Life at Kudjip...

 Ok, I realize that we have been here a month and I haven't yet made good on my promise to get better about the frequency of my blog entries.  Let me remind you that it is Easter weekend and a time of renewed focus on forgiveness!

First let me cover some basics...

This is the fabulous view from the back of our house:

This is my fabulous husband headed off on a walk-about:

This is my dishwasher (not so fabulous!!):

Our first package, definitely fabulous that it arrived before Easter since it contained the kid's Easter outfits, candy and plastic eggs! 

We pooled resources with the Kerr family at the Bible College today.  We colored eggs (their contribution) hunted for eggs filled with candy (our contribution) and generally had a great time hanging out together.

I think I have mentioned going to town.  I don't know if I have mentioned that we have a couple of vehicles on station that all the missionaries & doctors share.  We each pay a per kilometer price when we use the vehicle.  Since it is about $60 USD for a trip to Mt. Hagen we try to carpool (and split the cost) as often as possible.  On this particular day Gail was our driver and we took the van so we would have enough room for the 5 of us and the groceries for 3 families:

This is Gail and I at the Mt. Hagen market.  This is probably my favorite and most drastic difference from the states.  What used to cost $40 or more per week for produce now runs somewhere around $10 a week and it is some of the best produce you can imagine. 

Well, it has taken me the better part of the afternoon to get these photos uploaded.  I think I need to take a break and figure out what we are having for dinner at the Goossens house!  I have already picked out some pictures to to a "kid update" for the next blog entry.  Maybe tonight... maybe tomorrow...we will see!

Love from PNG,

The Goossens

11 days out of touch and off the grid- Part 4

Emma has had a fever for the last couple of days. It seems that were are all fighting off something (and losing) as we all feel under the weather. Many of the kids here walk around with a perpetual runny nose. We’re trying to be good about washing hands and limiting exposure but the cultural lack of personal space and continual shaking hands, even with people you may have seen only a half hour before, has made it hard. Doctor Scott from Kudjip loaded us up with some industrial strength first aid supplies including children’s Tylenol and even some general antibiotics if we need them. We can radio for advice if it lasts more then a few days or gets worse.

It got worse...
We now all have gotten the flu except Ethan who had some kind of allergic reaction and is covered in angry looking hives and a rash. On top of it all Joani hurt her back and has been laid up in bed for 2 ½ days. So much for the rest and relaxation part of the trip. We got through it but let’s just say it wasn’t fun.

I treated my first “patient” yesterday. Many doctors have spent time here and they occasionally run a clinic on the front porch. I guess he assumed that I was a doctor too and showed up for treatment. He had a badly infected cut on his finger wrapped in a dirty rag. He came up to the porch, politely introduced himself and attempted some small talk in pidgin. He then showed me his finger and asked if I could help. The best I could do was clean it and give him some Neosporin and a band aid. I told him I wasn’t a doctor but it didn’t matter to him. He then proceeded to ask me about some sores he had in his mouth. After once again letting him know I wasn’t a doctor, I told him that the best I could recommend was to rinse out his mouth with warm salt water three times a day. The oral health of these people is a definite problem and many people are missing the majority of their teeth with swollen gums and lesions. I’m sure their limited diet, ready access to sugar cane and no dental care is a huge factor. I hope things get better for him. It’s amazing what a little medical care would do to improve these people’s lives.

Finally the whole family is well just as we are wrapping up our trip to Dusin. We’ve genuinely made new friends and learned a lot over the last few days. In addition I feel a lot more confident being away from the familiar and much more willing to go rustic and into the bush again. In comparison to what the first missionaries went through in this place, our time has really been easy. I believe it was also a good opportunity to reset our expectations of what the basics of life really are. For the long run it has made me realize how absolutely blessed we are in the US and that there are places in this world where people live their whole lives on a mountaintop without the things we consider a necessity. We look forward to settling into our new lives in Kudjip.

Below are a few picture we took that we really like.  There's more on Joani's Facebook page that you can link to here http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=768379851

(There's nothing like looking down on a cloud)

(Yes, I fully intend to live out my Indianna Jones fantasy)

Sitting on "The Stone" high above the valley floor on the edge of nowhere...

11 days out of touch and off the grid- Part 3

We brought a couple of Frisbees, a soccer ball and a Nerf football. All we had to do is open the front door with the balls in our hands and the kids and adults alike were ready for a rugby or soccer match on the grass in front of the house. Sometimes they would play both at the same time with the two games overlapping and some players involved with both games. After about eight days, both balls were completely worn out and destroyed. This is a testimony to how hard their bare feet are from a lifetime of walking in the bush with no shoes.

One of the closest relationships that we have is with Pastor Dixon. He is the local pastor of the church at Dusin. He’s about 5’0 with a huge grinning smile. He speaks English but knows why we are in Dusin so he repeats everything we talk about in Pidgin several times so we can get the hang of it.

(Pastor Dixon is on the left.  Coincidently, one of his sons is named Randy…)

A few people have given us produce from their gardens which is their main and in some cases, only source of food. We got a few bananas and a bunch of hard green fruit we found were a type of passion fruit. At first we could’nt figure out how to eat them since they were full of seeds, until we saw how the local kids ate them. It turns out that they hold them by the stem, break open the rind and slurp out the inside seeds and all. I tried it and it was delicious. Unfortunately my system wasn’t used to it and I got a case of “runny tummy” as my Fijian friend Sam calls it. We also got a pile of the biggest green onions I’ve ever seen which they eat raw for breakfast, a pumpkin (which we don’t know how to prepare into a meal) and some corn.

Ethan has a new favorite game. He loves chasing the chickens while saying here kakaruk, here kakaruk (Pidgin for chicken) I’m still waiting to see what happens when he catches one.

Today I walked around station for half a day in my swim trunks and a t-shirt waiting for the daily rain. Due to a leak in the tank, we went through our supply of water alarmingly fast. We were in full conservation mode since we didn’t want to run out of water with eight or nine days to go. The reason for the swim trunks was to try to get a ‘free shower” without using the household supply. It worked. It’s amazing how a little shampoo in the pouring rain refreshes you. I was able to fix the leaks in the tank’s plumbing a few days later and soon we had all the water we needed. This was good since our alternative was a hike to the river 5 km away and down the side of a mountain about 1000’ feet below.

(That's the river at the bottom of the valley)

11 days out of touch and off the grid- Part 2

The people here are amazing! Here we are a strange family with three little pikininnies (children) and they are so warm and welcoming. Of course we didn’t speak pidgin but a smile and friendly gesturing goes a long way. We had to be careful because some of our common gestures from back home are more friendly then we intend them to be. Winks and raised eyebrows to the wrong person could create quite a scandal.
Our pile of supplies quickly disappeared as some men took it upon themselves to carry our gear to the house which was a few hundred feet from the airstrip. Our flying link to the outside world (ie. Our last chance to chicken out) left and would return for us in 10 or 11 days.

Blessedly we had as fellow travelers Pastor Yambe Seki who was coming for the Middle Ramu District Assembly and Thompson who was from Dusin. Both of them speak very good English, but they had other things to attend to and the point of this trip was not to have personal translators to hold our hands. The idea was to jump into the deep end and figure it out as we go. This isn’t as scary as it sounds since the Nazarene church has been in this area for some time. Still I now know what it’s like to be in the minority. Between our pale complexions and Lexi and Ethan’s blond hair and blue eyes, there was no way we were going to just blend in. Besides there are also very few places where I am the tallest person around.

(This is Pastor Dixon on the left.  He hosted us while at Dusin and basically made sure we didn't die by doing something dumb....)

One of the hardest things to get used to here is always having an audience for everything we do. It’s not rude to stare at someone in this culture if you are interested and there is no concept of personal space. Our house seems to be the accepted hangout for the local kids. The house has a large front porch with windows that look directly into the kitchen. It’s not unusual to have a dozen or more kids staring at you as you’re eating or doing the dishes. I’m just glad the bathroom is at the back of the house with a window eight feet off the ground.

It’s a challenge to get acclimated to this way of living. This trip is mainly about getting to know these wonderful people, learning the language and recuperating from many months of preparation, travel and emotional goodbyes. The driven, goal oriented life that I’m used to doesn’t exist here. I took off my watch a few days ago and only occasionally think about the time. What’s important here are the relationships between people and the basics of life. We see adults head down the mountain at daybreak to tend there gardens but there seems to be plenty of time to sit and just be. Everywhere you see people greeting each other, shaking hands and talking. Except for the clothes they are wearing and a small bag called a bilum, they don’t have much. Yet they seem happy.

We must look like space aliens to them with our digital cameras, ipods, flashlights and a different change of cloths everyday. It’s hard to take pictures of people being “natural” because every time I take out my camera they crowd around me to see the screen on the back. One more example that there’s no such thing as personal space here.

Joani posted a lot more pictures on her face book page so if you haven't sent a friend request yet, she can be found as Joani Goossens.

11 days out of touch and off the grid- Part 1

We’re finally getting settled in our new home at the mission station in Kudjip, PNG. About a week ago we got back from a wonderful place called Dusin that is a bit farther “out in the bush”. Since we had no phone, internet or electricity for that matter, we were keeping an “analog blog” using pencil and paper. So what follows are some of the things that happened while we were there. If anyone wants to hear more, drop me an e-mail and I would love to share in more detail or answer specific questions.
randy.goossens@gmail.com.


-Randy

11 days out of touch and off the grid- Part 1

After being in Papua New Guinea for only two days we boarded a Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) plane for Dusin located at 5800 ft elevation, deeper in the highlands. The locals can get there on foot but I’m told it’s nearly impossible for a newbie westerner like me to get there except by bush plane.

Dusin was one of the original Nazarene mission stations established in 1955, in the remote highlands of PNG. It now has a grass airstrip that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1100’ long with an 11 deg. slope. It’s located on the side of a mountain with one end that drops off sharply to the valley below and the other end terminating at a heavily treed peak that comprises the rest of the mountain. To find out more about the history of the place in the old days, you can read the book “The Edge of Nowhere by Daryl A. Schendel”

Our purpose for coming here was to begin to learn Pidgin and get to know the culture that we are now living in. Except for the pilots that dropped us off, we were the only westerners. Dusin has no roads, no power and no communication with the outside except for the shortwave radio used to report the weather for the bush planes coming in and emergency communication with the mission station at Kudjip. Even so immediate outside help was not an easy option.

The flight from Mt. Hagen only takes about 30 minutes but it takes a healthy national three days of walking and one day in a PMV (the local public transportation) to go from Dusin to Mt. Hagen. They say we have Malo Malo legs (It means soft or mushy, like the runway was) and we wouldn’t make it because there are mountains to climb, rivers to ford and a maze of people speaking one or more of the 800 different languages of Papua New Guinea. I’m glad to say we arrived safe and sound after a bumpier than usual flight. The pilot said that the weather had deteriorated since that morning’s report and we had to do a couple of flybys to find a hole in the clouds. Even so I never saw the runway until we were 30 seconds from landing. I was warned ahead of time that because of the runway’s length and slope, the pilots intentionally stall the plane right before setting down. He told me when you hear the stall alarm, you know you’re doing it right.

We climbed down the ladder from the plane and our feet sank into the soft surface of the airstrip. It seemed that everyone in the area turned out for the arrival of the plane. So there we were, a family of five standing on a mountaintop with 250 lbs of gear as the plane turned around, took off and disappeared into clouds that seemed to be gathering right at the end of the runway.

(Note: This is a slightly smaller plane that came in and left again later in the week.  I didn't get a chance to get a video of ours but it gives a good view of the runway and flight conditions. All together there were two other flights in and out during our time in Dusin, but the planes were too small for our whole family to get out in one trip.)

 

We have a comfortable house to stay in that used to be the home of Verne Ward and his family for eight years. We packed in the food we would need and water came to us courtesy of the almost daily rain showers that filled the tank on the side of the house. “Running” water was provided by the hand pump mounted outside. It’s very nice by local standards but compared to back home, it is best described as “rustic”.