Leaving for the Village

On Wednesday, we'll be leaving for the village living portion of the Pacific Orientation Course. This is the practical.

Over the past two months, we've been having lessons in Tok Pisin, the trade language here. We've been interacting with the nationals more and more. We've been learning and practicing cooking, both over an open fire and with local ingredients. And now it's time to prove that we weren't just day dreaming all day long.

So we bought food for a month. (Or what we thought was food for a month… How much rice do you eat a month? Do you know? Or do you, like us, just go to the store and buy more whenever you run out? Toilet paper? Sugar? Add a complete change in diet because none of your normal fallbacks are going to fly without a refrigerator and you might understand our confusion.) We bought basic household needs:  a bed, a bucket for hauling water, wash basins for dishes and laundry, mosquito nets, tarps for collecting rain water, etc.

We've spent the past week dividing and packing everything we own into what stays at POC and what goes to the village. (My sewing machine, our laptops, most of our clothes, etc can stay behind for such a short trip without electricity anyway.) (We do have a solar powered cell phone charger.)

We're so excited to head out.

There were some concerns. But we proceeded on the child like faith that we pretty much live our lives on.

With the same confidence that we had when we left the States underfunded, we are eager to leave for the village where, just a week ago, the house we're to stay in was a questionable state, an outhouse had not been prepared, and no idea what to plan for food for a month.

But Thursday we were told that if our waspapa (the man who will act as our father in the village) takes the time to buckle down and get the house up to snuff, he's going to be a great waspapa. And if he doesn't, there's a fallback village that has a solid reputation.

On Friday, we were told that the house is looking good. There were a ton of people actively working on it when they pulled up to see how it was coming!

And we brought 20 kilos of rice so I would be really impressed if we did manage to go hungry!  

So both of my worries that I decided would accomplish nothing by me worrying about and that God would sort out one way or another seem to have been sorted out!

So we have a few odds and ends that still need to find their way into boxes. At this point, we've fallen into the Oops Box phase. (Ordinarily, I would link back to my post about How to Pack Like a Rock Star, where I talk about the Oops Bag, but I pay per mb for internet here, so if you're really interested, I posted it approximately June 2014.) But we have two days (with the nursery open!) to finish up before we're off!

I have no idea what the data service will be like at our allocation. Even here on this mountain with 3 bars and just under 3G internet, posting pictures is a feat.
But I'll be back in town on December 1st! Completely done with POC! And hopefully I will have a good flow of blog articles to regale you of our time spent there and here at POC.