Recent Happenings

Since Josh has been back from the village, life seems like it's going faster than ever before! Here's a quick run down with some photos of what I actually took pictures of. 1. Grade 6 All School Chapel- Each month our entire school (K-12) comes together for a time of worship. It is normally led by a class from the elementary or middle school. This was our time. We had been practicing our songs since the first day of the second semester. We had a live band (a first for them), they wrote their own scripts, they memorized verses, and much more. The theme was related to what we've been talking about in our Bible class- When there is encounter with the Holy Spirit, Change happens. They shared parts of Paul's and Peter's lives and wrote a modern day story about a group of mean girls who meet Holy Spirit at a youth retreat. All in all, it was fantastic! God was lifted high. I am SO proud of them. 2. Easter weekend- Hallelujiah, He is Risen!! Josh and I both had a long weekend. We spent the weekend with friends. Saturday morning we got word the two local soccer teams were having a game. What a unique cultural experience! The scenery around the stadium was amazing. They even had chants and hooligans. :)

Sunday after church, we hid the eggs for a group of "nieces and nephews". In Papua, our friends' kids call us Uncle Josh and Aunt Amber. They had a blast finding the eggs, and I think they had even more fun ripping into the candy inside them!

After we left our egg hunt, we went on a spontaneous motorcycle ride to a place dubbed by local expats as "The Cross". The Cross is on a hill that overlooks part of Lake Sentani. Most people go at sunset and take photos. We ran into some of our friends flying RC planes and taking photos.

3. Harrington Hostel is now open! This past week our friends, Chase and Kelli (see previous post for more info on their work here) had a building team from America come to help them work on their village home. They came back to town on Friday. It's a long standing tradition to go to the local pizza place when they return from the village. We had a guest from the group stay two nights with us. Saturday we went to the beach and hosted a bbq. Josh is gettin' good at grillin' chicken, y'all! Sunday night we had another friend stay with us. We had a great time with our friends. It was so encouraging to feel connected to the body, and to for just a second catch a glimpse of how cool our roles as support workers really is! We have been busy, tired, but so thankful for the opportunities to serve! :)

Fufukanay

*Disclaimer* All Yetfa words are probably misspelled. Sorry Chase:)


The Reynolds Family on our way to Bias

Fufukanay is the greeting in the Yetfa language in Papua, Indonesia. I just got back from spending a week with the Yetfa people helping a Wycliffe Bible Translator friend put in a foundation for his new house. The Reynolds arrived in Indonesia about the same time that Amber and I did in 2008. They have already started the work of learning the Yetfa language so that they can translate the Bible. The Reynolds and I flew into Bias on a Tuesday and got to work on putting in the foundation for their house. Next week there is a work crew coming from the United States that is going to start framing their house. We had one week to get the foundation ready for them.


Before we started setting the foundation posts.

My dad is a general contractor that builds small homes, so I have been a part of foundation work in the past. I am used to backhoes, cement trucks and a steady stream of supplies from the local lumber company and hardware store. The jungle had our wood, the river had our rock and gravel and we brought the cement. We got to work right after we landed the first afternoon and cleared a burned out ironwood tree that was laying across the footprint of their future house. We took some machetes to a few stubborn bushes, laid out the locations of our posts and were all set up for the real work to begin the next day.

Awa Wamea


Pak Sion



Pak Yos, Chase, Pak Sion, Awa Wamea

Chase and I had some help from the local people the first day. Pak Yos (the pastor at Bias), Pak Sion (Chase's main language helper), Pak Yeri (cool dude), Awa Wame (the chief). We started digging holes big enough for our posts. I quickly realized that about 5 inches below the topsoil was the purest clay that I have ever seen in the ground. I also found out that the hard clay quickly turned into the consistency of a Wendy's Frosty once a wandering thunderstorm found Bias and hosed us down. The sun is intense here on the equator so we all welcomed the tropical deluges. The only other relief to the heat was a dunk in the river that runs past the village. I don't know how the water stayed so cold, but it was so good that it brought about spiritual analogies that wouldn't make sense unless you had been elbows deep in the mud all day under the intense sun.



Out Bird Hunting with Pak Sion

After three days of digging and setting posts, we ran out of material. The wood cutter didn't cut enough posts, there wasn't enough rock and the sand was still on the bottom of the river. Fortunately, we ran out of supplies about an hour before sundown which gave us enough time to go down to the river. Saturday is a declared day off in the Reynolds' household and my back and shoulders couldn't agree more. We walked around the village and Pak Sion took us up to his garden house. Chase and Sion took their pellet guns and we tried to do a little bird hunting. We never did get a bird but we got to walk around the jungle for a couple hours.

We went to church on Sunday and Chase let the people know that we needed some help getting rock and sand to finish the foundation. That afternoon we dug some more holes and got everything set up for the big push on Monday.


Monday's work crew

Monday morning we woke up to pouring down rain and Chase went out to dig some more holes. There were 64 posts in all, so we still had some digging to do. I went out and joined Chase once the rain let up around 7:30 and the rest of the village started showing up. Women went down to the river and started bringing up rocks and sand. The men went to the other side of the river and started bringing out the wood the wood cutter had prepared. The river was flooded but there was still about a 15ft clay wall on both sides. Those iron wood foundation posts weighed from 100 to 150lbs and the men were able to scale that 15ft wall of slippery clay with ease. As they neared the top of the hill they would all hoot together in unison. I tried doing it a couple times, only to get a couple odd looks. Apparently the hooting has to be done in context. Chase and I hopped in there and tried to carry up the heavy ones to the top. We made it, but it wasn't pretty. We ended up getting the 64th post in the ground before sundown on Monday.


All 64 foundation posts in the ground.

We spent Tuesday morning using the rest of our cement and sand up to add extra cement to the posts. I learned another Yetfa word while I was there. "Aneso" means perfect. They used it whenever we dropped a post in the ground and it was centered with the other posts and at the right height. If it wasn't, we had to haul that 100lb post out of the hole and add or take away rock. Needless to say they were quick to say "Aneso".

Embarrasing cultural experience.
The first day we were digging holes, I saw an older man leaning on a shovel. I politely pointed him towards a hole that wasn't dug quite deep enough and told him that he could dig until the handle of the shovel was even with the string we were using to get the correct height of the posts. With a smile, he started digging away. I looked back towards him five minutes later and he was past the handle and I directed him towards another hole. Once he was done with that hole, he went back to the first hole and dug some more. I looked back at him again and just started to laugh. That night Chase told me he was the chief. He was a cool old guy that I never asked to dig a whole again.

Joining the Translation Process

My 6th grade class had a really neat opportunity to be apart of the Bible translating team. They were able to do some checking before the final copies of the New Testaments were sent to the Yawa people group here in Papua. They flipped through every single page of the NT and wrote down any folded pages, smudged ink, or other things. That's stuff their parents do, and now they're doing it too! :)







Please pray for this class. We are leading chapel this Thursday in front of the whole school! Pray that the students will remember their script lines, song lyrics, speak loud and clear, and most of all that God would receive the maximum amount of glory!

P.S. Josh has spent the past week in the village with some of our great friends helping lay the foundation for their village home, where God's Word will be translated! Pray for them as they wrap up that part of the job. A building team will join them from America to continue the building project. :)

Conspiracy Theories Revealed

Consipracy Theory: Teachers do not live outside of their classrooms. (This is why it's weird when we see them in public.)

Praise the Lord for long weekends! Here's what this teacher did on her long weekend.





I was all geared up to splash around in the water, but here's what I ended up doing the whole time :) I didn't even touch the water.



I had a few visitors though.





The best part of it all is it's not over yet! :) More to come (I hope, as long as I remember to take a photo!)

**More exciting fun!**

This is a creambath. It's a fabulous hour of relaxing. Goop that smells good is massaged into your hair. As the goop sets, you receive a nice back and shoulder massage. They rinse it all out, and you have great looking hair :)





This teacher also tries to bake new recipes on her day off. :)



Good book+Good hair+Good food= Great weekend :)

P-A-R-T-Y

That's right, folks, party. This is what our Indonesian friends LOVE to do :) A couple weekends ago we were invited to a "neighborhood fellowship". Our landlord suggested that it would be good for us to get to know our neighbors and vice versa. It was right outside of our gate. Seriously, if we had to leave in our car we would not be able to back out of the driveway without hitting the tent that was set up. We went because we have been hoping for a way to connect with our neighbors and hanging out with them at parties seems like the way to go! :)Some of my favorite things were there: Josh, kids from the neighborhood, and food. We sat through a brief meeting with a question and answer time with our neighborhood leader. Here's some photos:

Lessons Learned

Today we took an unplanned trip to the Big City. This city's name is Jayapura. It takes about an hour or more to get there. We pass on many roads that wind through carved out mountains and jungle. They are paved roads that cross through a few smaller cities. The "Big City" has a store that has some imported items that we can't buy in Sentani. We heard rumors of a great find, so today we stopped in. This is what we saw:



Feast your eye's on that, folks! That's the first time we've EVER seen ANY kind of Dr.Pepper products here (besides t-shirts that kids from Texas wear!). So we bought two to go with our lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. By the way, KFC becomes "special" when you live overseas. :)We finished our lunch, came back downstairs to buy more of the "goods", and this is what we saw:



Dr. Pepper habis! Habis is the Indonesian term for "all gone". :) While we were eating, someone came in and bought the rest of them! I heard another rumor that there was the original DP, but someone bought all that they had when they found out. I know who you are, and I might be coming to your house soon. :)

We also saw this for all our Dutch friends and family (Ed, this is for you!):





With the current exchange rate, that wheel of cheese is ONLY $120.51. We didn't buy it, but we thought of you. :)

Lessons learned in SE Asia: Buy those favorite things you NEVER see here within the first five seconds you see them, because they might be HABIS before you can even say the word :)

We're Up and Running!

Since we moved into our house in November 2010 we haven't had a phoneline. If anyone needed us, they just called our cell phones. For internet we were using a 3G wireless modem, which when we first got it was sufficient for our internet usage. When we returned from furlough, we noticed the length of time we could actually be on the internet using the wireless modem slowed waaaaaaaay down to only about 20 minutes a day (I'm not exaggerating!).

Josh had tried to talk to the phone company and was told that all the phone lines were full in our neighborhood. He was given a phone number of the field agent who might be able to help us out. Josh called but when asked how much he (Josh) thought it should cost we got the idea that it probably wasn't going to be the right price for him to come out. We even offered to pay another phone bill that wasn't ours to connect the line to our place.

This past Saturday we contacted our landlord. We explained how we had tried to get a line hooked up to the house and how we felt disconnected from our family. He understood and made a phone call. Sunday we got a message telling Josh to go to the phone office to pay on Monday. By Monday afternoon, we had a phone line running straight from the main road to our house. Tuesday there was a miscommunication and the phone guy returned to install internet, but we were both gone. He returned on Wednesday, and by Wednesday night we have a faster internet connection! It's so fast that we can use skype, check email, update the blog, and see facebook. :)

We are counting our blessings, and hoping to talk to you soon!