Tim and I both joined Wycliffe as school teachers.  In fact, that is where we met – in a small multi-grade classroom at a cross-cultural training course Wycliffe held in south Texas back in 1989.  We were happy to use our skills as teachers to support the work of Bible translation.

After serving as teachers of missionary kids for many years, our interest in literacy grew and we able to use our teaching skills there.  When our daughters reached school age, Martha home schooled them for a while and then they attended Woodford International School in the Solomon Islands. In the USA, they  attended Christian and public schools.

When we began considering coming back to the Pacific, Sarah’s educational needs were an important consideration.  She is happily settling into Ukarumpa International High School at the SIL center in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Since we will be leaving soon and missing events like ‘Open House’ and parent teacher conferences, we spent yesterday meeting with some of Sarah’s teachers.  What a blessing to meet these teachers dedicated to the education of missionary kids. We were impressed with each of the teachers and confident that Sarah will have a great school year here.

Tim and I spent years teaching other missionary kids and now it is our turn to benefit from the ministry of a group of gifted teachers who will be providing a quality education for Sarah and the other students at the school.  We are grateful for each of these teachers – and those whose photos I failed to take!

If YOU are a teacher or know a Christian teacher who would like to serve overseas and be a part of Bible translation, let us know.  There are lots of needs for teachers of missionary kids all over the world.  The adventure awaits…

Mrs. Bowers, Sarah’s choir director

Mr. Voth, Sarah’s Physics I teacher

Mr. Noble, Sarah’s Computer Applications teacher from the UK

Mr. Matusumaru – Sarah’s PE teacher from Japan

Miss Rigsby, Sarah’s Pre-Calculus teacher (from DALLAS!)

Sarah will be staying at the Townsend Youth Hostel here at the Ukarumpa Center.  As we mentioned before, the Driggers keep the hostel running and will be responsible for Sarah on a day to day basis.  However, during breaks and in case of emergencies, we needed a ‘loco parentis’ (local parents) to be here for her.  Asking John and Brena Bruner to step into that role was a natural choice.

The Bruner Family worked in the Solomon Islands with us and Sarah grew up with their boys.  Included in this photo is Kairu, a Papua New Guinean student who is living with the Bruners this school year.When the translation project they were involved in was completed they moved to Papua New Guinea so the boys could go to school here. Sarah hadn’t seen the family for six years, but it didn’t take long to reconnect.  I think ‘Aunt Brena’ is happy to have some girl company.

We are thankful that John and Bruner are happy to take on the role of Sarah’s local parents and help her make this transition.

The closest town to the Ukarumpa Centre is Kainantu.  Tim and I decided to venture there this morning to check out the shops and pick up some supplies Sarah needed.  The store on the center has run out of a lot of school supplies.

To get to Kainantu we walked to the gate of the center and waited for a PMV (public motor vehicle).  After 10 minutes or so, a van came to the gate and passengers climbed out.  We climbed in and found the PMV sat for a few more minutes waiting for more passengers before it started.  The PMV made a couple more stops before heading to Kainantu.  The trip took us about a half and hour and cost us $ .75 each.

We walked around a few stores and picked up some items. On the way home we were able to catch a ride with friends who we saw in town and were returning to the center in their truck.  I’ll let the photo gallery fill you in on what we saw. 

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When friends and family heard that we were planning on Sarah going to school in Papua New Guinea while we lived in the Solomons, there were more than a few raised eyebrows.  Responses ranged from, “Really?”, “How does she feel about that?”, and “We could never do that!”

With those responses, I’ve wondered if I should feel guilty about being separated for most of Sarah’s last two years of high school.  If Sarah had said she really wanted to stay put in Dallas to finish high school, we would have honored that. Sarah has wanted to come to school in PNG.

We have been in PNG for a week and on the Ukarumpa center here in the highlands since Monday.  Sarah met some of her classmates on Sunday and was met by a group of classmates at the airstrip when we arrived here on Monday morning.  The kids, parents and school staff have been friendly and welcoming.

On Tuesday we went to the youth hostel where Sarah will be living to meet with her hostel parents, Marty and Sara Driggers.  With an easy going style and warm smiles they made all three of us feel good about the transition.

To help ease the transition, Sarah has been eating lunch and dinner at the hostel and only coming ‘home’ at night to sleep at the house where we are staying.  Starting Sunday night she will be living full time at the youth hostel.

Sarah has jumped into school and activities.  She is making friends.  The hostel parents say she is fitting in just fine.  We are so thankful.

One of the realities of coming to a school this size is that Sarah does not have the wide choice of classes and AP classes she can take.  But the experience of living in a new country and going to school and living with kids from all over the world will have lifetime benefits for her.

It reminds me of houseplants that decorate the house all winter long.  They can grow and provide beauty inside the house.  But come spring when you can put them outside, they grow like crazy and have a whole new beauty.

Will I miss having Sarah around?  Yes.  But how can I not be happy about her being in this place where she will thrive and grow in new ways?  There are sure to be challenges along the way, but sometimes that’s when we grow the most.  I’m looking forward to seeing the new growth and maturity in Sarah that will come with this experience.

Just before we left the USA, I asked Sarah why she was excited about moving to PNG.  Her response, “I’ve prayed about it and I just feel like that is where God wants me to be for the next two years.”  And really, isn’t that the best growing environment; right where God wants us to be.

We appreciate your prayers for our family as we are all in new places; Tim and I as mostly empty-nesters, Emily making her life in Arlington, TX and Sarah here in Papua New Guinea.

On Monday morning we were picked up at the guesthouse and taken to the MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) hangar where we would catch our flight to Ukarumpa.  We had a van load as there were two flights that morning.  With school starting and families returning from furloughs, there are more people traveling to Ukarumpa.

The three of us had to climb on the scale to get weighed and then our baggage.  We pay for the trip by weight.  Tim and I saw a few people we knew from years back and we spent some time catching up with them as we waited for the flight.

The flight up to Ukarumpa was about an hour and 15 minutes in 7-seater Kodiak plane.  The scenery was beautiful.  Some of the kids from Sarah’s class came to welcome her as well as our friends the Bruners.  We know the Bruners from the Solomon Islands and John and Brena will be Sarah’s ‘loco parentis’ – local parents, while she is here.  Sarah will stay in youth hostel, but the Bruner’s will be her local guardians for any issues that come up in our absence.

We walked down to the school and talked to the registrar about Sarah’s schedule and the vice principal gave us a tour of the school.  We also visited the youth center and met the youth director. After that, Tim went to the computer and technology services office and was able to borrow a modem so we can be on the local server and have internet.

Sarah and I visited the store on center.  I am continually shocked at how expensive everything is here.  We bought Sarah a note pad and a few pens and headed back to the house.

Monday night we had dinner with the Bruners.  It’s great to catch up with our friends.

Here are some photos from the day:

Sarah on the flight

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On Saturday morning, we headed to the airport to board our flight for Port Moresby, the capital city of Papua New Guinea.  At the end of our two our flight we cleared immigration and customs and exited the airport where an employee of SIL was waiting to meet us and take us to the mission guesthouse where we stayed for the weekend.

As we were walking to the van we saw a group preparing to welcome someone who must have just arrived from overseas.  How would you like this kind of welcome?

Sunday morning, our friend Stephen came and picked us up and took us to a Baptist church for the morning service.  We were a bit late in arriving and the usher marched us down to the some of the only seats available – in the front row as luck would have it.  At least the congregation was singing a song and all standing as we walked in.

After church we went back to the guesthouse where Sarah stayed.  Stephen dropped Tim and I at a nearby shopping area so we could look into buying a SIM card for our phone.  There were none available so while Tim stood in line at an ATM to get some cash, I spotted a friendly looking woman and asked her help in how we could catch a bus to the big shopping mall.

The mall is truly amazing.  It’s a modern three story building and is very western-looking. We have nothing like it in the Solomon Islands.  We purchased a SIM card, found a little lunch and took a bus back to where we had started our adventure. Lucky for me, Tim had a good sense of where the guesthouse was from the shopping area and we walked back.

As we returned to the guesthouse, Sarah was heading to the mall with some MK’s she had met.  Two of the girls will be classmates of Sarah’s and recognized her from Facebook.  It was great to meet some of the kids from her school already.

Sunday night Stephen came and took us back to his house.  His wife, Elizabeth, and their daughters had put together a feast.  Three women on a missions trip from Dallas were also there and a man who has come to do maintenance for a year.  It was fun to meet up with these folks and Stephen’s extended family.

I had brought Elizabeth a market basket from the Solomon Islands as a gift.  Later, Elizabeth gave me a beautiful ‘bilum’ (string bag) from her home province of Enga.  What a fun memory. 

We wanted Sarah to meet Elizabeth and Stephen so she knows someone in Port Moresby. When she comes home to the Solomons at Christmas, she will probably need to spend a night or two in Port Moresby on her own.  It will be nice for Sarah to have ‘family’ there to help her out if she needs it.  Stephen, Elizabeth and Sarah exchanged phone numbers before we parted for the evening.

We have been back in the Solomons for almost a week now. It has really gone fast. The first few days we concentrated on getting our cargo that was shipped off the wharf. We accomplished that on Friday afternoon and have slowly been getting things put away.

This week we have opened a checking account, gotten our cell phones up and running, purchased internet time and dongles and learned how to purchase power for our house.

When we left the Solomon Islands four years ago, we closed our account with the electrical company. When renters started living in the house, they had to have ‘Cash Power’ installed. The same power company provides the service, but a special meter was connected to the house that uses a pre-pay system.

Now when we need power we go to the electricity office located in one of the shopping malls and tell them how many dollars of power we want to purchase and they sell us a voucher with a special code. When we get back to the house, we punch the code into the control panel of the meter and we are good to go.

We will need to be on our toes to make sure we don’t run out of power unexpectedly. The power is generated by diesel fuel-fed generators. The fuel is imported and expensive so electricity is expensive as well. Tim calculated the cost of the power here – we are paying ten times as much as we did in Dallas. I can tell you that I have become fanatical about turning off lights and ceiling fans.

Another project for this week was to complete Sarah’s application for her student visa for PNG. We needed a couple of documents we didn’t have including a medical report and a chest x-ray.

We found a doctor who could do the exam right away and she sent us to the hospital for the x-ray. Once at the hospital we had to walk to the far end of the complex to the cashier’s office. This is the window where you pay for x-rays, medical tests, morgue charges and embalming. The charge for the x-ray was $20 Solomons – less than $3.00 US!

There wasn’t much of a line in the x-ray department and soon we had the film in our hands. There is no radiologist at the hospital to read the x-ray – the one radiologist the Solomon Islands has is currently in Taiwan for six months. We took the x-ray back to the doctor who read the film and signed the x-ray form for the visa.

We were able to lodge all the documents at the Papua New Guinea High Commission and were told to check back on Thursday – the last day to pick up the visa before we leave on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Tim was at the High Commission to lodge our visitor’s visa application and was given Sarah’s passport with a TWO year student visa stamped inside. Yeah!

(It’s now Wednesday)

Today I went back to the bank to pick up our checkbook. You know you live in a small place when the woman at the bank saw me and went and got my checks without asking who I was or what I wanted. She pulled out the ledger for me to sign for the checks when she noticed that the checks said, ‘Watzke’ instead of ‘Matzke’.

The remarkable thing about getting checks here is that someone with a rubber stamp with removable type and an inkpad actually stamps the account number and name on each check. So, it’s back to the bank tomorrow to pick up another checkbook with the correct spelling.

While I was out this morning I went to a small grocery store that often has a ‘mark down’ area. Usually things in this section are nearly to their ‘best buy’ date. With the high cost of food here, I’m happy to buy things that are marked down. Today there was a bag of ‘icing sugar mixture’. Icing sugar is the Australian name for powdered sugar and ‘mixture’ means that some corn starch was added to keep it soft.

In this case, the corn starch didn’t work and the bag was full of hard clumps of sugar. It wasn’t enough to put me off – I figured I could sift it again and it would be ok. I took the sugar home and sifting it was slow and not very effective. I tried hammering it with a small meat mallet, but that only turned the big lumps into small ones.

Then I decided to try something drastic. I pulled out the meat grinder attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer and started feeding the lumps into that. Warm, almost finely grained powdered sugar began falling out of the holes. Success! I’m not sure when I will need the sugar, but I will have to try and use it before it returns to cement again.

a new use for a meat grinder – powdered sugar grinder

Sarah is transforming her bedroom from the Narnia theme of her youth into bright and funky teenage colors. She won’t be using this room much, but she is enjoying making it look fresh and new again and ready for her return at Christmas.

Out with the old Narnia theme

Another project we will need to tackle is cleaning out our rain water tank. Rain water is collected from the roof, runs through gutters and into a fiberglass water tank below the house. Tim filled our 5 gallon water cooler and carried it up to the house for us to use for drinking water. He held a small plastic strainer under the watertank tap as he filled the cooler to catch anything that might be in the water.

Apparently the strainer isn’t fine enough because today when I filled a jug with water, I noticed little mosquito larva ‘swimming’ in the water. We will have to clean out the gutters and put in the gutter screens we brought to keep them cleaner. The water tank will need to be cleaned out and then refilled when it rains again. Basic living in the tropics takes a lot more time than it does in the USA. We are looking forward to being well set up and functional!

Our small neighborhood valley has changed over the years since we purchased this house in 1998.  Houses have been built on small strips of land that we never would have guessed could be big enough for a house.  With more houses have come more people and dogs.  It’s much more common these days to have the quiet of the valley displaced by the sound of a radio and children playing.

Sometimes in the night the ‘Howl-lelujah chorus’ of dogs disrupt our sleep.  And sometimes we wake to the sound of intoxicated young men in a taxi with the radio blaring or sitting on our cement driveway in the wee hours of the night.  That is not so pleasant.

This morning I heard some young men just outside our gate talking in loud voices.  I suspected that they had just come up the path from town where they would have been drinking.  I have to admit that I find the noise and beer cans left on our driveway an irritation.   I decided to walk out and talk to the young men and ask them to move on to their own homes.

As I walked I tried to brace myself to be firm, but kind in the way I talked to them. It doesn’t pay off to get anyone angry.  When I got to the gate I was surprised to be greeted by name.  ‘O Mata, yu kam bak nao!’  (Oh, Martha you have come back!)  Two of the young men are nephews of our neighbor.

The third young man walked up to the gate and greeted me as well.  He told me he was the son of a friend from our church.  When he was a young boy, we gave his mother, sister and him a ride to church.  The father did not attend church and this faithful mother worked hard to encourage her children to follow Christ.

As I began to talk to this young man with his glazed over eyes, I asked him, ‘Why are you letting alcohol destroy your future?’  Maybe the alcohol loosened his lips, but he began pouring out his story.  He was the only one in his family who had gotten to the level of schooling that he has reached.  He had dreams and ambitions, but he had caved to peer pressure.  And he hasn’t been attending church.

I reminded him that God loves him and he allows people to turn their lives around.  I reminded him that he has a gift – his intelligence and he shouldn’t waste it on alcohol and not doing his best at school.  I reminded him of his faithful mother who must be praying for him and crying over him.  He got teary eyed and replied, ‘Yes, always.’

The conversation continued and as I spoke, he kept replying, ‘that’s true’ and ‘you’re right’.  It was if he has been waiting for someone to speak the truth to him

I asked him if he would like to do a job for us – cleaning out our gutters.  He said he would like to and would come back later today.  I told him I thought that was a good idea since I wanted him sober if he was going to be on the roof!

He reached though the grid of the fence to try and shake hands.  I put my hands up to the gate on my side and he pressed his hands up on the other.  “Thank you” he said.  I don’t know if he will truly change his ways, but the conversation at the gate sure turned out differently than I thought.

I’m thankful to be here.  Thankful for the years we have had here that have lead to long term relationships like this one.  I’m even thankful for gray hair and being listened to like an ‘aunty’ would in this culture.

Please pray for this young man I’ll call, ‘Sam’. Pray that when he is sober, he will return to church and return to his walk with Christ.

We got an early start this morning as we had a lot of ground to cover.  The morning’s travels took us through rolling farm lands covered with velvety green grass and dotted with sheep and cows.  Being winter the sun is low in the sky and the cows and sheep cast long shadows across the grass.

We traveled to Napier to where we enjoyed morning tea with our friend Jenny and her 3 little girls.  Husband Morgan was at school and we didn’t get to see him.  We know them from the Solomons.

Then back in the car and we traveled to Whakatane where more Solomons friends, Sarah and Ivan live.  It was great to spend the evening them and their lovely daughters. After a yummy dinner, they surprised me with a birthday cake.

Tomorrow we head back to Auckland and prepare for an early morning departure for Australia and on to the Solomon Islands.

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