Tie your donkey to a grape vine? Wash your clothes in wine?

What would you think if someone suggested that you tie your donkey to the branch of a grape vine? That is, if you had a donkey and a grape vine nearby to tie him to.

I don’t know much about donkeys and grape vines, but my thought is that the branches of grape vines aren’t very strong, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to tie your donkey to one, as if he wanted to escape, he could probably pull and the branch would break off, or he would uproot the plant.

In his blessing for Judah, Jacob says: “He ties his foal to a grapevine, the colt of his donkey to a choice vine. He washes his clothes in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes.” Gen 49:11 (NLT)

What does this mean? Why would you want to wash your clothes in red wine? Do we want our white shirts to have a red tinge to them?

I’ve been checking the Teop draft of Genesis 49 recently and I did some research on this verse. I learnt that tying a young donkey to a grape vine is not normally a good idea, but the reason isn’t because it might break the branch and run away – the reason is because it will eat the leaves and fruit.

What Jacob is saying here is that Judah’s land is going to be so fertile that grape vines will grow really well, and he won’t even worry about the fact that a young donkey might eat some, because he will have such an abundance of them.

The bit about washing clothes in wine is also referring to how wine will be plentiful. It will be so plentiful that you could use it like you could use water. Even if we were talking about white wine, you wouldn’t wash your clothes in it because it is expensive and you wouldn’t want to waste it like that. However Jacob is saying that wine is going be as abundant as water. He doesn’t mean that people will actually wash their clothes in it; rather he is using the image to illustrate how fertile the land will be.

I’ve tried to edit Genesis 49:11 in Teop so that the meaning of the verse is clear. If I didn’t, people wouldn’t understand the verse, it would just sound like nonsense. What’s the point of translating if the translation doesn’t communicate the intended meaning?

Huge sea cucumbers

We have a lot of sea cucumbers in the sea near us. My estimate is that most of the ones I see are about 5cm wide by 22cm long, but there are some really big ones too. One day the kids got a couple of these really big ones out of the sea and we looked at and held them. Afterwards they were returned to the sea and weren’t injured.

Here are some photos:
Two sea cucumbers on a log, me touching one of them.

Holding one:

Mirriam with a sea cucumber – and that’s Emily in the background, also touching it!

Broken Japanese bridge

There was a lot of rain and the rivers flooded and were flowing strong, so strong that they caused one of the new bridges that the Japanese built, to fall.

It didn’t completely collapse into the water. As you drive past, now going through the river, it doesn’t look like it is broken at all:

We had to walk along the bridge to see it properly. Here is the bit that broke:

Today, cars have to drive through the shallow water to go to the other side, but if you are going by foot and don’t want to get wet, this is the precarious way that you have to cross – on the edge of the concrete that is on a sloping angle down to the water.

Aussie tourists

The Aussie surf tour blokes had an afternoon free and wanted to see a bit of culture, so the local people put on a cultural dance with music. They had been preparing for an upcoming event, so it was handy that they already had something prepared up their sleeve.

It was happening at the next village along the beach from us, so a bunch of us walked over to watch too. It was just the weirdest thing having all these tourists here! It was quite the novelty to me, so I took photos of the tourists…

I also took photos and videos of the dances too, like a local tourist.

And here they are on their little boat heading back to the big boat. I love this photo – click on it to see it bigger – it just has so much in it, especially the traditional (canoes) and the modern (small boat and fancy big boat in the distance), with the ocean and Teop island as the backdrop.

Boat in harbour and Australia Day

It was a surprise one afternoon to come back to the village after a trip to the bush, and find a nice, white shiny boat in the harbour! It’s not often that there’s a boat anchored there.

It was a charter for surfer tourists. They stayed for a few days, travelled south and anchored again for a couple of nights on their way back north. I met the guys and the boat captain invited me over for dinner with them all on Australia Day. It was so amazing – who would have imagined that I would have an Australia Day BBQ with a bunch of Aussie blokes (and one woman, the captain’s wife) while out in the village! It was a great meal too – not your sausage and hamburger BBQ, rather steaks, fish and lobster tails!! Wasn’t the timing great!

It also looked really pretty at night with the boat lights reflecting on the sea. It’s hard to get a good photo at night, but I thought this one wasn’t too bad (taken from the beach).

Tiny island

Just behind Teop Island, there is a very small, uninhabited island. There’s not much there other than some trees and the rocky, coral ground.

The rough coral ground:

When the tide is low, it is possible to walk/wade there from Teop Island. Here are a series of photos showing the little island as we progressively got closer to it:

Finally, as we arrived at the island, we could look back and see Teop Island with the larger Bougainville island and mountains in the background. Nice view.

Travel to and from the village

Whenever I travel to or from the village, I get a ride on a truck or 4WD. Some 4WDs are utes with roll bars and canopies and some have no roll bars or canopies, and I feel less safe in them, but I don’t think the roll bar frames are going to do much to protect me if the car rolls anyway, as we don’t have seatbelts to hold us down! Other 4WDs are fully enclosed and have two sideways bench seats behind the driver. We call them a ’10 seater’. They are the most comfortable ride to the village.

The 4WDs all go quite fast, but we also have some bigger trucks, which are probably safer as they travel more slowly. There is one truck that we especially like travelling on as we trust the driver to be careful. This truck only travels to the Teop area and doesn’t go further south. It has the name ‘Green Fingers’ painted on the front, so that’s what we all refer to it as, or just ‘Green’ for short.

Here are a few photos of Green Fingers.
Front:

The view when sitting on the back of the truck:

We were lucky this day, there wasn’t many people travelling, so you can see quite a lot of empty space. Other times the truck is full and we’re all packed in really tight!