Flowers

Enjoy some of God’s creation through looking at some of these flowers that we have in the village.

There are several different colours of this flower, which I think might be a ‘New Guinea Impatiens’, but I don’t know for sure. So here are a few of the different varieties I’ve seen.

Unonovi views

It’s a long story, so I won’t go into it, but back in December, I stayed overnight at a village called Unonovi. It is about a 5-10 minute walk away from where we live.

I got up early in the morning when the sun was still low in the sky and took some photos, which I will share with you now.

Early morning light on the trees:

If you go to the beach and look to the right (or south-ish), this is what you see:

If you look to the left (or north-ish), you see Teop Island:

Here is a zoomed-in photo – half of Teop Island and also the smaller uninhabited island called Teovorana.

“My” vegie garden

I sort of have my own little vegie garden next to our village, which I am really enjoying. Most gardens are about a half hour walk away from the village, but this is just right where we are, so I am able to go to it at any time and do a bit of weeding or clear away more grass, or plant more vegies.

Here is a photo of the whole garden. (The tall plants with long, pointy leaves to the right are pandanus and aren’t a part of ‘my’ garden).

These are my tomato plants in the centre of this photo, and the ones Joyce planted are on the right, at the top right are the beans.

These are the leafy greens known as ‘aibika’ in Tok Pisin. Similar idea to spinach.

There’s a banana tree in the centre of this photo, which was already there when we started the garden, but surrounding the banana tree, you can see more of our beans.

I’m hoping to plant some eggplant, basil and more tomatoes here in the future. I’ll do my best to keep you posted on the progress.

Shellfish

I’ve been wanting to go looking for my favourite type of shellfish since I arrived back in Bougainville (it’s called ‘bohara’ in Teop, and I’ll write a blog post about it in a few weeks). One day two ladies from the next village were passing through on their way to collect shellfish, and I was able to tag along with them .

We wandered in the shallows looking for shellfish in the water. I wasn’t very good at finding them – I only found one, and a big one at that, so probably the easiest kind to find. Here’s a picture of the kind of shell I found:

Fortunately my friends were generous and shared their shells with me (including some bohara!), so I returned to the village with this basket of shells:

We cooked them up and had them for dinner. These two photos show the cooked shellfish, removed from their shells, before we mixed them with vegies and noodles.

Scottish village life in the old days

At the Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore, there is a replica of what a highlands village would have been like in around 1700. I really enjoyed seeing similarities between it and village life in PNG.

Village houses:

A straw broom:

A woven basket:

Some seats and a fireplace:

Firewood and a basket with stones (o vasu tao bau!).

Temporary camp accommodation for when people were travelling:

Neolithic sites – or in other words: really old places

It was really interesting to see some Neolithic (very old) sites at Orkney and to imagine what it would have been like to live back then.

Skara Brae is probably the best preserved Neolithic village. You can see what their houses were like, and I’d love to be able to go back in time and just see people going about their daily life in that era, although I’m glad that I didn’t live then – I like our modern comforts.

The Broch of Gurness is actually from the Iron Age (thanks Wikipedia for telling me that!), so it’s not Neolithic, it’s a bit more recent – about 2000 years old. Again it’s just fascinating to see these places and to think that 2000 years ago there was people here in the same place as me, seeing and touching the same stones.

These standing stones are a part of the Ring of Brodgar, a big circle of standing stones. They are also from the Neolithic area, before there was any machinery and it makes you wonder how they managed to move these stones about and put them in place. Theories about, but no-one really knows.

This huge stone really dwarfs me and must weigh a ton!

Ska-Nah-Doht village

Rebekah and I visited a replica of what a traditional Iroquois village would have looked like years ago. The Iroquois were one of the tribes living in Canada before white settlement.

The village is surrounded by a big fence to keep intruders out.

Many people would live in these long houses.

Me in the entrance of one of the long houses – I’m a bit too tall for the doorway.

Here is the inside of a house.

I found a mortar and pestle and posed with it. Not the right size for making our village specialties like menaga and gogii. The Iroquois probably used it for grinding grain.

A bridge, which was a little bit bouncy when crossing over it.

Heading to the village Part 1 – Buka to Bougainville

When we are heading back out to the village after being in Buka for a while, everyone who is at the Centre gathers together to pray for us as we go. We always do this whenever someone is travelling.

Prayer for us going to the village:

We have a short car trip from the Centre to the boat ramp in Buka town, where there are always many little boats vying for us to choose to travel with them. I never know which one to choose, they’re all much the same to me, so we just pick any one. We load our supplies on, then make the very short trip across the water from Buka Island to Bougainville Island. It only takes 1 minute to cross.

Next blog post will talk about getting the rest of the way to the village.

Tropics on a rainy day

When we think of tropical islands, we usually think of warm sunny days and scenes like the one below:

The reality however is that it’s not ALWAYS like that. Sometimes the sky goes grey and the heavens open. The sea loses its beautiful bright blue colour too. The photo below is taken from roughly the same place as the one above.

Coconut palms and frangipani – a common perception of the tropics, but usually with a bright blue sky in the background too. Rainy day photos don’t make for quite as attractive tourism campaigns, but they are a reality, and it’s a nice relief from the hot sun, plus it fills up the tanks with drinking water.

Fun times visiting another village – Waropa

There’s a new Bible school that’s started up near us, which runs one month courses. Some of our friends from the village have attended these courses and while we were in the village, there was a graduation which we were invited to. So we travelled on the back of a tipper truck to Waropa and we stayed overnight there.

On our first night there was a huge feast. There was incredible amounts of food there. But then again, there was a lot of people too! I enjoyed spending the afternoon seeing some of the food being prepared, and helping out a little too.

Here is some pork which had been cooked inside bamboo, getting transferred to a pot.

The village where we stayed (Waropa) was looking immaculate. See all the grass in the photo below? That’s a lot of grass, so it would take a lot of work to keep that nice and neat and short. There’s no fancy ride-on mowers here!

The graduation service was the next morning. Everyone was encouraged to wear white, and it looked really nice seeing everyone wearing the same colour (Wouldn’t it be cool if they chose purple?). The service started with all the graduating students singing a song in Teop as they approached and entered the building. As you can see in the photos, they also wore some traditional grass skirts too.

Rebekah and I had been invited to share as guest speakers. I shared a bit of my testimony and encouraged people to share with other people how God has worked in their lives.

We had a nice time at Waropa. It was our first time to visit that area. The people there speak Teop, but a different dialect. Most of them hadn’t met us before, so it was quite a novelty for them to hear us speaking Teop and they all wanted us to show them our photos and describe them in Teop. It was quite funny, one time a bunch of young men set up and sat in front of two empty chairs which they wanted us to come and sit on to show them our photos. Thus the following photo was taken later…