First visit to a distant village!

The Teop language is spoken by many villages on mainland Bougainville, not just Teop Island. The village we live in, Hiovabon, is one of those villages and we are able to walk to and visit many of the other villages, but some are too far away and we haven’t been able to visit them and develop many relationships in those places.

Irue beach:

We wanted to personally meet pastors to invite them to the church leaders meeting that we had in May, so we arranged a trip to Irue, where we had never been before, to see some people there. We travelled there by boat from our village.

Irue beach:

One of the local traditional customs is when a person goes to a village for the first time, the local people pour water over their feet and this happened to us at Irue. It wasn’t as soon as we got off the boat; we had been there for several hours before they did it. I don’t know what the meaning behind the foot washing is however.

Irue village:

Shortly after we arrived, we went for a walk along the beach to the ‘point’ (the end of the peninsula) and we saw the lighthouse. I will post about the lighthouse later, but here’s a picture of us walking along the beach.

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.

Update and some photos

Rebekah and I are off to the village on Saturday! We went shopping and bought a lot of food to take with us so that we can prepare meals for ourselves. Our shopping trip was quite a success, with us getting almost everything that we needed.

We’ve also written some plans for language learning and a list of lots of different words that we could learn. I hope that we will be able to find people who are willing to really help us learn the language.

We have 9 weeks that we could be in the village, but we won’t stay for 9 weeks straight – we will stay for maybe 3 or 4 weeks, then return to Buka to restock on some food items, and probably do email, as we won’t have our computers in the village with us.

Rebekah and I have filled a crate and are shipping it to Buka. It has a lot of supplies that we would like to use in the village, so we want to return to Buka when it arrives, to unpack it and get some of those supplies. Then we will go back out to the village again. We don’t know when the crate will arrive in Buka, so that’s why we’re not sure when we will return to Buka, but if it hasn’t come in about 3 to 4 weeks, we will probably still go to Buka after 4 weeks in the village, just for a short break.

No more blog posts until I’m back in Buka for that short break!

Here are some photos of some kids that we saw as we were walking along the beach on the weekend.

Making sand-balls:

Having a good laugh:

Looking like a warrior:

Went to the beach today

Although the ocean is right in front of us, we can’t just walk out to the beach because there’s a big cliff there too! So we can look at the lovely view a lot but we can’t just go out and enjoy the water or the beach. It’s a short walk to where there are some trails that lead down to the beach.

Some friends and I went along a trail and walked along the beach today. Here are some photos:

The waves can be quite rough if you’re in there swimming.

I tried to take an artistic photo of my foot, but I don’t think it would win any acclaim other than me being called a ‘try-hard’!