Episode 3 - the Bakar Batu

One of the highlights of our trip was being able to see a "bakar batu" (burning rocks) up close. We had heard that this event was going to occur at a church near where we were staying so that morning we wandered down to find out what time etc... Some said 9:00 am, others, obviously more in the know, said about 2:00 in the afternoon. So in the late morning we saw the smoke from the fire heating the rocks. The rocks are ready when all the wood is burned. In the meantime, the women go to their gardens and gather lots of vegetables - green leafy stuff, ferns (yes, the really enjoy ferns there), corn, and sweet potatos. I saw some ladies washing their veggies in a nearby stream.

A pig flu had made its way through the valley and so there were only four little pigs available for this event. To make up for the lack of pig meat, the people had ordered frozen chickens from Wamena (a city about 1.5 hours drive away, provided the road isn't washed out by a landslide...). Unfortunately, the people have no experience with frozen chicken and didn't realize just how frozen it gets. They had not taken it out to thaw hours earlier. So they got busy cutting the chicken in half and then soaking it in water and laying it out on leaves to thaw in the sun.

Then the rocks were ready and they took them out of the fire pit with split sticks and dropped them into the holes that already had banana leaves and veggies in them. Then the chicken and on top of that the pig and then more veggies.
In the meantime, the guys were shooting the breeze with some of the locals... One guy spoke a bit of English and enjoyed talking with Dad.

Hugo got to meet some of the church leaders. They told us that the Dutch missionaries came in the 1950's. Some of them still wanted their kids to learn Dutch and some could still remember some words of Dutch.


Meanwhile the food was cooking under that hill. Normally it is done in 30-40 minutes but because the chicken was kind of frozen, they cooked it for an hour and then the ladies got in there and took all the food out. Most of it was laid on banana leaves.

We were then presented with banana leaves of veggies. I tried a tiny bit of the green leafy stuff. Kind of tasted like it had sand on it.
Then they handed out the sweet potatoes and corn. The corn was rather chewy. They don't have good crisp sweet corn like back in Canada... By this time, the whole process had taken hours, we were getting rather crisped from the sun and it was getting late and as I needed to cook dinner on a wood stove and needed about an hour to get the stove warm enough for cooking. So we said our thanks and left. They really wanted us to stay and have some meat but we did not feel good about taking meat when we get to eat meat all the time and these folks hardly ever get to enjoy it. Not only that, my back was killing me from sitting on that log...
So that was our first bakar batu experience! I actually hope I get to have more! It's a great social event!

Episode 2

We entertained ourselves with things like puzzles....

and board games and reading some of the many, many books they have there along with magazines from the 1970's and on!
This is what we cooked on... and sat by when we were cold...

I felt a little like Laura Ingalls Wilder, minus the long skirt and apron.... and the braids too I guess...
This is the main drag of Bokindini. A number of abandoned buildings and quite a few houses and kiosks. Most with cute gardens. The people native to the mountains of Papua are known for their gardening skills.
a couple kiosks including one selling clothes.

This is how we showered. We heated up water on the wood stove and then hauled it to the bathroom. Okay, there were cold water taps in the bathroom and at the end of the day, if there had been sun, there was some solar heated water... You lower the bucket, fill it, and then raise it again. Then you stand under it and turn the "shower head" and you have a nice warm shower for about 4-5 minutes.

We had a couple men from a nearby village helping us out with boiling rain water to drink, getting the fire in the wood stove going in the morning, keeping us stocked with wood for the stove and doing dishes. One of them had a rather hilarious t-shirt... They were really very sweet men...

Home again!

Ahhh, back in muggy Sentani again... I am finally now able to write a blog about our adventures interior. (we haven't had internet for a couple days...) I think our adventures will have to be broken down into episodes as there are just too many photos to upload...

We took two of these planes to go there as all our bigger planes were in the shop...

We saw a lot of this on the way...
Then, finally, the landing strip in Bokindini

After just over an hour flight we arrived.

This is the house we stayed in. It is actually a dorm and was used this last semester by Eduventure and Netaikan to house American and Papuan college girls. (more on that later...)

It is Friday and I am now finally able to make another post. It has been busy, yes, but the internet has been terribly ponderous so I am just now able to post again. I strongly dislike it when Facebook doesn't load right.... grrrr....

Right away on Wednesday my father-n-law was able to go along on a couple flights for the morning. He got to see first-hand the kind of work MAF does here. He even saw a medevac. His pilot nearly had to take the patient but another plane from a different base came in and took her.

Now we are busily planning our trip to the interior next week. We plan to stay in a dormitory at the village of Bokindini. So we will be up in the mountains over Christmas, hopefully sipping hot chocolate by the fire... :-) It is a lot of work to prepare as there aren't really any stores there. And as it is Christmas, there may not be much of a market either as people will be preparing for pig feasts. We're hoping to get to see a pig feast up close.

But first, tomorrow we plan to go to the beach!!! Always a fun time!!

Visitors!!

This morning at 9:10, Hugo's parents arrived! We are soooo excited to have visitors!! The kids are also very excited to see their Opa and Oma again. Of course Brynnie has no idea who these people are and why she should be excited, but she was anyways. Normally at the airport you have to wait outside the baggage claim area to meet people. I asked very nicely if I could go inside with the kids to meet their Opa and Oma. The woman guarding the door let me in! Whoo hoo!! Hugo had a special pass which allowed him to meet his parents right at the bottom of the stairs out of the plane....
The kids have their last day of school on Friday and then four weeks of holidays...

Christmas party...

That's my girl Sisi as MC.

Ibu Linda stirring the soup...

Can I just say first how much I dislike trying to organize photos on blogger??? How do people get their photos lined up so nicely and with nice little borders around them???

Anyways, last Friday we had the annual MAF Christmas party. It is held in the hangar and they hang up big tarps, blue and orange ones - pretty- to "hide" the machinery around and then hang up some squiggly balloons and some other fancy decorations. They invited everyone to come at 5:30 but the intended start time was 6:00. This is important to do as we live on jam (time) karet (rubber) here...

We sang and we watched a few video clips and there were a couple speeches and a devotional and then all the kids received a Samaratan's purse box. The boxes were actually leftovers from two years ago. The organizing ladies had to remove all the melted candy first...

Then we all ate together. We scooped the rice out of a large cooler using dinner plates as scoopers. There were chicken pieces (here they just chop up whole chickens there's never just drums and breasts...) beans with pieces of beef in it, and chicken soup and krupuk. It was a very meaty meal and probably the only real meaty meal some of the national workers will eat all year. Then we all went home and bathed our kids as they got just filthy from playing at the back of the hangar all evening... sigh...

On Friday morning, Christiaan's class along with another grade did the all-school chapel and that's a photo of him with his teacher and some of his classmates.

I've seen others do a bit of a photo diary and I thought that might be a fun thing to do. Of course if I had to make note of every event in the day it would be a rather cumbersome post... So I thought I'd pick just some things....

This morning, while listening to this....

I made these...

and these...

and these...

while Marc and Brynne enjoyed a freezie on the front porch...

Then a guy asked to borrow the pump to pump up his wheelbarrow tire...

Played a game with Brynnie... I WON, I WON!!!... okay, I know, she's only three....

Then the bigger kids came home from school and Mikah and I goofed off and made some sweet pics.... I know, she does this creepy thing with her eyes... I think that's from her fathers side of the family....

THE END....

Bits and Bites....

Yikes, it's been a while since I last posted...
*In spite of the fact that we are quickly approaching Christmas, the weather here has been overall really rather warm and humid. What's new??? The kids keep talking about snow. Mikah was dreaming that it would snow for the first time ever in Papua and they would have fun playing in it. I reminded her that the average temperature here is 30 C and in order for snow to be able to fall, the temperature needs to be an awful lot closer to 0...
*Back home when one decorates ones house it doesn't really mean anything particular aside from the fact that you like to decorate your house. When you decorate your house here with lights and greenery etc... you are showing that you are a Christian. Because those of our cousin faith just don't "do" Christmas.
*Today was the Muslim holiday of Idul Adha. This is the day where they celebrate the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Ishmael (yes, they believe that it was Ishmael, not Isaac). Many animals are slaughtered and the meat is shared with the poor and rich alike. Unlike in Bandung, we didn't get to see any of this first-hand. I just enjoyed a super quiet drive to hockey this morning. And unlike in Bandung, we weren't subjected to the all-night calling of the m*sques. We are blessed to live up on a hill where there are no such buildings and if the locals have their way, will never ever be such buildings. We can hear the calling, it's just not loud... thankfully....
*We have been discussing the possibility of putting in a water tank near our fence with a spout poking through the fence so that people can come and get water whenever they like, as long as there is water in the tank. I mentioned this to Ice and the next day she told me that her mom has a tank that she has never used and would probably want to sell. I told her that I would tell Hugo. The next day Ice had a couple guys bring the tank over and clean it without telling me.... Her mom keeps coming and asking if we've made our decision yet... So I asked her if she needed some money or something... Yes, she would like to visit her dad in Wamena. She hasn't seen him since 1994. I asked her how old he is, she wasn't sure, something like 80... Seeing as she herself has no idea of how old she is... Anyways, she has the money to get to Wamena, but not to get home. We like the idea of a tank as then folks don't have to enter our yard and ask permission and if someone leaves the tap on, just what's in the tank gets wasted. We talked with the base manager and he volunteered some national workers to do the installing. We just have to pay for the materials.

Marc's Five!!!

It seems like just a heartbeat ago, but it was five years ago that I called my neighbour (we were living here in Papua then) and said, "I think it's time." And off we went to the Catholic hospital about 20 minutes away, I made her drive - I didn't trust Hugo to drive safely at a time like that (it was already dark outside). An hour and a half after our arrival, Marc made his arrival. A few hours later we were on our way home. It was an adventure we'll never forget!

He was quite excited to turn five. He told me that he felt bigger right away. Naturally, he was totally thrilled with his new bike.

Yesterday was also Papua's "birthday". Up here on the hill there was a pig feast but it was not about Papua's birthday, but it was a ceremony to open Christmas. I wanted to go and take photos but the event started much later than scheduled (what a shock...) and then it began to rain really hard.

In town the main street was blocked off by those attending the festivities by the burial site of the leader of the Fre* Papua M*vement. Earlier in the morning I passed by the fire station (with it's circa 1950's fire trucks that are more ornamental than anything) and I observed that they were readying a large riot truck with guns mounted on the top. The sight of that confirmed my earlier thoughts of not going to the post office downtown later that day.... Apparently at one point they did raise the forbidden flag of Papua... I haven't heard anything about any violence or the like so far. Thankfully...