Family Conference!!

After being in Sentani for a mere week, we "jetted" off to the interior village of Pyramid for our annual MAF family conference.

This is the plane that took us for the 40 minute flight from Sentani to Wamena. It's a bit of a scary plane...

The airstrip in view as we come into land.

Then we waited for our 10 minute flight to Pyramid with the new MAF kodiak. This plane is really nice but does provide a rather bumpy ride... Gravol all around...

Once we arrived we settled into our luxurious accomodations... cabins with very thin walls containing beds made by hand and probably no level and mattresses stamped with dates like 1958... I left our mattress out in the sun for a few hours in the hopes that would kill some of the dust mites... I think it helped.

The "lodge" where we ate our meals and had our meetings.

The old church building where VBS was held.

Each year a team from New Heights Church in Vancouver, Washington comes to help us with our conference. They run programs for all the age groups of kids and Pastor Matt Hannan teaches us twice a day. This year he taught us from the book of 2 Corinthians. Good stuff! There is also a team of cooks that volunteers to cook for us for the week (on two large wood stoves!). They are assisted by a great team of locals.

The kids had a great time playing with the other kids and participating in the programs.

One night we were the privileged family to sit in the family fun box seating (located on the "stage"...). For this honour we also received water bottles and bags of Skittles!

Brynne and her friend Hanne.
This is how we had hot water for our showers each day...

A traditional shelter where the high school group had their gatherings.

One afternoon my friend Anja and I took a little walk and this was our view as we sat on the side of the road. Then along came a pig, he visited for a bit. There were overloaded pick-ups passing us by and every now and then a local person would wander by. The women with their colourful skirts and nokens hanging off their foreheads down their backs. They were quite curious about us but didn't ask us what we were doing sitting on the side of the road. They just giggled... Many of the people there speak little or no Indonesian.
To be continued....