Learn about the First Language Group on the Table

The first language group we're going to check out is in a language family with a couple of other projects PBTPNG is working with.
They live in a hilly region of the Madang province, with approximately 4000+ speakers.

In 1991, the first translators allocated in this language group. They were able to translate and publish the book of Mark before they had to leave the field.

The team of national translators didn't let that deter them and drafted the entire NT! Unfortunately, they divided the Scripture by chapters evenly with 7 different translators. The difference in styles, verbage, and voice is stark. Additionally, rather than taking each draft and polishing it to publication, thus learning what a "sweet" translation looks like, and starting again, thus learning and improving their skills as translators, the entirety of the NT is drafted with the talent of a green translator.
There's a lot of draft but should the work go into polishing it or should it be scrapped? How could scrapping it be done in a way that doesn't cause tension? This is a complication we would be walking into should we decide to work with this language group.

This language has shown dedication to completing their project, which is great!
They have had a missionary before which means there are some preconceived notions on how we ought to act. This can be good in that they know what to expect from "white skins" and the oddities of our culture, but it could be ... complicated if we don't fill the shoes of our predecessors to the expectation of the village.

This allocation is totally 100% a helicopter allocation. Which means dropping $2,000 (at least) every time we want to go in or out of the village. But we wouldn't have to buy and maintain a vehicle.

We're planning on heading out to visit this location on February 8-11th. However, the helicopter we were planning on taking isn't air-worthy. We can switch to using an SIL helicopter but that's who was going to charge us $5000 for the round-trip. Hopefully the other people who were planning on using the other helicopter will also switch to SIL and lower the price.

Stay tuned for information about the second language group presently on the table.
We don't want to have a hard choice to make. Please pray that the Lord guide us and the people He wants us to work with is exceedingly obvious.

Signs, Comforts, and Sleeps

Background

Imagine a chihuahua, in a balloon that cannot move and cannot pop, trying to escape. Now, imagine that this balloon is inside your belly and every move the chihuahua makes you can feel. Welcome to the third trimester. 

This is what I started thinking about, lying in bed staring at the ceiling fan that coaxed a draft in the humid room. But my thoughts moved on, in a logical fashion, to getting this chihuahua out of my belly, and onward to where that would be. 

It occurred to me that in 6 weeks, I would be flying internationally. (I have to make that flight before 34 wks.) And I have no idea where I'm going. 

The plan is to deliver in Australia but I need a medical visa in order to do so. 

I emailed in my medical visa three weeks ago and got received no confirmation that it had been received. Anytime I tried to call them, I would find myself transferred to a line that would ring and ring and ring until the line went dead. 

If I don't get a medical visa, I could fly to the US to deliver but that's another 16 hr flight with James and another 16 hour flight with two babies shortly thereafter! Not my definition of fun. 

And then there's the timing. One way or another, I need to purchase plane tickets. There needs to be a plan!

God Answers Prayers

And so I prayed. 

I told God that I was worried. I know I shouldn't be worried because the Scripture commands us not to worry, but I was. And if the good Lord wanted me to not worry, He would need to help me. 

I told Him that I didn't need a sign that He was taking care of everything, because every instance of Him taking care of me before was a sign that He could and would take care of me now. 

But I needed a sign about whether or not I would be getting this visa. Not as a condition of anything, because I would do as I was told and led to do no matter if I got a sign or not. But as a comfort to me. To cast my worries aside. To let me sleep. 

I posted an update on Facebook and started mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed. It was 6 AM CST, so there wasn't a lot new on the feed. 

I thought about how crazy some things for delivering in Australia were already working out. 

The first time I laid awake in bed wondering if it would be less expensive to fly to the US to deliver, I got a text message in that moment informing me that we had secured free lodgings for the 3 months we'd be there. A $3000 savings. 

There were only 4 OBs in Cairns and 3 decided not to take me on as a patient and I could never get a hold of the 4th and finally, finally! She said she would. 

We needed someone to come to Australia for the birth and for our day trip to Sydney (to pick up the emergency passport). Who would be able to afford it and could take a long enough time off work or school or whatever to be out there for that imprecise period of time? But Jacob's mom was already planning on coming out for a month! 

It seemed like far too many crazy things had already fallen into place for this to be the deal breaker.

And that's when I saw it. Something new amidst all the old posts I had been looking at all day long. A post from a missionary here with a sister organization. A shared memory from a year ago saying: We got our visa with 5 days to go. 

Ok. That seems like a sign. But should I go hand deliver it in Port Moresby? Or sit back and do nothing? Is this a wait on the Lord moment or the Lord will back your efforts moment? 

So I google plane tickets to Port Moresby and compared them to the expense of lodging a medical visa application in Australia (it's free if you do it while not in Australia). And at $550 to $380, it was clear that I shouldn't travel to Port Moresby. 

So that was it. A sign the visa was going to be taken care of. A sign that I shouldn't go to Port Moresby. And the rest wasn't for me to worry about. So I decided to buy plane tickets to Australia and let God organize what He would. 

But first I would ask the Director and friend and man who went through this with his wife just last year if he thought that was wise. In my mere quarter of a century of life, I've learned that it's prudent to not make decisions off of what you think are signs from God until you can talk to people who love you enough to tell you if you're being stupid. 

And then I went to sleep. My God, my comforter, helped me rid myself of worry and rest easy. (Not that He does this every time I ask for it. But this time I did ask with more serenity that I normally find myself with. This time it wasn't "I am stressed and I need to know that you've got this" but more "worry=lame sauce, remind me of how good You are." And I think that was an more appropriate way to seek a sign. NOT that there is a magical formula for receiving signs from God. This is NOT a prescriptive way God can be manipulated. That's called paganism. God doesn't work like that. So I'm NOT saying that if you pray this way things will happen for you the same as it did for me. ALL I'm saying is I prayed and the Lord answered hallelujah amen. Ok moving on)

Epilogue 

So Monday! (That was Saturday night.) Monday! I spoke with the Director and I felt like I got a bit of hesitancy. So I waited. 

We found the phone number for a for-profit company that the Immigration's Office outsources to and they, money-hungry as for-profit companies are, answered their phones, because, you know, customers=money. 

I then went to the OB, who asked me when I was going to leave the country and balked at the date I gave him, wanting me to leave earlier. Good thing I didn't buy those plane tickets, huh!? 

So Tuesday! my visa application was sent, by courier ($12), to Port Moresby. I anticipate a confirmation email of its arrival tomorrow morning (or tomorrow evening for you all on the Western Hemisphere) and they should process it in 4 weeks, for a small fee ($25). (This story hasn't ended yet. Keep up to date on the Visa Fiasco here.) 

Thursday! After many failed attempts and sleeps and crashed internets and false fraud alerts on credit cards, WE HAVE OUT PLANE TICKETS TO AUSTRALIA!!!!! ($599.96)

Visa Fiasco

Monday 8/2/2016

10:00 am - Received email confirmation of electronic medical visa being applied to our passports!!

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Tuesday 2/2/2016

2:00 pm - Emailed Immigration about whether or not they received the medical documents.

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Monday 1/2/2016

1:45 pm - Received email that Drs office has sent medical documents to Immigration

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Thursday 28/1/2016

10:30 am - Back in Madang

9:30 am - Boarded

9:27 am - Receive 3 calls in two minutes from drs office. I call back and try to convince the woman to speak over the din at the gate. She doesn't understand why I'm calling. Finally she gets it and says she'll figure out who tried to call me and have them call me back. (BTW their office has an 8ft table with all 6 of their office employees working at it, finding who called me was no difficult task.) I explained I was about to board a plane. I was transferred and, to my relief, was not told I needed to come back in, but asked who was going to Australia for medical treatment and why I needed to go to Australia. "Oh! You want to have your BABY in Australia. Ok. Thank you. Good bye."

9:00 am - At the gate

8:15 am - Lots of confusion but en route to the airport

8:00 am - Somebody else too was expecting an airport transport. Why hadn't they been planning on sending a car?

7:30 am - Called to see if my airport transport was coming. They weren't planning on it but would send out a car right away

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Tuesday 24/1/2016

11:00 am - Dr's office drove us to another place to get Jacob's chest x-ray completed (to make sure he didn't have TB) ($100)

10:30 am - The dr checked our vitals and felt our lymph nodes ($700)

10:00 am - Gave blood for Hep B test ($25)

9:00 am - Taxi came to take us to the drs

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Monday 25/1/2016

5:30 pm - Taxi driver dropped someone off and had no recollection of our conversation...? But the transportation is now scheduled

3:00 pm - Called taxi to schedule transport to drs appointment

12:45 pm - Arrived at Mapang Guesthouse

12:30 pm - Found airport transport without problem

12:20 pm - Arrived in Port Moresby

11:15 am - Departed for Port Moresby

10:00 am - Received confirmation of airport transport

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Sunday 24/1/2016

2:00 pm - Called Taxi to book a car for Tuesday. No answer. 

1:30 pm - Receive advice to avoid rental car. 

1:20 pm - Researching rental car. 

1:10 pm - Sent form requesting transportation to and from airport. 

11:50 am - Room stay has been extended extra day. Rooms: $90

11:40 am - Room Confirmation doesn't have me staying the extra day!

11:30 am - Plane ticket booked. They dropped down K200, so we're saving K300 to stay an extra day on plane tickets and spending K90 to stay an extra day at the guesthouse. Tickets: $724 

11:10 am - Rooms booked! A room with 2 sets of single bunk beds... She hopes to rearrange the bookings to get us a double...

10:30 am - Tried to book room at Mapang Guesthouse. No answer

10:00 am - Tried to book tickets to Port Moresby. Found by extending trip one day, I'd save K400 ($133). The cancel button was very close to the "I accept terms and conditions" button. When I tried to book the same tickets again, they were K300 more expensive. 

9:40 am - Found different phone number on Facebook. Scheduled appointments!

9:00 am - Sat down to make drs. appointment. Called 8 different phone numbers, provided by the Immigration Department. None of them worked. Sent two emails. One bounced back. 

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Saturday 23/1/2016

4:30 pm - checked email and had received HAP ID #!!!! Also received word that I needed documentation on legal records that I don't have! Ahh! Called all the local approved drs and they're either not in country or no longer approved. Drs in Port Moresby didn't answer phone. Attempts in retrieving documentation tonight were in vain.

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Friday 22/1/2016

4:07 pm - Received automatic reply to email.

3:45 pm - Received email from Immigration!! They informed me that the application number (what they said was enough information) wasn't enough information and requested passport names and number. I replied in less than 5 minutes.

3:00 pm - Called Immigration. No answer.

10:00 am - Called Immigration. No answer.

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Thursday 21/1/2016

4:30 pm - Sent email to Immigration, received automated response. Called with no answer.

4:00 pm - Called again. No answer. Tried hitting 1 instead of 2 on the menu, the same lady from 2 answered. She said the email had sent (still don't have it) but she gave me the Application numbers! So I emailed the immigration department (the people who never responded to me back in December) and hopefully the possession of visa application numbers is the key I need to be spoken to!

1:30 pm - Still haven't received email. Called, no answer.

10:50 am - Received an email confirming they've received my application and assuring me that it would be lodged and my application number would be emailed back to me in 10 minutes. That was 27 minutes ago.

10:20 am - BUIDHFBROUENIWJBCHSBCODWJBVOLJDWBVJL
*ahem*
While it was uttered that my visa application had been lodged, that apparently wasn't true... But now, they have my visa application. And I'm supposed to get my visa receipt # from them TODAY. So hopefully when I switch to dealing with the Australians (ALTHOUGH! Those were the people who weren't responding to me originally!), we can get things expedited. ugh.

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Wednesday 20/1/2016

3:30 pm - No email reply. No answering of the phone.

8:30 am - TTS has not received my email still and asked me to send it to another email address. They said they would respond to my email with the application number I need to contact immigration. Email sent.

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Monday 18/1/2016

10:30 am - TTS hasn't received my email but says that my application has been lodged (???) I asked for my HAP ID number. She said it would be 5 to 10 days and if I wanted to communicate the urgency of our situation, I could send an email to the same guys I had been sending emails to and they never replied. I asked for an application number I could provide to them to pull up my account and she took my number to give me a call back with that number. 

(I need the HAP ID# to schedule my appointment in Goroka, PNG to get my chest x-rays, to make sure I don't have TB, mandatory for the visas to be approved. The HAP ID# allows the results to be submitted while I'm in the drs office. Then the visa will need to continue processing)

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Friday 15/1/2016

9:15 am - TTS answered phone but haven't received the email with my updated application because their internet is down.

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Thursday 14/1/2016

4:45 pm - New application has been sent, but TSS did not answer its phone to confirm they had received it.

4:00 pm - The new forms are identical to the old forms except for the date listed as latest design update.

3:20 pm - The new forms have been received!

11:00 am - TTS informs me that the new forms are in their email outbox but they're having connectivity issues.

10:00 am  - K100 ($50) has been dropped off to the courier for delivery ($12) to TTS (the visa people)

9:30 am - Lois returns with K100 money order

8:30 am - TTS has received the package! But! The visa application is out of date and the fee was per application and I need to send K100 more.

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Wednesday 13/1/2016

3:30 pm - TTS did not answer phone.

1:30 pm - TTS has not yet received package. Courier typically comes in afternoon.

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Tuesday 12/1/2016

12:30 pm - Meeting's over. Visa Application is sent via Courier. Should Arrive tomorrow morning.

10:00 am - Lois returns with money order ($25). Brian is going to show me where the courier is. He's in a meeting.

7:00 am - Make copies of birth certificates. Discovered there's a K50 fee. They only accept money orders.

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Monday 11/1/2016

3:30 pm - All instructions have been followed. Too late to send via courier.

1:00 pm - TTS answers phone and gives instructions for submitting application.

8:00 am - Find number for for-profit company who gov't outsources visa apps to (TTS).

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Monday 4/1/2016

Emailed Visa people. No answer

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Wednesday 30/12/2015

Called Visa people 5 times. No answer

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Monday 28/12/2015

Called Visa people. No answer

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Wednesday 23/12/2015

Received the letter from the OB! Sent visa application to government via email

We had wanted to send out this visa application while we were in village living. But the flash drive was temporarily misplaced. When we got back, we were informed that our OB had closed his doors. We planned to proceed with submitting our application and then finding a new OB later, but we discovered that the letter from the hospital said I was an SIL employee instead of PBT and wouldn't fix it until she could also put the correct OB on the letter. There are only 4 OBs in the city. The first would be on vacation during my due date, the second was who closed the doors, the third didn't want to take a patient so late in her pregnancy, and I couldn't get confirmation on the fourth. Weeks went by with me making international phone calls to her regularly.
But Christmas came early! Unfortunately, it's like getting a present with lots of assembly required and not all the pieces and poor customer service....

Trip #1 is on the Calendar!

Are you ready for the exciting news?!!? Are you!?!?!?

We're *going* to get to take the trip to a potential allocation *before* we leave for Australia!

Now, before, mentioned in the post "Looking Ahead", we said, "there are no helicopters that will be traveling in one of the areas, which would necessitate commissioning a helicopter, about $5000 round-trip." But it turns out that there was some miscommunication (c'est la vie) and there WILL be a helicopter!!

So we're looking at $4160 for a round-trip, which we've been informed, is the cheapest we will ever find it.

Let me expound on the implications of this.

As we plan to be a village team, we need to decide which language group (and village) we're going to move out to. There  are only two languages on the table at this time. We need to check out both of them before making any decisions and then either pick one or none. ("None" would mean waiting to see what other language projects surface and consider those as they come.) Checking them out means heading to the village where we would want to stay and spending some time there.
So, circling back, the opportunity for the first has come!  

So we head out from February 8th-11th as presently planned. (There has been mention of a desire to extend the trip to give us more time but we haven't heard back about that yet.)

While we're there, our main objective is to do a village checking session. This is a checking stage of translation where we take the draft and, after some polishing, go out to the village and ask people who haven't had any previous exposure what they think. Is it clear? Is it natural? Do they understand everything we want them to understand?

So presently, I've been prepping extensive questions for the 9 chapters that we're going to attempt to cover while we're there, and researching best practices and devising a plan, etc. Jacob will spend most of his time during our trip figuring out the lay of the land, visiting with people, determining who we like and where our house ought to be and who we would want to be adopted by (not that we get to decide any of that, per se, but preferences can be given to the DLA, who speaks to the head translator, who speaks to the village.) 

We also get to plan for a trip out to village! 3 nights is a long and short time. It's too long to expect tech to stay charged but too short to worry about it. It's a weird time for food estimating… You can't just throw 40lbs of rice on the helicopter and say it'll get eaten eventually. But how much do you bring? How many people are you going to end up needing to feed with it? What can you get there? It is definitely a short enough time for disposable diapers though!

So all of this and more gets to be sorted out. We're really excited to see the first of the two language groups and see how God moves to indicate whether or not we should allocate at this location. Helicopter travel is budgeted for but we came into country under-budget, so the question of whether the money is there for this trip is a bit tricky. If you'd like to contribute to our first journey into this language group, or for any of our other ministry expenses, see our giving page!

If you would like to join our support team, that would also be awesome! We're about $1000/month short of being full funded. By committing to give a monthly gift of any size, you lessen that number and the stress that big expenses such as these put on our budget.

Thank you so much. It is through your financial sacrifices, whether monthly or on special occasion, that we're able to do this valuable work of providing the Scriptures in people's heart language. It is through your financial sacrifices that transformed lives can happen in the far reaches of the earth.

Thank you!

New Years Post

There's something about a little bit of craziness that makes life sweet.

2015 was definitely a crazy year. It started in Houston with a 3 month old and no place to call our own.

It continued to Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, Vegas, San Diego, and up the Pacific Highway to Portland.

We headed east, stopping to visit friends in Illinois, before finding ourselves back in Virginia, and then down to Georgia again, before traveling on my birthday to Dallas and what would be a place to call our own for three months.

After a long and awesome and tiring and fun PD trip, we turned our attention to packing up our lives and getting ready to head across the world with an infant in tow and one in utero.

We went to POC which was all kinds of craziness and a chapter I am thankful I will never have to revisit. (The PD trip across the States was a craziness that I'm glad I have a three year break in between but excited to do again!)

We ended POC in a month of village living, which was good but not ideal. It's hard to spend a month in a place where the only objective to being there is to spend a month in a place.

And then we moved into Madang town. We got to meet and meet back up with the members of the Branch. We have an apartment. Which was craziness trying to move in and prep for Christmas at the same time! But it's been good.

It's all been good! It's been a fantastic year that we would not have been able to manage had God not been so good through it all.

And we're super excited for next year.

Next year we have a couple language groups to consider working with long-term. We have a trip to Australia (hopefully)to have our second child. We'll have about 4 months of staying in one place (hopefully) which is the longest we've been still since June 2014. And then we'll conclude the year with 3 months (hopefully) in the village we'll be working with long-term (hopefully).

The future has so much uncertainty, which is fairly typical of the future.

Adding that to my saying, "there are two constants in the life of a missionary: miscommunication and change", it's extremely likely that things are going to be different than we envision.

But there's another constant in life and that is that God is good. Yesterday, today, and forever. And no matter what changes go down, He's already seen it coming and has a plan that glorifies His name.

Hopefully we'll like the plan, but even if we don't, it's not our place to seek our own interests, but to obey Him. And He is so so good, that more often than not, we find great joy in the way His plan works out in the end, even if it's stressful in the meantime.

We are super excited about the New Year and super excited to be working for a good God. 

A Papuan Christmas

Not just far from the original family units, which can be hard for many people to not be "home" for Christmas, but far from any semblance of a First World Christmas, things this year have been a little different than we're used to. (See A Presumed History of Christmas in Papua New Guinea.)

We got our tree, purchased for us by my mother, while we were still in the Village Living stage of POC. And I'm so glad we did. There were a mere 6 trees to choose from and, when we returned from the village, only a bright gold tree with fiber optic led lights in garish colors was left. My dear "sister" purchased that tree. A couple weeks later, another store got in a shipment, but that's nothing you can count on here.

I decked the tree with tiny blue ornaments I found in a store that caters to American's, frail and ridiculously cheap snowflakes, and my icicle ornaments. Afterwards my sparse tree couldn't handle another DIY craft without being overwhelmed. Except for the tree topper that still needed to be found.

The rest of the house was decked in tinsel garland of varying qualities and DIY décor crafts.

A little wacky, maybe even a little tacky. But that's life in PNG.

And to celebrate that (because if you don't laugh about it, you'll cry about it), we had a Wacky Tacky Christmas Party. A progressive dinner brought us from house to house to ooh and aww over the fine assortment of odds and ends that had been combined into our Christmas décor.

The next day, I coordinated a cookie exchange. I first went to one 2 years ago, hosted by Brooke, a woman in my home group, and it was delicious and so much fun. So everyone brought a couple dozen cookies and there was much joy in the sampling, tasting, and voting, with Christmas mugs filled with candies for the three winners of Most Delicious, Most Creative, and Most Christmas-y cookies.

Christmas Eve, the Branch had a feast. Chicken, yummy sides, scrumptious desserts, followed by a White Elephant and singing Christmas Carols. It was miserably hot and humid until the clouds broke and the rains came, the mosquitos were out in a fury, and the electricity was out for most of the evening, but the food and the company was excellent.

Christmas Day, to my surprise, James slept in until 6 am! We had a lovely morning opening presents. At 9, we headed over to my sister's house for her traditional family breakfast. (We had been adopted in at POC.) And enjoyed a kulau, or a green coconut, with a delicious water that almost wishes it was carbonated. Noon, most of the Branch was by the pool. And at 5, we headed back over to Lisa's for burgers on the grill, which everyone was invited to.

Jacob's tradition was Christmas gumbo, which we didn't have on Christmas Day as our meals were already covered for the day, but we did have later with a Papuan twist: crocodile instead of chicken.

It was a good Christmas. And while it wasn't the same by any means, it was a lot better than it could have been without the love and company of our family away from family and our Branch as a whole. 

A Presumed History of Christmas in Papua New Guinea

(I did no additional research or fact checking for this blog article at all. The internet is super slow here, guys. I just took the knowledge in my head and put it on a blog post. It's accurate but not definitive.)  

To start, let's give a superficial account of European Christmas. There were a bunch of places in Europe that celebrated a pagan festival and they all developed their own traditions over hundreds of years on how to celebrate that paganism. Then the Catholics were like, whoa, I see you really like this paganism but maybe we can redeem it by keeping all the stuff you do but making it about Jesus. So they added that to the mix. And then there were hundreds more years of adapting and developing and deviating customs and traditions. And that's why pretty much every European culture and all the places that Europe has dropped colonies has their own Christmas traditions.

Now let's talk about PNG. The first people to come a-visiting the island was in the early 1900s. That's 100 years ago. A single century.

They came to a place that is so wild and rugged that despite the fact that the country is the same square footage as Montana, it developed 800+ different languages simply from isolation.

Ok so 100 years ago, someone shows up with an agenda. It probably wasn't to introduce Christmas. Even if Christmas did occur while they were there and they celebrated it, they would have introduced it to the people group they were hanging out with. It probably wouldn't have traveled very far past that.

So over the years, a bunch of people come and they share Christmas (maybe) with the people groups that they're with. But for the most part, really, this is something else that the crazy white people do.

Through globalization and years of exposure, Christmas gains momentum here, but it's a white man's holiday. It was probably initially celebrated much in the same way as I celebrate Boxing Day: "Why don't I have to work today? You know what, whatever, it's cool."

But unlike Boxing Day, the white man seemed to be having a lot of fun with this Holiday. And so now people dress up in Santa clothes and throw candy and betelnut (think chewing tobacco, even though it is very different) out of the back of a pickup. Some people may buy a Krismas tri  (even though the Tok Pisin word for tree is diwai. Christmas is such a white man holiday, they don't even bother translating Christmas tree.)

So sometimes people ask "What do they do (differently) for Christmas?" And the fact of the matter is, this holiday hasn't had enough time in country to develop specifically Papuan traditions. They do pretty much what we do, it's just not as beautifully. Because it's a third world country. And they don't have as much practice.