The daily work

I have been really busy during the week with the translation workshop. I wake up at 6am and have a cold shower, which I really don't like. All the staff meet together at 7.45am to pray and then at 8am, all the participants come.

We have devotions first and then a half hour training session, in which Rebekah is teaching about music and the church. In a couple of weeks the participants will be working on writing songs.

We have breakfast at 9am and dinner at 5.30pm and these are big meals. There is usually rice, stew, sweet potato, pumpkin, taro, bananas and leafy greens at these meals. At lunch time, it is a smaller meal, either some savoury cracker biscuits, or a cake.

After breakfast we start looking at the passage for the day, reading through it in a few different English translations and discussing things that could be issues. Then the groups start translating the passage and this takes several hours. Once they finish, we print their first draft out and they read through it to check that it sounds natural and they also check the accuracy of the translation and mark the paper with changes. Then they input the changes on the computer.

The work is not finished there though! There is still more work to be done on the passage and I'll write more about that in my next blog post.

Back from village living

We have left our villages now and are back at POC. I had a great time in the village, I absolutely loved it and would be happy to stay there all the time. There is so much I could tell you about my time in the village that it would make one very long blog post!! So I’ll share a little bit now and add more posts about village living over the next few weeks.

Some of the highlights were: making sago, harvesting cocoa, going for a trip up a mountain, making a bilum and being given a local name – Mogom.

In the mornings, I had a bit of a routine of having breakfast then washing my clothes at the tap, then washing the dishes at the tap too. It was an interesting affair – I often had a crowd of children standing watching me. It didn’t really bother me. Lately I had a little girl about 5 years old helping me, which was really sweet.

Washing clothes:


Washing dishes:


Every day was different, so there was only a regular routine in the morning and later afternoon.

At about 4-5pm we washed in the river which is right next to the sea, with a sand bar in between. It was very public – sometimes there would be a man sitting on the shore nearby doing something, or other times, a group of little children would come with us and play in the water around us. I was fully covered when I bathed, so I didn’t mind it at all. In fact, I can’t really think of anything that bothered me when I was in the village.

Here I am about to bathe, fully covered up.


This picture shows me bathing with a bit of the background of where I was:

And with the kids:

After we bathed, we made our dinner using our kerosene stove (Primus). Then after eating dinner sitting on the verandah, some of our ‘family’ came and sat with us and we talked for a little while or made our bilums and then went to bed.