Our friendly village dogs again

I’ve talked about our village dogs before, but they are so cool that I want to talk about them again.

We decided to give them wash and a flea treatment, and it was quite the scene! We put a collar and lead on the dogs, which was totally foreign to them, so they didn’t like that and they also didn’t like getting the cold well water poured over them! Sasaki was the hardest to handle as the collar was too big for him and he is the most vocal dog I’ve ever seen, so he let the whole world know that he wasn’t happy about having a bath!

Here are some photos of Sasaki. He is a fairly young dog and has a cool personality. He has a blue tongue.

The other dog in our village is Bill. He is getting old and the people in the village seem to like Sasaki better than him. He is the dominant dog, and if we’re patting Sasaki, Bill will get jealous and start a fight. However, Bill seems to have decided that he belongs to Rebekah and me! He has accompanied us when we’ve gone for a long walk to another village and a few times he has escorted me to our shower room, waited outside and then walked back with me after my shower.

Here are some photos of Bill.
Going for a walk with us:

Washing clothes

Twice a week I hand-wash my clothes in the village. Hand-washing is probably my least favourite thing about being in the village, so I’m glad it’s just me that I have to do it for! If I had to wash clothes for a husband and kids, it would be a much bigger job. It takes enough time as it is just to wash my own clothes.

In this photo, I have just started rinsing the soap out of my clothes. The water is clear because I’m on the first item. By the time I get to the last items, all the soap is in the water and I don’t know how effective my rinsing is.

Here I am wringing as much water out as I can.

Ice cream in the village

Ice cream doesn’t really excite me that much, but it was still pretty exciting to have ice cream at the local trade store for five days in a row. I wonder if the owners will continue to bring it in, it certainly sold well!

The trade store has some freezers and a generator which goes on and off during the day. When it’s on, we have a bit of ‘noise pollution’ in our village, and it is often in the background of the recordings we do for language learning.

Here’s me enjoying my ice cream.

Joyce enjoying the ice cream that we bought her.

Forever packing

Packing is something that is just a part of my life now. If I go to the village, I have to pack; if I return to Buka, I have to pack.

In the village, our bedroom is too small to spread out and do any packing in, so the night before we go to Buka, we take over what would be the living room if it had couches in it. It’s just a big open room which the bedrooms are adjoined to. During our village stay, our food and cooking items are stored in a corner of the large open area.

We don’t completely pack up everything that we have in the village every time we leave, so that makes it a bit easier, but it involves looking at everything and deciding if it is staying or coming with me, so I need to spread out and put things in their separate bundles.

In these two photos you can see how much we spread out in the large room. It’s not a problem really as nobody ever spends any time in there, so we’re not getting in anyone’s way (except for when they want to get something from a bedroom and have to negotiate our obstacle course!).

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!