Ukulele

We had a wonderful guest visit our village for several weeks, and he brought with him a couple of ukuleles, which became the flavour of the month in the village. Everybody wanted to sit and strum them, including Simone and me.

We sat together and made an interesting noise, while I sang a short song. I gave my camera to Simone’s mother and asked her to film us. It was so funny, because we had Simone’s sister howling with laughter in the background. I’d love you to see it, but the file is too big to upload. Instead, here are some still shots taken from the video.

Port Moresby

Since I have been in Ukarumpa recently, I have had to fly through Port Moresby, staying overnight there. As I travelled from the airport to the guest house where I was staying, I took some photos of various Port Moresby scenes.

Some parts of Moresby look a bit like the scenes you see while travelling on the train line to Melbourne:

Other areas look quite different – lots of green grass.

Bohara shellfish

As mentioned earlier, ‘bohara’ is my favourite type of shellfish. It’s small and not as chewy as some of the others. I don’t know what it’s called in English. Rebekah did some research a while ago and thought that they might be a type of ‘cone snail’, so maybe that’s what they are. Most cone snails are fatally poisonous if they sting you, and some aren’t fatal, but they still hurt. However ‘bohara’ do not sting or ‘bite’ or hurt us in any way, so in that way, they don’t quite fit into the description of ‘cone snail’. They do look like the pictures of cone snails on the internet though.

Anyway, to answer your question of ‘what is bohara?’ – here are some photos.

Bohara with shellfish still inside it:

Clean bohara shell:

Empty bohara shell:

Cooked bohara shellfish (quite close up):

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.

Special guest at Kekesu school graduation

I had just sat down and was ready to watch the procession of students and special guests at the start of the Kekesu Primary School end-of-year celebrations (in December) when a Teop chief came over and asked me to be a special guest. I felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea, but I agreed, because I also felt uncomfortable with declining.

So I walked over to the other special guests and took all my cues from them. The students formed a guard of honour for the graduating Grade 8 students and special guests to walk through before going up on the stage.

Walking behind the Grade 8 students:

There were lots of speeches and also some songs that the students presented:

Academic awards were presented to students from each year level, with students receiving a gift presented by one of the special guests. I was surprised when with no prior warning, it was announced that I would be presenting the gifts to the E-Prep students! It was rather funny and a bit embarrassing, because I don’t see myself as being important enough to qualify for presenting awards!

I didn’t get any photos of myself handing out awards, but here’s a photo of one of the presentations. Just imagine me there instead!

After all the formal presentations were over, everyone had lunch, and again I had it up on the stage with the special guests and enjoyed nice food. After that I was able to return to my ‘comfort zone’ of my village aunties, sisters and nieces and watch some of the dances that various groups of people performed. It was a long day, and we got back to the village just before dark.

“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.