Village – Family (post by Bill & Liz)

While we were in the village, we stayed with Julie’s wasfamili from her orientation course. Because Julie was their ‘adopted daughter’, we were considered to be part of their family as well, so in their eyes, the village children were our children and grandchildren too.

This is Julie’s wasmama and waspapa with us.

We also had close contact with the waspapa’s oldest brother and his wife, who took a lot of care of us as well. Here’s a photo of us with them.

Christmas Day

I started the day by making myself a special breakfast and then I went to a 9am service. After that I went on to Yahoo Messenger, put the webcam on, connected to Mum and Dad and opened my presents with them watching me, which was nice. Much better than opening them on my own.

I had invited a few people over for Christmas lunch at 1pm and I had been busy over the past few days doing some baking. In the picture below you can see my "good food pyramid", although you can't really see what's in the containers. From top to bottom: shortbread (top two), fruit loaf, cheese muffins and fruit biscuits.

We had a good main course consisting of borscht, chicken, ham, meatballs, rice, potato bake, cheese muffins, bread rolls and salad items. We had Christmas napkins and crackers that were kindly given to me by a friend here who didn't end up needing them, so we all got the daggy paper hats on! Here's a photo of us:

We had nice desserts too. Here's a mango and passionfruit mousse that I made (from my church's recent dessert book!) and mince pies and Christmas cookies that other people brought.

Here is some of the food from my "good food pyramid". From left to right: fruit biscuits, fruit loaf and shortbread. I forgot that you're supposed to use plain flour with shortbread and I used self-raising flour, so it wasn't quite the same as normal shortbread.

My guests helped clean up, which was great. They all left before 4pm and I had the rest of the day at home by myself. I looked through my presents again, and in the evening, I saw all my relatives on the webcam on Yahoo Messenger and chatted to them too (that is, 'typing chat', not a voice call, the sound is usually not very good for that). Even Jyra (my dog) made an appearance on the webcam!

Well that was my Christmas this year. I hope you had a great Christmas.

Foster families/Selling at the market

Over the past few weeks we have been spending time with foster families. These are local families who have volunteered to be foster families for the students at POC. In Tok Pisin we call them our ‘wasfamili’.

We have visited them in their village and had dinner with them there and last week we stayed overnight too. I started to learn how to make a ‘bilum’ (a string bag) on that visit. Going to the toilet is an event because the toilet is a little house by itself with a hole in the ground.

On Saturday I went to the town market with my foster mother to sell sweet bananas. We set up in an undercover area where we had a table and a seat. Thankfully we weren’t outside in the sun and sitting on the ground, so we were quite comfortable.

I had a great time at the market. I enjoyed sitting there watching everyone pass by and just observing everything. I was also a bit of a novelty – everyone thought it was amusing to see a white person selling food at the market, but they were happy about it too. I think it was also a selling point!

I was out all day and using Tok Pisin in all my interactions. I didn’t find the day stressful at all. I actually felt happy and at peace afterwards because I hadn’t had any time pressures on me. I don’t like rushing around to fit into a time schedule, I like taking my time, so I think I’m going to appreciate the slow pace of PNG life.