One Month: Tok Pisin and Hiking and Cooking, Oh My!

I’ve been in Papua New Guinea for a month now. We’re on outdoor cooking weekends now. We have no access to the kitchens and must cook all our food on open fires all weekend for the next few weekends. We've made everything from local foods such as kaukau (sweet potato), taro, and local greens with tinned fish, to steam baking banana cake and tortillas over an open fire.  My village living partner and I have been having great fun experimenting with local foods and with trying our hands at new ways to cook over a fire. It's hard sometimes to get fires going with the high humidity and rainfall here but my village living partner is a trooper and is amazing at getting fires going.

This training is meant to prepare us for the village living phase of our training where we will be doing all of our cooking every day over an open fire. Thankfully, right now we still have access to running water, bathrooms and a "regular" bed at night. However, they’re slowly weaning us even off of this. We had our first overnight with our wasfemili ( host family) last week and did again this week. We started to learn to use their outhouse, slept on the floor after we set up mosquito nets, and learned to cook, eat, drink and live with our Papua New Guinean family. In 3 short weeks we will be going to a village for a month to live in a local Papua New Guinean house and experience their village environment (much different than their town environment). We will live somewhat like our Papua New Guinean friends and will be on our own as a team for a month. I tell you what, that’s daunting and exciting. It’s been really neat getting to know the Papua New Guinean staff and our wasfemili here. I’m starting to gain enough Tok Pisin to start communicating more extended thoughts and they’re willing to help me as I attempt to talk more with them. They listen eagerly and help me finish my sentences. It’s great fun, especially in story telling (which is a great vocabulary booster by the way). I'm able to understand whole stories now and follow along in Tok Pisin conversations (for most topics).

Other training is going well also. Physical training takes place primarily on Mondays (hikes) and Wednesdays (swimming in a lagoon area of ocean). We generally hike for a couple of hours on Mondays and we are preparing for an overnight hike in about a week or so. The views are definitely worth the sweaty work of the hike and we're able to learn a lot from our Papua New Guinean guides as we go walkabout long bus (walk in the bush). Swimming is coming along better than I expected. They'd like us to try to be able to swim a mile by the end of the course (about 1,600 meters). The first week I could only swim 200 meters at a time and only got 2 laps in (400 meters) before we had to go. However, by the next week I had done 5 laps (1,000 meters) and the last 2 times I've done 1,200 meters. I have a few more weeks to hit my 1 mile goal. There's also great snorkeling here and there are reefs very close by that some students go to on the weekends as a way to relax after a crazy week.

Well, that's a snapshot of some of the things I'm learning right now just outside the classroom. So, if you light a fire this week, open a can of tuna, eat a sweet potato, go swimming or take a hike you'll remember me and the work we're doing together in PNG! 

Christ Follower,

Meg