Basket weaving

Coconut trees are amazing – almost every part of a coconut tree can be used for human purposes!

The leaves are especially useful for weaving baskets of various types – some are used for carrying food and others are used for baking food.

On the day of the celebration feast (see earlier blog post), I learnt how to make the kind of basket that is used for baking some traditional food. Here are some pictures.

Working on the basket under the watchful eye of my sister:

Getting some help from my sister:

The finished product!

Party time! Village feast

In January, we arrived in the village to a hive of activity – the village was preparing for a feast that weekend. The occasion for the feast was that when one of our Uncles was driving to Arawa, he crossed a river which was high and it rolled his car. This was a situation in which he could have died, or been seriously injured, but he was fine, so this feast was celebrating the fact that our uncle had a dangerous experience and lived – definitely something to be thankful for.

Part of this celebration tradition involved washing certain people’s faces and feet with a combination of special water and leaves as shown in the picture below.

Lots of people came to our village for our feast and they all brought baskets of food for the feast. They also go back home with a basket of food too. Inside the kitchen house was very busy and full up with baskets of food.

The men constructed two special long tables for the feast food to be set out on. They were working on the tables during the week before the feast.

Some food was set out in the open on the tables, which invited the flies along, so several ladies and girls were shooing them away with various bits of trees. I managed to get in on the action too!

There was also some dancing and lots of hoots of laughter whenever someone new got up to dance. One lady got me up to dance, with reluctance on my part, though I think I got the loudest cheer of the day when I went up!

It was a really fun day and I think everyone enjoyed themselves, I certainly did. In the morning I went around from place to place in the village, seeing what everyone was doing and chatted to people. I got involved where I could – I helped with food preparation, sorting out the baskets in the kitchen and I also made a basket to be used to cook something.

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

Buka airport

Buka airport is an airport like no other. Your first experience with the airport is likely to be in arrivals. When you arrive, you go through a small gate and wait in a small area for the luggage to come over on a trolley. The passengers unload the luggage and you squeeze through to grab your bag when it’s accessible. The photo below shows the Buka airport building, and you can see the arrivals area outside. The people who are standing behind the mesh fence have just arrived and are waiting for their luggage.

When you arrive, you don’t need to go inside the building – it is only for departures. Here is the check in counter.

We do have a little shop to buy some snacks to keep us going. It’s called the ‘Landing and Take Off Canteen’. There’s no hot pies for sale there, mostly it’s cracker biscuits and Twisties. Here you can see the canteen, and to the right of the photo there are two security staff – they check your bags when you enter the airport, to make sure that you aren’t carrying anything you aren’t supposed to have.

Lastly, here is the waiting area. When Rebekah and I were travelling recently, we managed to sit under a fan and keep cool. I counted the ceiling fans – there were six and only three of them were working.

(Remember you can click on the photos to see them a bit bigger).

Computer course

In February and March, Rebekah and I attended a computer course with our translators, Joyce and Ailyne. Each language team was given a netbook and a solar power setup so that they can use the computers to do translation work in the village.

Photo by Steve Blewett

Ailyne is pretty computer savvy, but Joyce, like several of the participants, had never used a computer before, so it was very elementary level training. They learnt how to type and they played games like Minesweeper, to practice controlling the mouse. There is some Bible translation software on the computers, which they were also taught to use.

Photo by Peter Kruzan

Joyce was really happy with how much she learnt at the computer course – before she couldn’t do anything with a computer, but now she knows how to do many things, and she can type!

Joyce typing while I look on:

Photo by Peter Kruzan

During the course, there was also times when the participants could continue working on their translation projects, so Joyce and Ailyne were able to finish typing up their draft of Mark, and then go through it and correct some spelling and punctuation errors.

Our daily hang-out spot

This is Joyce’s kitchen building. She cooks in the room on the left, while we cook in the open air room on the left. We spend a lot of our time in this little shelter. It functions as our dining room and our office where we do language learning, and it is also a social area.

When I am sitting inside the shelter doing some language study, I just need to turn my head to the left and I have this beautiful view of the ocean (and another kitchen building).

At night we also sit in this kitchen shelter with our Coleman lamp lighting it up. We spend a lot of time in this humble little building. It has a grass roof over the dining area, so it is much cooler than inside the house with its tin roof. The house is just for sleeping and storing possessions really.

Language learning

A huge part of our village life is spent in language learning. We have formal language learning sessions in the morning where we learn new words and grammar, and record what we have learnt.

We use a bit of repetition and physical movement to help us learn the words. On the day this photo was taken, we were learning more body parts. We asked for the names of the body parts and then Joyce said them in a random order, and we touched that part of our body. Here, she said ‘rikirikii’ – ribs.

Here we are recording what we learnt.

After our session and throughout the day, we spend a lot of time listening to our recordings and looking at the language that we have written down in our books too. We also try to go out in the afternoon to spend time with people, practising speaking Teop and learning more language from the conversations that we have.