More progress on the house

Here are the latest photos on the progress of my village house. I took these photos before coming to Buka, but I’ve been told that since then, they have put the frame up.

If you compare with the previous blog post, you will see that the supporting struts and protective fence are no longer there, as the cement has dried and the posts can stand by themselves. The bearers are also on top of the posts here, and the window frames have been made and are under the roofing iron.

A closer photo of the window frames, with some other frames in the background, and the stockpile of timber behind them.

And just to give you a bit more perspective, here is the house from a different angle. If you look closely you can see the road in the background (it is white).

I’m in Buka for a few weeks, so can’t get new photos of the progress until I go back, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it has changed. It will be great to see the frame that’s up now.

Village house construction progress

This is how I found my village house when I came back to the village after having two weeks away at Petats Island!

Before I went to Petats, no work had been started on my house, and I was surprised to find the house looking like this when I got to the village.

On the day I arrived, the men were working on cementing the posts in. I don’t know how it is done in Australia, but here they put some stones in the hole first.

Then they put the cement in the holes. The mix the cement with water and with sand that they get from the beach just 50 metres away!

Lastly, here is some of the timber that is ready to be used for the house.

Where I'm staying

While I’m here in Canada, I’m staying with Rebekah at her parents’ house. It’s out in the country and it has nice views.

Here is their house – the bedroom I’m in is upstairs, at the window by itself on the left.

Here’s my room:

Here is some of the bushland near the house:

Horses in the paddock with some farmland in the background:

This is Grace, one of the horses that they have rescued. She was very skinny and in poor condition when they got her and now she is doing very well.

House with cool walls

How do you like this house? I love how it is just so different. Not many houses have the bamboo walls brightly coloured like this. It really stands out.

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.

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.

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.

SIL Centre (post by Bill & Liz)

After our stay in the village we returned to Madang and stayed at the SIL centre. This was a relaxing time we shared with Julie. The SIL centre is located opposite the sea about 10 minutes PMV drive from Madang town centre.

SIL Centre unit.


View looking directly out from the balcony.


Here we are relaxing (posing?) on the balcony.


The sea was directly in front of the unit, and although there is no beach, the sea is easily accessible, and was lovely to swim and snorkel in. The coral may not be the most colourful, but still looks impressive. There are many fish to observe, from little blue or orange fish that dart in and out of the coral, to larger schools of fish that swim by.

Looking along the coast in front of the SIL centre.


The Madang Lodge restaurant was a 10 minute walk away and had a lovely setting.

Village – Garden house (post by Bill & Liz)

Every villager has a piece of land they use as a garden to grow produce and cash crops. Our village was next to the beach, but the gardens are located in the small hills further inland where the soil is more productive. They grow cash crops such as cocoa and food crops for their own consumption and for sale at market. Foods that they grow for eating are bananas (sweet ones and cooking bananas), kaukau (sweet potato), taro, Chinese taro, sago and green leafy vegetables.

Close to their garden site, they build a smaller dwelling to use while they are working in the garden. Here are some photos of the garden house.

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.

Julie’s current house (post by Bill & Liz)

This is Julie’s current house, she lives in the left hand side of this two-unit building.

This is an early morning view from Julie’s house.

Here’s Liz admiring a big flower at Ukarumpa.

Continuing the nomadic lifestyle

I have moved house again. I like the new house, I have a big bedroom and my own office area, plus there is a microwave, which I had in the last house too, but it is always a bonus to have a microwave.

Here's a photo of the house. It is actually attached to another house, so I guess it is really a unit.

The house is located at an outer part of the Centre, but it is not too isolated. There are lots of houses behind mine, but not many in front, so I have a great view of the hills as you can see in this photo below.

I never really felt interested in ministering to nomadic peoples, the lifestyle didn't really appeal to me, but it's funny how although I'm not going to be working with nomads, I have been living a very nomadic lifestyle this year. I was in three houses in Ukarumpa from January to May, and then in May and June I stayed in three houses in the Sepik. Back to Ukarumpa for a month after that and then the following locations: Goroka, Kokopo, Buka, Port Moresby, Melbourne, Kyneton, Melbourne, Brisbane, Port Moresby, Alotau and then back to Ukarumpa. I went back to the house I have been in since February, but then moved out this weekend to the new house.

Overall, the number of times I have moved from one place to another this year is: 38!! That includes every move, including overnight stopovers. I have gone to sleep in 25 different beds this year. I'm glad that I can sleep okay in beds that I am not used to!

I don’t think that even traditional nomads move 38 times in a year.

Hakö visit

I visited the Hakö area on the weekend, staying there on Saturday and Sunday nights. It was nice, the people were very friendly and the language was definitely strong and being used a lot. Two very cute kids are pictured in a couple of the photos above.

I stayed in a modern style house which was wired for electricity but not connected. You can see it in one of the photos above. I was sharing it with the men who were working on the mobile phone tower. I had two local teenage girls sleeping in the room with me as security, and the rooms had doors with locks in the handles, so the girls locked the door when we went to sleep.

The toilet was really nice. It was the best village toilet I've been to in PNG so far and better than some public toilets in Australia. It was in a little hut that you would probably describe as a shack, not very flash looking, but inside there was a regular toilet seat with water in it. It didn't have a cistern for flushing, so we had to get a bucket of water and pour it down to flush it. It was very nice and didn't have a toilet smell to it at all.

On our first night we had mud crab for dinner, which was very nice. They gave us a crab each, you can see the size of them in one of the photos above. The one I ate was a little bit smaller than the one in the picture. I'm sure these would be very expensive to buy in Australia, so it was a real treat and although my mouth enjoyed the crab, it seems that my stomach didn't, as I had stomach pain during the night and the next day, and also diarrhoea. That was a shame. Next time I'll have to only eat a little bit of crab and not a whole big one.

The main mobile phone company is building a new tower in the village that we were staying in. It is nearly finished and will be active in a week or two. There's a picture of it in one of the photos above. These towers are popping up everywhere. There are also devices available which enable you to access the Internet using the mobile service, so if I end up working in a village with mobile reception, I will be able to access email and Internet in the village. I think that would be wonderful!

Well, there you go, that's my trip to the Hakö language area in a nutshell.

A few days in paradise

My visit to the Teop language group was like a few days at a tropical paradise, and in comparison to other villages, it was luxury too! We had a modern house to live in and a room each with a foam mattress, pillows and mosquito nets provided. There was tables and chairs to sit at too, so it was very comfortable and we had million dollar views. (Our house is shown in one of the pictures above).
 
We were staying on the mainland of Bougainville, but one day we went and visited the island across from us, where there is also a village. We were able to walk across during a low tide, and in the afternoon we took a canoe back. (See one of the pictures above for a view of the mainland from the island).
 
People from the island go to their gardens or school on the mainland during the day, and they return to their village via canoe in the afternoon, so this was a good time to go for a walk along the beach to the 'canoe terminus' and socialise with the people. I enjoyed spending time with the people showing them my photos and learning some of the Teop language. (One of the photos above is of me with some of these people. They are so dark that for their faces to look good in a photo, the camera has to over-expose my face. I am not really as white as the photo shows!).
 
Our toilet didn't smell because it wasn't a pit, it was the ocean! We went into the mangroves when the water was low, but you had to watch for the bits sticking up from the ground. Overnight the tide came in and washed everything away. (See one of the pictures above which shows our toilet spot).The only concern was privacy, there was no little hut to hide you!
 
The people were very nice and the language was very strong, which was encouraging. The little children spoke the language a lot and parents spoke to their children in Teop too. In some parts of PNG, parents are using Tok Pisin to speak to their children, so the children grow up speaking Tok Pisin and the language gradually disappears.
 
I cannot yet say whether I will be working with the Teop language group. It all depends on what what God's will is and also the thoughts of my future team-mate. I think it would be a good option though.