Notes on Life in Sentani...

The first photo is Marc with the train track that he created. He almost always makes straight tracks... I guess he's just a straight up kind of guy... And he insisted on wearing his motorcycle helmet for the picture.

The second photo shows how Aidan was attired at supper yesterday. One of the first things he does when he comes home from school is take off his shirt. Today, however, he didn't as yesterday he got eaten alive by mosquitoes after playing outside in the trees without a shirt on. He is proudly displaying the genuine "plastic/gold" medal he received from his teacher after reading all three stories in his Sing Spell Read and Write story book. (I'm not sure how much he actually read and how much was simply memorized...)

And the third shot is a completely gratuitous photo of our little cutie... How could I resist posting this one?

The fourth shot is of Christiaan's watch. It's HUGE. But he loves it because it tells him the day of the week, the date, it has a stopwatch and a light and you can turn the dial and oh yeah, it tells time too... So coooollll!!! He bought it for 40,000 rupiahs with his allowance.

So life here has settled into a routine of sorts. Everyother day we go without power for fairly long stretches. Apparently it's going to be like this for a while. This is in spite of the six new generators that the city installed recently. I think they must be running out of fuel...

For the past three days the area my helper lives in has had no running water. No one seems to know why but the result is that we have a lot of people, mostly kids, coming to the door asking if they can fill their jugs at our outside spigot. As our tap water is actually drinkable, we are the prime location for people to get water.

One of the first projects that Hugo is diving into in his new role as Avionics manager, is to clean up the radio shop. There just hasn't been time for the other two guys to even think about doing this and therefore it hasn't been done in many, many years and Hugo is really eager to have some real space to work with. He hardly has room to put his tools. Today he came across a wack of old passport size black and white photos. Back in the day, everyone who had an HF radio had to send a photo to the government. I already found a couple old pics of people we know. Plan to post them at a later date once I've been able to find some more.

I asked one of the little girls who hangs around here how her friend who got bitten on saturday was doing and she is doing well. She needed 8 stitches, some of them on the inner layer of skin.

I guess that's about all the interesting news from here! Hope all's well on your end!