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. 

Lindy the Awesome and My Feelings on Our New Plans

Let me start out this blog post with a shout out to Lindy.
Lindy was my internship leader when I came to Papua New Guinea in 2010. We had mutual friends in Dallas prior to that, so while we ourselves didn't really hang out, sometimes Lindy was in the group that I was hanging out in, and we got to become friendly acquaintances through that.
Then we went on our internship. And Lindy gave out lots of wisdom on that trip, some of it being life-changing.

Well, I've been in town for only three weeks now and she's already at it again. One nugget, I'm pretty sure, is also life-changing, but it's too soon to say that definitively. I'll give it some time. And two are year changing at the least. Those I'll share here.

To say that I was displeased about our delay to allocate until October would be dull. In a more poetic fashion, it made me want to beat my head against the brick wall barricading my path in an obviously futile attempt to break through it.
10 years, my husband and I have been on this road. 10 years from the moment we decided we wanted to go to the mission field to the moment that we moved internationally. And there were many brick walls in that time frame. But we're finally here!!! And behold! Another brick wall!!  
And there's no source of my frustration. I can't be mad at any one because it's not anyone's fault. It's just... the way it is.

Hanging out. In town. Until October. AT THE EARLIEST!
GAH!
Patience isn't one of those things I was naturally blessed with.

But Lindy, in our Bible Study, pointed out our parallel to the nation of Israel after they crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. That land wasn't yet theirs but they had finally arrived. They were in the Promised Land, but they weren't ready to settle.
And that's totally where we are. I felt called to PNG. Jacob felt called to missions where ever that may be. (We just figured it would be better if we stuck together, being married and all, so he came to PNG with me.) And after 10 years, which I'm just going to say, is a noteworthy fraction of the 40 years Israel spent in the wilderness. I mean, we're comparing the story of a Nation to the story of a Person, so... percentage-wise, I might be beating Israel in my time of wandering (fund-raising).
And now we're here! But not really. I mean, our feet are on Papuan soil, but we have no home here. Our purpose for being here isn't happening right now. We have to wait for that.

But when Israel crossed the Jordan, they weren't all about busting down some brick walls (the walls of Jericho) and rushing the process.
No. Step one was gathering 12 stones to stand as a monument to the work of the Lord in their passage across the Jordan. Step two was renewing their covenant to the Lord.

Now. The nation of Israel isn't really who you want to be modeling your life after. As many times as the Lord considered smiting all of them (and actually did smite large fractions of them from time to time), we need to take the actions of the nation of Israel with a grain of salt. 
So why did they stop and remember rather than bust down some walls? Because the Lord told them to. 
Ok. That's a pretty good reason. Whenever the nation of Israel does what the Lord tells them to, we should follow suite, until the Lord gets mad at them again, and then we should evaluate what they did wrong. 

Now, the other thing Lindy said in an entirely different setting, is that she was really glad I was here. That there are reasons for all of God's timings and, that while she knew it was beyond frustrating for me, she herself was glad I would be in town for a while for self serving reasons. Now, I don't really get this, because I'm not the one spouting off tons of edifying wisdom all over the place. But it is encouraging to hear that she feels like there's a reason for me to be here in town longer. It is encouraging to know that while this isn't the purpose that I foresaw for my first year and I trained for and I prayed for, there is purpose for my time in town. And maybe it's only to hang out with Lindy. And if so, that's totally ok. Because Lindy is pretty cool and she influences me to be a better person.
Maybe there's another purpose for my being here that hasn't been revealed to me.
Maybe it will never be revealed to me!

And that's ok. Because I'm the Lord's servant.
And it's not the servant's place to know the business of his Master.

Sometimes He does decide to reveal His business to His servants, and it's so helpful in understanding, it's so encouraging, and I'm thankful for Lindy pointing out at least one purpose for my perceived delay (which is really just God's timing).

But it's the occasions that He does reveal His business that should give us faith to continue obeying Him even when He doesn't, just as His provision in the past should give us the faith to believe He will provide for us in the now and the future.

 
So now it's our turn to follow Israel's example. To not rush forward but to remember this time and all the times before that the Lord has provided for us a way to complete the job we believe He has called us to. To become a part of a larger story of Bible Translation across the world, which is in turn part of a larger story of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A part of the larger story of God wooing His creation back to Him.
And to pay careful attention to what God is telling us to do, so we are able to fill every purpose the Lord has for our time here.

Pray for us. For wisdom in choosing a language group, for patience in the meantime, and for attentiveness to God's direction.
And pray for Lindy. Because she's awesome. Pray for her to be encouraged and to receive some great wisdom's that change her life for the better in greater quantities than she gives them.

Looking Ahead

What the Plan Was

Our goal upon arriving in to town was to figure out which language group we would be working with long-term prior to leaving for Australia.

There are presently two language groups on the table. We will visit both language groups and spend time praying about whether or not God would like us to work with these people. If both groups are a no-go, then the next step will be survey work to see what other language groups are in need of translation in the Madang and Sepik Provinces of Papua New Guinea.

Why That's Not Going Down

However, due to the nature of the beast, it doesn't seem possible to begin visiting either of these places before we leave for Australia.

In the window of time we have after the Annual General Meeting (AGM) and before we leave for Australia, there are no helicopters that will be traveling in one of the areas, which would necessitate commissioning a helicopter, about $5000 round-trip. This is a hefty expense that gives us pause, especially coming into country under-funded.

The area around the other language group's village where our translators live is very rough hiking, made treacherous and arduous by the rainy season. One translator was delayed coming into town as a two hour hike from his village to the road took him two days.
While we're praying for other ways in to visit these places, the answer to our prayers maybe a command to be patient.

What We're Doing Now

In the meantime, we'll be working as any other town based team, serving in what capacities we can for the 17 different language groups that are considered Active with PBTPNG.

When we go to visit one language group, we'll be doing village checking (reading the current version with people who haven't worked on the translation to check for accuracy, clarity, and naturalness). Presently, I'm working on researching best practices for Village Checking, devising a plan for our checking session, and developing an extensive list of questions for the segments we plan to check.
After that, I'll probably work with teams of translators who need help when they come into town to work on their translations.
Jacob is working on morphophonemics for a suffix in that same language. When they add an ending to a word, they do it inconsistently, and Jacob is trying to figure out a rule for what's happening and how to make it consistently handled. He's also been developing job descriptions for some of our national literacy workers, which is very important because our work visas are contingent on us training and equipping nationals for employment. (That's how the government protects the jobs of nationals!)

After that he hopes to help said language group with some literacy work that they haven't been able to do for lack of literacy specialists in country. Jacob fills that void!

The Trip to Australia

We'll head off to Australia February 20th, my 34th week of pregnancy, the last minute in which we can travel internationally. Our medical visa is good for 3 months, so hopefully the baby won't delay and we won't have problems getting the baby's emergency passport and visa for travel to PNG!

Back in Country

When we return (May 20th), hopefully we'll already have a plan in place (devised while we were in Australia) to go visiting the two languages. And then it's a matter of getting out to visit both places and deciding if one of them is where we'll be allocating. If not, we'll start survey work. If so, however, we'll get started on preparing ourselves to allocate. This means getting our stove ($215), a solar panel system ($2,500), a water tank ($1,700), etc. and all the little pieces we need to set that up, figuring out how much food we'll need to bring and how we'll prep it for longevity (canning vs dehydrating), and starting a little bit of language learning as there are speakers of both languages who live in town!

Allocating at Long Last

Our target date to allocate is October (though needing to do survey work could easily throw that off schedule.)

This timeline also ensures that the new baby is 6 months old before allocating, giving the baby a chance to get a measles vaccine before we leave for the village.

So the goal is to spend 3 months in the village by the end of 2016! Oct, Nov, Dec!

5 Best Things About Living in the Village

Lest you think that our arrival in town was all town-loving and village-hating, let me share the 5, kinda big, things that we really loved about the village life:

1. Relationship Building
   It was so so easy to get to know people in the village. Town is much like home in that respect. You come to know only the people at the places you go. Instead of pulling into a garage at the end of the day, we pull into our gated compound laced with barbed wire. Everyone's house is like this (though some people do walk). But coming to know your neighbors is hard.
   In the village, there is no barbed wire, because it's way harder to be a criminal when everyone knows everything. In the village, everybody walks. Everybody stops by and visits. There are some people you spend more quality time with than others, but you don't need to seek an opportunity to build relationships, you just need to sit on your porch.
2. The Simple Pace
   Even when work was to be done in the village, it was a simple pace. Work 15 minutes tilling the earth and then take a break, drink a kulau (green coconut; or perhaps coconut water would be a more explanatory translation), eat some roasting taro kongkong (type of potato), then work another 15 minutes.
   There was no office to be at. No clock to worry about. They told time by sun (though, gauging by my watch, they were most often wrong…)
   The beginning of things was marked by hitting a garamut (a hollowed hunk of tree, that sounded like a deep rich drum resounding through the jungle). That was the signal to come and, when the most important participants arrived, that's when they would begin.
3. The Community
   If someone had a large task before them, like sewing morota for an entire house, their whole family (which is often the entire village) would come to help make the work light.
   James was cared for by the entire village. Everyone loved the white baby who would eat anything. It was pretty much free babysitting all the time. 
4. Spending Time Outside
   James loves loves loves to be outside. And, in the village, outside is where you spend your day, unlike town which has us in the house or in the office. (We live on the second floor and there's no baby rail on the stairs.)
   The scenery was gorgeous, the wind was lovely, and there were a plethora of animal to enthrall James.
5. Price of Living
   Sure, we brought a pretty penny's worth of food to the village but there was no rent, electric bills, or water bills! (except for what you give to the nationals who haul your water for you as a thank you…) The people who live in the village have it even better with gardens which significantly reduces their grocery budget, cooking over a fire eliminating gas bills. And there's pretty much no reason for insurance for the nationals.

We are so very excited to move out to our village allocation and add the work of translation and literacy to the best things list!