Pacific Orientation Course

After a harrowing journey up the mountain with steep cliffs inches from the edge of the road and turns that make your stomach drop, we arrived at the Pacific Orientation Course. We live in a dorm setting. Our room has a queen size bed and a pack and play draped with mosquito nets and a twin size mattress perched on wood not as wide as the mattress. James has a nice scrap on his head as he found the edge of the mattress has no underlying support. Luckily Jacob grabbed him before he hit the cement floor.

We unpacked our luggage immediately. When you live in a place for only a few months, it’s nice to rush through unpacking so we can feel settled for as long as possible. A small open wardrobe was provided in addition to a desk and four rat boxes. Two of them will be brought out to the village with us during village living when protecting from rats is more relevant than it is here. Adding a hanging closet organizer and a hanging shoe organizer gave us all the space we need so that everything has a home.

The course hasn’t started yet, though we have had a nursery orientation and a meeting with the nurse. On Wednesday, we’ll start the course in force. In the meantime, we’ve been working at our assigned readings so we don’t have to worry about them on our fully scheduled days.

The nursery has been open allowing us to allow James some time to grow accustom to it while we can still give him a break. When the course starts, he’ll be there from 8-12 and 2-4. There are four national women who take care of the children under the leadership of a woman who works for Wycliffe Bible Translators. When we first left him, we called out good-bye (because we don’t want James to be afraid that he’ll look up and we’ll be gone without warning). He looked at us, gave us a dead pan look, and then returned to his newfound toys. How dare we disturb him from the important things!

There’s a lunchroom where we eat all of our meals. We sit at long tables with benches. High chairs sit at the end of each table. There are 5 babies currently. I don’t know if more will be coming before the course begins. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two tea breaks are served. They offer tea and instant coffee, but luckily there’s always water on for our French press! Eventually, we’ll have kitchen duties but for now the staff serves us as we get our bearings.

The campus is beautiful. We’re at the top of the mountain with steep drops all around us, revealing the beautiful foliage of the jungle around us. The ocean can be seen in the distance. I’m not sure how far it is but the clarity in the air makes me think it’s only appearing to be so close. The weather is fairly cool, being that the mountain has a fantastic breeze. There have been times, even in the heat of the day, that I’ve felt a little chilly. Though that was inside in front of a cliff side breeze. The nights get frigid. I woke up in the middle of last night to lay a blanket over James and grab several more airline blankets for us. (They’re super thin but heavy! Perfect for traveling, so we collect them from our flights.)

The feel of the camp is that of summer camp: rustic beautiful environment with tons of people living in close quarters. We’ll be here for two months, do village living for a month, come back to debrief for a couple days and we’ll be done at the beginning of December.

We’re excited to start learning. And we’re excited to be done. The fact of the matter is, while we’re still in PNG (yay!!!), this is still training and a step we need to complete to get to our ministry and our end goal of transformed lives through God’s Word in every language.

Pray for rain. When we flew in, this beautiful land we remembered was brown and covered in fires and smoke. People need water to live and to grow food. When people are hungry and thirsty and dying, spending effort on Bible Translation is put on the back burner. Pray that God meets their physical needs so we can return our focus to the spiritual.