Sweet pawpaw

The pawpaws in the coastal parts of PNG are wonderful. They are really sweet and juicy and vary in size, from small to HUGE! When I visited Australia at Christmas and saw the pawpaws for sale at the shops, I was shocked at how small they are – even the smallest ones here are bigger than most of the pawpaws I saw in Australia!

The pawpaw that I’m showing you in this picture is not what we would call a really big one, it’s probably about medium size. It looks a bit green on the outside, but there is some yellow on the skin which indicates that it is fully ripe and ready to eat.

Watching DVDs in the village

I got a portable DVD player for Christmas, so that when I’m in the village, I can watch DVDs that my parents send me. I just need to charge it with electricity when I’m in Buka and its battery will last for about four hours in the village. Sometimes we get a group of people from the village who come and watch it with us – not too big a crowd as the screen is pretty small.

This is our little DVD viewing set-up. We have to rearrange the furniture a little so that we can all see. There’s not many people yet as we haven’t started the DVD.

Scenes from my flight to Buka

I’m back in Buka now and off to the village tomorrow for two weeks. We flew from Lae to Buka on Monday, via Rabaul. I was at the window seat on the flight from Lae to Rabaul, so here are some photos that I took.

Lae

Islands and reefs

Thank you Air Niugini!

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).