’t need to worry if we don’t have a fully private shower room.

This is the house that had the flush toilet and normal shower:

Good, clean drinking water was available too – also thanks to World Vision who provided water tanks for the villages. I shouldn’t give all the credit to World Vision however because Care International, Red Cross, Caritas and Ausaid are some of the other aid organisations that work in the area too and have probably also provided water tanks and toilets.

Village – Our humble abode (post by Bill & Liz)

We stayed in the village for 5 nights. In the photo below is the house we stayed in. It was newly built for when Julie did her orientation course and stayed in the village for 5 weeks. The family have lived in the house since then and generously shared it with us while we visited.

This is a picture of our bedroom. You can’t see much of it because of our mosquito net.

Here is the toilet, which we shared with many nocturnal creatures.

Here is our open air bathroom. We bathed in the river, which is in the foreground. The sea is on the other side of the sandbank. The water in the river is amazingly warm, it feels like you’re hopping into a nice warm bath.

Namatoa – An amazing villageǃ

While we spent most of our time in the Teop area in one village at the coast, one time we travelled up the mountain and stayed in Namatoa village for two nights. It took us 4 hours to walk up the mountain, but apparently the Namatoa villagers can do it in 1½-2 hoursǃ

Namatoa is a fairly big village in seemingly the middle of nowhere. It does have a road that goes up the mountain to it, but it is in terrible condition. We walked along the road, and its condition even made walking difficult, but they still somehow manage to get vehicles up there when it's not too wetǃ

Namatoa has spectacular ocean views. In this photo, the land that you can see in the distance is Buka Island:

Another view from Namatoa, with some closer land in sight:

The views aren't the most amazing thing about Namatoa though. The most amazing thing is that it has a plumbed water supplyǃ The toilet we used flushed like normal, with the press of a button, and there was even a little sink for washing your hands in the toilet outhouse. There were also showers where you turn a tap on and water comes down from above. It was really nice to have a normal shower, rather than tipping water from a bucket over me. Here's a photo of the shower we used, hope you can see the pipe clearly.

On the other hand, the floor of the shower wasn't all that spectacular...

At one stage, the village must have been even more amazing, with an electricity supply. There are electricity poles and wires going throughout the village, but they have not been functioning for a very long time. In this photo you can see some of the village houses and an electricity pole and wire.

It's raining!!! (Bathing story 2)

Oh how you would love some rain in Melbourne! We've had heaps in Ukarumpa lately, but when we were in the village it was entering dry season there and our nice bathing spot (which I haven't told you about yet) didn't have enough water for us to use, so we were bathing at our muddy bathing spot (mentioned in my newsletter if you receive it), which was getting less and less water and it was just difficult bathing there because of the mud, so we were really happy to get some rain. It filled up our nice bathing spot and we were able to use that for the rest of our time there.

We also took the opportunity to have a shower in the rain under the water coming off the roof of the house. It was so nice, we felt so nice and clean afterwards, perhaps because the temperature had dropped with the rain and we washed at the house, so we didn't have a walk back to the house to get us all hot and sweaty again. We washed our hair in the rain too and also washed our clothes while we were wearing them. Here's a picture of me washing in the rain:

Another thing we did when it was raining was catch rain water for drinking. The first time we had a good rain, we didn't have our tarp set up, so a few people got wet while hurrying to set it up and get as much water as we could. The water wasn't quite flowing the way we needed to either, so a young boy was sitting under the tarp directing the water into the bucket.

But firstly, we didn't have an empty bucket to collect the water in. All our buckets had food in them, so we emptied out the contents of one bucket so that we could collect water. A few days later we had nearly gone through all our water and we needed some more, so we prayed for rain and cleaned the tarp and the bucket, in anticipation of God answering our prayer. That afternoon we had another good rain. It was such a good rain that we didn't want to let it go to waste, so we emptied out another bucket of food and collected two buckets of water to last us twice as long. After that, it always rained often enough that we didn't run out of water.

The problem with emptying two buckets of food was that we had to find some way of keeping the food out of the reach of the rats. That's what the rat-proof buckets were for, but we hadn't gone through enough food to use two less buckets. We ended up putting the food into bilums (string bags) and tied the top so that the rats couldn't get in, the we hung them from a beam in the house. Gradually as we got through our food we were able to empty the bilums into the other food buckets, but as you can see, living in a village is not quite as simple as you may think, there are certain obstacles and challenges that you have to solve!

Here's our bilums hanging up:

"So glad to see you bathing!" (Bathing story 1)

Our bathing spot at Mangijangut village, was right on the 'canoe highway'. Yes that's right, we bathed on a log at the side of the river where everyone coming and going from the village would pass us in their canoes. So obviously we didn't strip down and wash, we bathed with clothes on!

Sitting on the log and getting wet:

So on the only day that we brought the camera with us to take bathing photos, a man comes back from being out somewhere and he sees us and says, "I'm so glad to see you there!" We thought, 'Okay…why is he so glad to see us bathing?'

It was totally innocent though, he had speared a snake in the swamp and was glad that we were there so that he could show us!

The snake:

Proud hunter:

The numbering of the photos on the camera shows that this happened in the midst of our bathing…the photo of me bathing above is number 340, the two snake photos above are 344 and 346, and this photo below of me about to get dressed is 347. So photos of the man and the snake are surrounded by photos of us bathing!

That night, two pieces of snake were given to the family we were staying with, but they were afraid to eat it and Correna and Elvira didn't want to eat it. I was the only one who was game to try. I didn't even have any psychological issues to overcome to eat it.

Here it is on the plate:

Me eating it:

So, what did it taste like? It tasted like…chicken!! It really did! It tasted like the meat on chicken drumsticks.