Overview of our trip to the village

Overviews are the worst.

It's like, "inform me, entertain me, and most importantly, keep a synopsis of four days in the village brief."

It's kind of a tall order. But I aim to please.

I'm pretty sure we were sunburned before we left the hangar. We went out to load the helicopter (they let us take 400kg! Which was exactly the weight of everything we brought with us!) but we just sat there, during an overcast day, waiting for the helicopter to fuel. Then we unloaded in the middle of a field, and then we were greeted. The greeting was short, compared to others I've been privy to in this country but all of this was done under an overcast sky. How deceptive those clouds are.

My first great cultural victory was persuading the translators to let us have a checking session on that first day. They waved it off initially because all the people worth having in the checking session were in their gardens still. But in a quiet voice without (seemingly confrontationally) looking into the eyes of the men, I explained that I had not done a checking session before and it would be better for me to practice with the women and those around before I sat down with the bikmen, or prestigious men, of the area. This was very pleasing to them and we checked Matthew 26:1-13 day 1.

Day 2, we hiked out to the second village, the village we were thinking of allocating to. I managed the hike well with only two mountains to trek before reaching the village. They said it took them 45 minutes and, upon hearing that, the veteran missionaries told me to expect 2-3 hours. I made it in 1.5hrs! At some point grit and friction rubbed a bit of my toe raw, but I didn't think badly enough to break the skin. Apparently I was wrong and spent the rest of the trip with infection. Luckily, the helicopter was planning on picking us up in the second village and we wouldn't have to hike back.

We arrived 10:30 in the morning, and while they traditionally beat a hollowed hunk of strong wood to beckon those far and wide to come, they didn't have one at this hamlet, so blew through a conch seashell. It resounded through the rainforest letting all the people group know it was time to start the checking session. Man, I wish I had thought to snap a photo of that!

This story sheet was given to the Mum translators upon their completion of the Back Translation Course in 2010, which I helped with as an intern on my first visit to PNG. 

The first day we checked 56 vs in Matthew 26 in 5 hours with plenty of breaks. The group was representative of all the dialects of this language group, meaning some people had trekked quite a distance to join this session.

The mountain ridge on the horizon is a 4 hour hike (for a national). I know because several people from a village there hiked to attend this checking session. 

The next day, the focus was emphasized, the routine was found, and the commitment to finishing was strong. We finished checking Matthew 26, and 27, 28 (105 vs). At 10 pm, after 12 hours of checking, I pointed out that they were falling asleep and that wasn't good for checking. We should stop for the night and we could start again tomorrow morning.

I went straight to bed, joining my husband who tucked in hours before after a long day of hiking to see every hamlet in the village.

Going from sleeping on a 6" foam mattress with four pillows to a wooden surface with a 1/2" foam mattress and a single pillow (while still pregnant) wasn't a very comfortable transition. I woke up many times during the night, giving me the awareness to say, those men stayed up until 2 am talking with their wives about the checking session.

At 4:30 am the next morning, I got out of bed, hoping someone would be around to boil some water for coffee. But the place was uncharacteristically quiet. (They go to bed at 11ish and wake up at 4ish, and laugh at us for sleeping 8 hours.) Finally, at 6, I wondered if maybe they were waiting on me, so I walked over to the pavilion and a man jumped up as he saw me arrive. But not to greet me. To run inside and wake all the men who had slept in there instead of hiking back to their homes.
I walked back to our house (a trade store, emptied for our use, featuring a veranda and one room with a platform for me to sleep on, so high I could barely hop on it!), giving them some time to wake up.

At 6:30, we started checking. They sent out for a young girl to get Jacob and me some hot water for our coffee, and we tucked into the translation. Taking a 10 minute break at the end of chapter 14 and 15, we worked with an ear to the sky, having no idea when the helicopter would come. We were working on checking the last vs of chapter 16 when they told me the helicopter was coming. (Their hearing is way better than ours.)

During the time we were there, they had cleared off a space for the helicopter to land (cutting grass, felling trees, clearing brush), and so were on the landing strip with red cloth to flag the helicopter down. The helicopter flew over twice before we finally convinced them that he saw them but couldn't land while they were standing on landing spot.

And so ended our visit to the first language group on the table.

We really really loved the second village we went to. Jacob had hiked around and saw it all and it's a beautiful place. We love the people. But the layout of the village (in distant hamlets instead of in a centralized village area) isn't ideal for language learning, community, or incarnational ministry. Really, there wouldn't be much difference between living in a hamlet and living in town, (except that people would more easily be able to join us for translation work). But as far as mourning with them and celebrating with them, there's a lot of distance between any two points in the village. The first village isn't off the table, per se, but we didn't really get a chance to check out that village as we were so focused on this village.

NEXT STEPS:

Go check out the second language group. See if we get a firm yes or no from them. If we get a yes, then it's decided. If we get a no, then I think we'd like to consider other options WHILE allocating to this first village for a month to get some translation work done there. So even while the very slow process of survey work is happening, we're serving a current Group Directed Project, and getting a better feel for this language group who we've really liked personality-wise. We can then decide to work with them or pursue another option that will hopefully surface during survey.

Either way, more translation teams are coming and survey needs to be done. None of this work would be wasted.