Bits and Bites...

*Today is Hugo’s 35th (yikes!) birthday. I’m ashamed to say that I have no early morning photos of us all with bed head and wearing pajamas, presenting Hugo with his gifts… We gave him a new leather wallet and a coffee maker. You can actually get some very nice coffee that is grown and processed locallu.
*Coincidentally, today we had a little party for the last day of preschool. We went to the Papua Trade Centre which is a 45 minute drive away (what we don’t do for fun around here…) and the kids got to play on this enormous bouncy castle and a separate bouncy slide. I have never ever seen a bouncy castle this big. Well, it wasn’t actually shaped like a castle but it had all kinds of things like little slides in it. Hard to explain and forgot my camera, hopefully someone else can give me photos… This bouncy business was conveniently located extremely close to the new pizza place. Upon our arrival at PTC we immediately inquired if they had ingredients to make pizza. (never ever assume that they do as all their stuff comes in by plane…) And they did! So, in honour of Hugo’s birthday and Marc completing a year of preschool (he’ll have to do another one as he doesn’t turn 5 until Dec 1 and the cutoff is Oct 15th) we had pizza for supper and it was delicioso!! What a treat! A rather pricey treat, but who cares!!
*Today was also a big day for our MAF program here. Today we celebrated 5 years, 21,000 hours, of accident-free flying!! We know that it is all from God’s hand. So we had a celebratory lunch at a local restaurant which was a big hit with the national workers especially, of course.
*MAF has been appealing to the government of Myanmar to let us bring in a couple planes but up until now all our requests have been denied. There is an MAF guy that is actually in the country right now working on this. We have an amphibious plane in Bangladesh that is in the process of going through a regular inspection and they are working as hard as they can to get it completed so that if the government changes its mind, they can be ready to go in. We also have an amphibious plane here that we have offered as well, but because of the length of time it is taking to get approval it is doubtful we will be able to bring it there as it too is nearly due for inspection.
*The locals around here, especially the kids, like to give nick names to the westerners that live around here. One couple is called Mr. and Mrs. Ronson. Ronson being the name of their dog… We are called Orang (people) Barat (West) Gereja (Church). They called all white people Orang Barat around here. In Bandung we were all called Orang (people) buleh (white). We are called the Western People of the Church because our house sits on the site where there was previously a chapel.