Welcome Back to PNG

Well, we've been in town for about three weeks now and I don't know that anything has gone as planned, which is fairly normal here in the Land of the Unexpected.

We anticipated having our guard dog Regina with us by now, but through a series of typical events in Papua New Guinea, the delays snowballed. Hopefully we'll have her by the end of the week. Luckily, we chose to dog-sit for some co-workers who took a short trip stateside, so there has been a dog on the property, allaying my concern that every fallen coconut in the night is an intruder jumping the fence.

We anticipated having work. And we did. For a moment. The second language group that we're going to visit has a bit more of a literacy slant, putting Jacob at point. Well, the original suggestion involved sitting down and tagging an audio recording of Mark at every verse to sync it with the written text. Jacob listened very politely to all this being explained and then told me later that, in a nutshell, there's an app for that.  Apparently this app will read the text, analyze the audio recording, and sync the text to audio with modest accuracy. In 7 minutes for every hour of spoken text. So a months long project has been shortened to an afternoon.
I anticipated renewing my efforts on that side project for Lindy, but was told to stand down for reasons that haven't been revealed to me yet.

But honestly it was nice to have the time we did to unpack thoroughly. I have a couple more projects for the nursery until it's just like I want it. And I've been reupholstering the rocking chair because use has taught us that any prolonged sitting in it with a fussy baby caused great physical discomfort. I put sunscreens up over our front porch because it gets sun ALL DAY LONG and that's where we were planning on corralling the guard puppy to keep her from all the dangers on the ground level.

And day to day living is a bit more difficult. Both because we have two babies instead of one. And because we live in Papua New Guinea. Grocery shopping is a feat. Laundry has doubled as Marissa goes through more diapers at this age than James and a TON of burp clothes and swaddles. Even dishes are harder to do when there are two babies. James could be distracted or looked after by one parent but unless a baby is asleep… There's forever a need to stop scrubbing dishes and start a new episode of Dinosaur Train on the Kindle, get James water, get Mommy water, get Marissa a new burp rag, let Mommy take a shower, etc. etc.

But even as we get used to the new normal, both babies are steadily becoming more and more independent and the job gets easier.

In a couple days, our traveling companion for our second trip will return to country and we'll get to discuss this trip and how he would prefer to go about it and that may provide us with more work. If not, the Director of Language Affairs will be in country in a week or so and is normally bursting with ideas.
In the meantime, I'll finish up a couple of those forever loose ends from the first trip we went on. Including blogging about some of the highlights from the translation work there.