Bits and Bites...

*Recently our Reformed Churches out here had a synod. The MAF float plane from Merauke (city in the south of Papua) picked up the delegates from all around that area. It took him about a day to pick up everyone. Had the plane not been available, it would have been very difficult for the pastors to make it to the meeting place. They would have to take boats and walk which would take forever. These meetings are so important as the villages are rather isolated from eachother that without them the pastors would have very little meaningful contact with each other.

*Good news, we have a phone again! We’ll never take that for granted again!

*Each day we have people coming to get water from our outside tap at the front of our house. I get a kick out of the kids as inevitably they check themselves out in the side mirror of the car. They check their teeth and then their hair or pull funny faces… so cute!

*The other day I went grocery shopping and I couldn’t find sugar anywhere. So finally at the one store I asked the woman who owns the place if they had any sugar. She whispers to me,” I have some but I’m not allowed to sell it. I can be arrested if I do. How much do you want?” I asked for 3 kilos and she had one of her workers put it in a black grocery bag and warned me not to say anything to Indonesians but I was free to tell all my friends about it. What’s up with that?? Who knows…Thankfully now there is sugar readily available in the stores again. But there is not an onion or margarine to be found anywhere… sigh…

*This past weekend we were helping a new Dutch family, the VanDijk’s, get settled in here in Sentani. We got to know them during our last few weeks in Bandung. Our kids are similar ages which is so much fun. We are their go-to couple here which means we have to show them the ropes like how to order ground beef, shopping at the market, which grocery stores to shop at, how to drive here, etc… It’s fun to look at everything through a new person's eyes and you realize how “normal” it has all become!

Road Work

So we’ve finally found out why our phone isn’t working. It seems our phone line was cut by the guys digging the ditches alongside our road. So there are others without phone on our road.

This morning as I was about to leave to do some shopping for a new family that is arriving tomorrow, a bunch of guys came in a dump truck. An MAF worker was with them. They were picking up a stack of metal trusses that had been sitting in our backyard. These were the trusses from the old church that used to be on this property. Anyways, these guys decided to use our kids swinging rope to tie down the trusses on the truck… without asking of course. I didn’t see them leave as I was already gone. But when we returned and the boys went outside to get their hammers that they had been playing with before… they were gone. At first I thought maybe a local kid had grabbed them but that isn’t realistic. Local kids don’t go in our back yard except in the evening when there’s a soccer game across the road and the kids are playing with balls themselves and there’s always one that goes in our yard and they need to get it. But they almost always ask permission to go get the ball. Anyways, Christiaan mentioned that he had left his hammer up in the tree fort and then I realized what had happened. Those guys had to go up the tree fort to get the rope! So this evening I smsed the head of MAF construction and told him that these guys had taken the rope and that we had two missing hammers. He immediately said that he would replace the hammers. I replied that I just really wanted there to be someone from MAF watching any non-MAF people who are in our yard. He called me and said that he had talked with the MAF guy, Harry, who had come with those other guys this morning and Harry told him that he had seen those guys put the hammers in their truck. So now I’m thinking, well, why didn’t he say anything??? Anyways, tomorrow Berry, MAF head of construction, is going to go to those guys and try to get our hammers back. I’m not sure what we should expect from all this. I feel bad making Berry replace the hammers. But I also feel that if they don’t get replaced it sends a bit of a wrong message like it’s okay to take stuff from the Feunekes’ because they won’t do anything about it…

I guess I’m getting a little sick of people always working in our back yard. A while back there were a few guys working, not MAF guys, painting the water tower. They painted for an hour or so and then they decided to wash their motorbikes in our backyard with our hose, and then wash themselves… and then they borrowed our ladder without asking and got paint all over it and then they left their paint brushed in turpentine laying on our back stoop right where Brynnie could get into them and she did and then they left empty paint cans lying around… And it seems like every morning there’s a vehicle at the gate and I have to go to the door in my pajamas and give someone the key so they can get in… Its HOLIDAYS!!! I don’t want to get up early!!!! (Except to play hockey…) Okay, I guess I’ve complained enough… It wasn’t really bothering me much before but the whole hammer thing was the straw that broke the camels back…
This is the current state of our road right now. You can see the little “cliff”. To the left is someone’s front yard. Those barrels are being used to heat up tar. It’ll sure be nice once their done! It’s amazing, most of the work is being done by hand! The only machine they have is a big roller thing to flatten the road.

Cooling Off

Still no phone… sigh…
This is the pool and the view from the picnic tables at the pool. That mountain is nearly in our backyard!
What a great way to finish off a hot sweaty day!

Bits & Bites

Bits and Bites…
*Still no phone… (-:
*Yesterday our church celebrated its fifth anniversary and the 53rd birthday of our pastor. They had an enormous sheet cake made for the event and after the service we all sang and had cake and chatted. I think these events are great times for church-bonding.
*Yesterday a little pipsqueak of a kid came up to the door and asked if he could get some water so we said sure. Then when he came to say thank-you he was kind of looking around and was acting rather suspiciously so when he started to walk away Hugo went to the door to see what he was up to. The little guy decided that he would try to get himself a new pair of flip flops and was walking away wearing one of Marc’s and one of Christiaan’s sandals. What a stinker!
*There are guys working furiously on our road. I’ll try to get some pictures this week. They are digging enormous ditches along side the road and then lining them with concrete and stone walls. There are other guys who’ve begun to fill the holes in the road with gravel and sand and tar. It looks like they are widening the road a bit too. However, further to the top, closer to our house, they are still at the digging the ditches stage and of course you have to put all that dirt somewhere… They’ve just piled it on the road making the road there even narrower than it was. There is one spot in particular where the road is just barely wide enough for one vehicle to drive. If you were to drift a little too far to the side of the road that doesn’t have the dirt pile, you would find yourself falling of a little cliff into someone’s front yard. I know, I really need to get a photo of this for you as it is really hard to describe accurately. Let’s just say I breath a sigh of relief each time I have successfully negotiated that section of road…
*We took a visiting family to the beach on Saturday. We started off with a flat tire before we’d even left. So we departed an hour later than planned but the spare was on the van and the flat had been fixed. You do not want to have a flat tire and no spare when you are at the beach.
*You know how back home you need to store playdoh in a sealed container or bag? Well, we need to do the same here but not because it will dry out, it will become a glob of mush if we don’t. There’s that much moisture in the air here!
*There is no telephone operator here in Papua. So no possibility of collect calls…
*We have one street light in town. It is located on the main drag where it meets up with another fairly busy shopping road. This road only meets the main road, it doesn’t intersect it. The lights on the main road are your standard red, yellow, green. The lights for the other road are only red and green. The hilarious thing is that the lights change simultaneously. There’s no yellow light warning to clear the intersection before allowing the other direction of traffic through… no, just say a little prayer, maybe honk your horn, and off you go!
*I gotta tell you, the rice cooker is a wonderful invention. Put the rice and water in and press go and you don’t have to worry about a thing… except the power going off before the little lever goes from cook to warm…

A silly little blog to post…

Still no phone… sigh… and no sign of when it will happen either… (-:

People here go through a lot of matches and people love things that are imported or considered export quality. This goes for everything, including matches:
These matches might be made as Sweden, but man, they suck! I can’t tell you how often the flaming heads break off after you swipe them or they don’t even light or a piece of the head flies off or the stick breaks in half as you are swiping it and the head still lights or doesn’t…. really not very safety at all….

You’re wondering, why is she lighting so many matches? Has she picked up a nasty smoking habit? Cigarettes are only .50 cents a pack after all…

No, one of the burners on my gas stove, one I use rather frequently of course, refuses to light with the little button so I have to light it the old fashioned way.

Due to the sudden disappearance of the dial tone on our phone last Saturday, I haven’t been able to post any blogs of late. So I’ve had to call on my good buddy Pearl to help me out. (yes we can still email as that is done through MAF’s LAN but because of the restrictions on internet access through the LAN I can’t post to or read or comment on blogspot blogs.)

Here is a blog I had written last Sunday:

Today I actually had a conversation with our pastor’s wife. She is currently pregnant with their 5th child together. He was previously married to her older sister and had five children with her before her sudden death. Anyways, I don’t even know her name I just call her “Ibu” out of respect. She is a very difficult person to talk with. She speaks very quietly and doesn’t really seem to have any sort of interests that you could talk about. I brought her a banana loaf a few weeks ago and we just stood at her door talking for a little bit - or I should say, she was answering my questions. There was no, “Would you like to come in for a coffee or tea?” However today she talked. I guess the language of pregnancy, pain, delivery etc... is inter-cultural. I asked her if she knew where she wanted to deliver the baby (she is seven months along). She didn’t know. She went on to tell me that the first three kids were delivered at home by midwife but the last two she delivered herself. With the second-last one she even cut the cord herself and with the last one her husband cut the cord. She said that they were born at night and at night there are no taxis and the only way for her to get to the local government clinic would be to walk - so they were just born at home. At that time they also did not have a cell phone to call a midwife. Now they do. However, if she had to get to a hospital in the night she’d have to go on the back of a motorcycle… I don’t even want to imagine doing that while in labour…

This One's For You Pete...

I'm a titch late with this post...

Last Sunday we had a farewell party for the deHaan family who is repatriating. Most likely to Canada. So of course there were speeches, thankfully only two, and there was some singing, very nice, and then food and then the requisit photo's were taken. We sure will miss them here in Sentani. Our kids especially as they often went to eachothers houses after church...

In the first photo of the group singing, you can see a younger girl at the front. This girl was adopted by the Naphtali family from our church when she was just little. She was very sick when the Naphtali family found her. They had gone back to their hometown and saw this little girl (I think she was the child of family members). She was near death and her family was not taking care of her. I'm not sure if they knew that she was mentally handicapped or if her being so sick caused that. What often happens here, especially in the villages interior, is when a handicapped child is born they will just let the child die. It's very sad, but the reality is that they just don't know how to help them or what to do with them. The Naphtali family took this girl home and nursed her back to health and she considers them her parents. She is actually talking now, I'm not sure how much. I wonder what the future holds for her especially if Mr. and Mrs. Naphtali were to pass away.

The other day I took Ritha and Mikah to the dentist. The Dentist has his office in a complex from one of the missions and it is located on a hill. The mission built a water tower that you can climb and at the top is a picnic table with a roof overhead. So of course the other kids and I climbed to the top and I took some photos of Sentani from up high. On the first photo you can see the runway and Lake Sentani beyond that. The large building in the middle of the photo is the new mall. As you can see it is by far the largest building in the city. What you see on the two photos is nearly the entire city. We live on a hill that is parallel to the one that I took the photos on and so it is not on the photo.

I started taking photos of the kids but after two of them my battery ran out. But I thought these three pics turned out quite nice...

More Pictures...

The other day after supper I was fooling around with the kids and taking goofy photos and this was the result...

I think Aidan and Mikah are trying to show the empty tooth spots in their mouths... or something....

The last photo is of our friend Sisi. She would be horrified to know that I posted a photo of her on my blogsite... sorry Sisi... Sisi is working as a Caravan Mechanic for MAF. She has been accepted by MAF to go for her official training and get her license. Once sponsorship is obtained she will apply at a Bible College in Australia and go there to study. Currently there is only one licensed national mechanic in the hangar here. There are guys with loads of experience but unwilling to take the step to being responsible for signing off on the maintenance. This is quite a typical issue here. The other problem is that because the education system here is learning by rote, many have issues with trouble-shooting problems. They just can't do it. Sisi is different. She is very smart and will make an excellent mechanic.

Today we had four men from New Heights church in Vancouver, Washington over for supper. They are part of a team of seven men here to do some electrical work that is badly needed in the MAF complex and hooking up the new generator.

The kids were done school last Thursday and are already having some trouble keeping entertained... It doesn't help that all of our immediate neighbours, their playmates, have gone home for the summer. It's awfully quiet around our area these days.

But there is a little bonus, because our neighbours are gone for the summer, we can use their barbeque!!! Yippee!!! (Totally wishing we had packed one in our crate from Canada...)

Pictorial Update....

Photo #1 - Me taping up my hockey stick (I know, on the bed!! but I store my stick in my bedroom closet...) with my new hockey tape from Canada!!

Photo #2 - Ritha and Rode with Marc and Brynne on the tree house

Photo #3 - Aidan and Christiaan with their paper mache art - Aidan's is an alien pirate (??) and Christiaan's is Yoda

Photo #4 - the first bottle of No Name Ranch dressing we've had in our hands in nearly two years thanks to Joanne Vandermooren, neice of the Togeretz's - we are very excited about this...

Photo #5 - A butterfly that Aidan caught on his field trip to a local stream

Photo #6 - A cake that Ritha made Hugo and I for our 11th anniversary which we celebrated yesterday. Considering that she probably had to buy most of the ingredients especially to make it and she had to buy kerosene for her little stove, this is a big gift from Ritha. I was really quite moved by her generosity and thoughtfulness.

I have to correct something I wrote in my previous post. GKI actually stands for Gereja (church) Kristen Injili (Evangelical).