Look what I found at the store today....

Hmmmmm...... Should I use it????

Stuff...

Things are humming along here. Not too many exciting things happening lately. For this I am thankful. Although I have to admit that the exciting things make for great blog material.
We’ve been lending out one of our soccer balls lately. It was one Christiaan received for his birthday last year and was still in great shape. Note I used the word was. We lent the ball out last Friday to a girl who lives near Ice and she returned it the next day. Then a few days later some boys wanted to borrow it so I said okay, but don’t forget to return it! They didn’t return it that night. So later in the afternoon of the next day I kept my eye out for the ball and sure enough, I saw a boy with it. I ran up to the edge of the yard by our water tank and asked him why he didn’t return it. A group of boys came and they all pointed at a different boy and said, “Well, he’s the one that borrowed it!” Passing the blame... I told them that if they didn’t return the ball, I wouldn’t lend it out, but if they returned it, I would keep lending it out. So they returned it... It looks a little different than it used to. Soccer balls here, the cheaper ones anyways, are not sown, but the pieces are glued on... so now they’ve started falling off... I think the kids are using it as a basketball. So I’m thinking I might just replace the ball if it gets really wrecked but keep lending it out. Provided they keep returning it....
Someone told me the other day that when she lived here she was told by a close Indonesian friend that they don’t care that we have a lot but they don’t like it if we are possessed by our possessions. That really struck me.
Ice’s sister has been rather hard-headed. She is the one who was beat up by her husband – who had left her for a long time. He still would like to be married with her and have a relationship. She, in the meantime, has been carrying on another relationship. She wants to kawin (move in) with this guy. The head of their area, called an RT, did not agree with that plan and told her to think about her child and the fact that she is still legally married. So she responded by making her daughter move out of the house! She wanted to be free! I think she might be back now, but I’m not sure. Anyways, she has been fined 33 million rupiah for her actions as a married woman and she is supposed to pay this money to the relatives of her husband. Not sure where she’ll get that kind of money from. I think she also drinks a lot and spends a lot of her money on that. Ice said to me that she thinks Iblis (Satan) has a hold on her sister and that’s why she is being so hard headed. It is really hard to see someone who works hard and is smart, making such poor choices in her life. Please pray for Ice’s sister as her actions are having a negative impact on the entire community never mind her 11 year old daughter.
Today I was able to visit with one of the ladies of our church. She had a baby boy a week ago and they gave him the name “Mario”. I had never visited with Bebe (pronounced Baby) in her house before; we’ve talked at church and at church functions but never in their home. (It is not common to be invited to people’s houses to visit unless you are really close) Their daughter was the one who had the birthday party recently and they held the party in the home of her husband’s uncle, Pak Naftali. Bebe’s home is one they rent from the uncle and it is rather like a townhouse back home, except single storied and really tiny. It was nice to visit with her and talk with her. For us women, there’s nothing more we like to talk about than our birthing experiences... It sure breaks down any walls and just makes you the same. What makes me sad for the women here is the lack of education regarding child-birth and what happens afterwards. There are no prenatal classes here. In fact, the trend here is to do a c-section. Doctors here are always telling women that they need a c-section. It is so sad that they can’t trust the doctors. The financial gains are greater for a c-section so.... Bebe’s doctor told her that she needed to go in for a c-section because her amniotic fluid was low. She just waited for labour to start on its own and then proceeded to deliver normally. But most woman would have believed what the doctor (remember, a half step below God) said.

Where we live...

This is an aerial shot of where we live. I so helpfully labelled everything I circled only to discover that I should have just given everything a number.....

So the black line is our road except for the top inch or so of the line. I drew that to show you where we would leave the road to walk up to the falls. At the tip of the line we enter the "jungle" and you can't see the path from above.

Starting at the top of the line going down, the first circle on the right hand side of the road is our house. On the other side of the road is the youth Centre. The circle to the right of our house is approximately where Ice lives. The larger circle below and left a little is the pool. At the far left of the foto at the end of the red line is Ritha's house. The red line is the path I can walk to her house. There is a road but it starts farther down. The large circle near the bottom of the foto is the old ZGK compound where my Uncle Keith and Aunt Coby were dorm parents. Our church now meets there. The large square on the bottom right of the foto is the graveyard where Ritha's husband is buried.

On the far left of the foto, about half way up you can see a cluster of buildings. This is part of the complex where the International school is located. Even though it looks so close in the foto, you have to drive down our road until you reach the main road, turn right and then drive until you reach the school's road and then turn right again and drive up. There is no road across the valley, only a walking path.

Photo credits: Pieter VanDijk

This is our house up close... On the bottom left of our fence line (along which I so helpfully drew a black line) is our water tank for the public. The long building below our house is part of the Bible school. It is the old location of the International school that our kids attend. The house above ours and across the road to the left are the homes of other MAF'ers. The house above ours is a renovated quonset hut from WW2 and so is the house above it (only it's hidden by the trees). Above those houses are the guest houses of World Team.

Bits and Bites....

A friend of ours lives with the Korowai people, the infamous tree-dwellers. Last week our amphibious plane was finally back in action and able to deliver our friends canoe to his village. The river was a bit low but they were able to make a landing. This boat will make it easier for PJ to travel to other nearby villages.

This is my lady Ibu Sina (Seena). She comes about once a week and sells me bananas and pineapple. A while ago a relative died and she travelled back to her home village. She had to fly to Wamena first, take a taxi for a couple hours and then she had to walk for a day to reach her village. Incredible! She lives just down the road from us and works hard in her gardens on the mountain.

Bits and Bites....

* Yesterday we celebrated Christiaan's 9th birthday. We celebrated with a party at the pool. That morning we had given him his gifts and he was pretty pumped about the digital watch we gave him.

* About once a month a load of vegetables is sent from an interior village to an expat woman here in Sentani. She sends out an email and we all go to her house to buy. They grow nice white potatoes, sweet potatoes, green peppers, and celery in this village. It is too humid here in Sentani. The celery available here is called soup leaves and that's just what it is, leaves. The celery from the village doesn't come in big bunches of stalks, but individual sticks that are thinner than you would buy in Canada. Anyways, it was to this place I was going to buy celery with Brynnie on my motorbike. We weren't far down our road when suddenly there was in the middle of the road a rather inebriated fellow whose shirt was covered in blood. There was a friend on either side of him. I stopped, unsure of what to do when his friends motioned for me to go by. At the moment he looked up at me and said, "Orang Barat!" (Westerner!) and lunged at me. I gunned my motor but in the heat of the moment I forgot that I was in third gear so I didn't zip ahead as quickly as I would have liked, but it was fast enough to avoid the clutches of this man. Thankfully.... I just wanted to buy some celery....

* Last month a woman from our church had come to my door asking to borrow money because her husband was in another city far away attending the funeral of a brother and her son had been sick for a couple days and she wanted to take him to the doctor. She asked to borrow 300,000 rupiahs, which is for them quite a lot of money. I kind of thought it was a bit much for going to the doctor but I know that her husband is a trustworthy man and I wanted to help, so I gave her the money. (Normally we have a policy that we do not lend money) In retrospect she seemed rather nervous and anxious and didn't really listen to the advice I gave her regarding her son. She promised to pay the money back at the end of the month. Well, the end of the month was two weeks ago and I hadn't heard a thing from them. So yesterday I got up the guts to go to their house to talk with them about it. She wasn't home, thankfully. I told her husband about it and he replied that he did not know his wife had borrowed money and that he had told her before that she should not borrow from others. So maybe that was why she hadn't told him.... He was ready to pay me back the money right then and there but it is a lot of money for them so I told him that maybe he should discuss it with his wife and then maybe pay us back over 2 or 3 months. I felt really bad for him and I realized that I shouldn't lend that much money to people who don't work for me. Live and learn....

Bits and Bites....

* A friend and I have started having eachothers daughters over to play once a week giving eachother a little "free" time and the girls the opportunity to play together. Adinda has an older sister who is in school so she loves to play with Brynnie. This week they made necklaces and bracelets. So fun!

* Mikah LOVES papaya and there she is cutting up an enormous one that I bought the other day. It's growing on me. It really is a very healthy and very cheap fruit!

* Marc loves to play with playmobil!

* And there's Aidan doing homework and Christiaan reading the latest Garfield that he borrowed from the library today.

* It's been a regular week around here. Last week we had some "fun" when a person native to this country decided to come to our house and yell at us. I won't go into the gory details but suffice it to say we did nothing wrong and this was an incident of cultural "save face" and pass off the blame. Unfortunately this had to happen in front of the kids - one of them was involved and it was somewhat traumatic. But things have been dealt with and we've moved on. The biggest fun I've had this week so far is pumping up a ton of balls and bicycle tires and I'm really okay with that!

* Today Hugo flew along in our amphibious airplane as it is in the process of being returned to regular duties. I guess there was some avionics issue that the pilot wanted Hugo to check out in flight. The plane hasn't been operating for some time now so the pilot wanted to do a practice landing and take-off on water so they did so on lake Sentani. The tower operator from the airport wasn't quite sure she was hearing right when the pilot told her of his plans. As far as we know we operate the only amphibious float plane on the island!

More Bits and Bites....

Each year the entire high school goes to an interior village for two weeks. This is called OE (Outdoor Education). They usually go to a village where M's have been or are still working. They will break into teams and work on different projects. Then some of the teams will hike to other villages in the surrounding areas. This year they went to the village of Ibele which is located in the mountains near Wamena. While there the kids did various projects around the villages but the big focus was on health. An expat nurse saw over 600 villagers with various aches, pains, and illnesses. An expat dentist pulled many, many teeth thereby relieving many of pain. The students also did presentations regarding Aids awareness. It is an enormous problem in this province and especially in the villages as there is such a lack of knowledge regarding transmission etc... They also showed the Jesus film a number of times. The students also spent a night in a traditional honai (hut). This was a great honour to the people of the villages. This area has never had this many people come in just to help so it was a great witness to them. The students were also able to hear some of the stories from the first believers in the area about how their lives were before and then after.

Ice came to me the other day and told me that on the 13th of the month she would need some money, 200.000 rupiahs, as her cousin is getting married and needs to pay the marriage price. Actually, the cousin is just getting kawin (they move in together-it's much cheaper than getting married). Ice said that even her little brother who is 12 received an invitation meaning he also has to "donate" to the fund. He has no job! She asked her mom about this and her mom said this is the cultural tradition; that they will give money now to help their relatives and then later when Ice gets married this family will provide a pig for them....

Bits and Bites....

Yikes, it's been a few days since I last posted...
What has been happening?
*Good news, nearly all of our caravan aircraft are back in service! Yippee! Just our amphib aircraft is in the hangar. The guys are finishing off the installation of the loaner engine. It will be good to have that plane back serving the people and churches of the south coast.
*We've been having the odd power outage again lately. Not sure why. Last Monday I went to start our generator and had a bit of a freak accident. Occasionally the pull-cord jams and as one usually uses some force when pulling the cord, the cord flies out of your hand and usually hits something. One time it hit the side of the generator and broke in half. So now we had a half pull-thingy on our pull cable. So last Monday the cable jammed, pull-thingy flies out of my left hand and smacks the bone on the wrist on my right hand so hard that I no longer have feeling from the nail of my thumb down to my wrist on that hand. It's a rather odd "feeling" that will hopefully slowly go away....
* Marc came down with a fever on that fateful Monday and so I brought him to the clinic to make a slide and then brought the slide to the most accurate slide reader, an Indonesian woman who works for an NGO of a scientific genre. She works for a couple hours each afternoon, provided she comes in. She didn't come in that Monday so I did not have the results of the slide until Tuesday afternoon. Usually I know the first day that Marc has a fever and headache and I start the quinine that very day, but this time I started a whole day later. What a difference that made! Poor guy still isn't himself yet. Normally he bounces back after two days! Learned my lesson, go with my gut.
*Today I made a blood slide for Brynnie (I've learned how to do them myself now-so nursey of me eh?) and brought it to a pharmacy that we've had some success with in the past (lady who works for NGO of scientific genre doesn't work on weekends...) and at 6:00 they called to inform me that Brynnie also has malaria tropika. Quite possibly a mosquito bit Marc earlier in the week and then went on to bite Brynnie thus infecting her. (They share a room)
*Yesterday I actually let to little girls play in our yard. To this date I had not let neighbourhood kids play in our yard. I've seen what can happen once you start.... However, 2 little girls came to the door holding hands and asked if they could play. I asked them what they wanted to play. The immediately responded, "Bikes!!" We only have one bicycle suitable for them so I told them to share and if they were to fight they would have to leave. While playing, rather nicely I might add, they gained a bit of an audience at the fence of jealous kids... It's really hard to say no to them all, but for sanity and safety, I have to have limits...