Cuteness overload!

Some photos that I took one happy afternoon.

Children's Day

On 20 November last year, we celebrated Children’s Day after the church service. (The UN has marked 20 November of every year as Universal Children’s Day). We heard children reading out what the rights and responsibilities of children are, and there was lots of songs and dances. Here are some photos of the celebrations.

Children decorated and waiting for their time to perform.

Here is a video of some children singing a song. I liked this song; the words went like this: “We are the children of Bougainville. We are the leaders of tomorrow. Together we come, united we stand. Respect our rights as we stand.”

The adults performed some items too. I thought it was pretty cool to see a guy playing the guitar behind his head in this photo:

Some ladies singing and dancing.

Family – our village nieces

Mark 10:29-30 “I assure you that everyone who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or property, for my sake and for the Good News, will receive now in return a hundred times as many houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and property—along with persecution.” (NLT)

One of the things I love about being in the village is being part of a family. Joyce, our main Teop translator is our mum – we call her ‘mum’ in Teop, which is ‘Iaa’ (said like ‘yaa’). Her children are our brothers and sisters, and her siblings are our uncles and aunts.

Our oldest brother has two daughters, so they are our nieces and we are their aunts. The Teop word for ‘aunt’ is also ‘Iaa’, so our nieces call me ‘Iaa Julie’. Their names are Tovu and Simoun. Tovu is four and chats away to us in Teop a lot although we don’t always have vocabulary to understand. Simoun is two and has gotten over her fear of us now and is very confident around us. Previously she would stare at us seriously or burst into tears, but now whenever she sees us, she gives us a great cheesy grin. Here are some photos of them.

Simoun:

Tovu eating rice from a large serving bowl:

I think that Simoun’s face in this picture shows just how confident she is around us now.

Me with Tovu:

Me with Simoun

Cute kids

Just a few photos of some kids looking cute. Our village brother’s two little girls are in all of these photos, they are our nieces, and they can call me ‘Aunt Julie’, but in Teop it is ‘Yaa Julie’. It was so cute to hear the oldest on the mobile phone one night saying ‘Yaa Julie, tea bon’ (‘Aunt Julie, goodnight’).

The shorter two kids in this picture are our village nieces.

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:

Random photos

I don’t have a lot to write about, but they say that a picture is worth 1000 words, so here’s 3000 words for you, with 3 pictures. The thing they have in common is that they were all taken on the same day.

Matsungan madness

When we visited Matsungan Island, it seemed like everyone was in a fun, silly mood, which made it a little bit frustrating for me doing my questionnaires, but they were great people. One time when I asked a question about who speaks certain languages, a voice piped up in reply, “Me too”. I looked over and saw a Malaysian man sitting there, which was funny. The whole crowd that was with me started laughing hysterically and it took a while to get back to business. Later on when I was walking around the island he saw me and we had a short chat. It seems like he is a bit of a joker.

Mariela was taking photos of kids and young people, and I went over to join her, and as I approached a teenage boy came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder and posed for Mariela to take a photo of me. I got into the spirit of things and look a bit crazy in this photo too.

It was actually a bit weird for a second having a young man put his arm around me, as that is not culturally appropriate behaviour for PNG. I think this guy might have been a bit high on betelnut and/or something else.

Here are some more photos of people being crazy in front of the camera at Matsungan. (Mariela took all of these except the last one, which I took).

Village – Children (post by Bill & Liz)

There were always lots of children around in the village, some were really cute. Here are some photos of village children.











Looking cool:

People love photos!

Well, I am back from our trip to the Teop language area and we had a good time there. We were based in one village most of the time, but we were able to visit 4 other villages and stayed overnight at two of them.
 
I always take my photo album with me to villages. People love looking at the photos and it is a good conversation starter too. They also love having their photos taken and looking at them on the camera. The photos above show people looking at either my photo album or a photo on my camera during this trip to the Teop area. You can see one kid noticed the camera when I took the photo and is looking directly at it instead of the photo album!

Cute kids

Here are some photos of the kids around here. The one at the beach was taken when we were at the Teop area, and I took the other two photos at church this morning.