The Littles in the village

We’ve been working on not saying “The Babies” anymore when we refer to our twins. After all, they are 2 1/2 years old already. If Jacob catches one of us calling him a baby he yells “I not baby. Ain a big bo-eee!” Jenny Beth calls him “De-Dub” to which he replies “I not De-dub, I Cha-cob!” (Emphasis on the “ch”) She mostly refers to him as Bab-ba (brother) though. We’ve started calling them The Littles lately.

I thought I’d share a pictoral view of what they’ve been up to this week…

Ben picked up the camera as I read e-mails on his computer…

Sometimes it feels like there are arms and legs everywhere. I’m a human jungle gym!

“MOMMY! I’m done mine cereal!” Jacob is all about tactile experience…why eat your food when you can wear it?

They giggled uncontrollably when Ben wrapped them up in a towel together after their bath…

And finally, Jenny Beth and Jacob like to take turns sitting on daddy’s lap while he works. They are surprisingly content to ‘be’ and it helps me tremendously to have one little out from under my feet for a few minutes!

Running into the arms of God….

I just overheard Jacob loudly saying “I want mine daddy!” Sometimes he says it when his daddy is available and sometimes it’s when Ben is in the middle of consultant checking, so I have to distract him. I was thinking about God and how my desire for him dulls when I am busy. My daily tasks in the village often feel relentless: laundry, dishes, cooking, homeschooling, and often I fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day. Today is Sunday and I asked Ben if I could read my bible upstairs away from everybody else. He readily agreed and here are a few verses that jumped out at me. I often read from The Message because it gives me a fresh perspective on things I was born and raised on.

“I’ve already run for dear life straight into the arms of God” Psalm 11:1

“Keep me safe, O God, I’ve run for dear life to you. I say to GOD, “Be my Lord!” Without you, nothing makes sense.” Psalm 16:1

My heart cries for God the way Jacob cries for his daddy. I long for times when I can be quiet enough to hear from Him and get the nourishment I need to pour myself into the tasks I need to do. I don’t feel like I have a bunch of enemies seeking to kill me but sometimes I just need God to save me from myself…when I am tired or the twins have been cranky, I am more likely to respond in sin.

So God, let me run into Your arms today!

my struggles with weight loss and stress eating

In the midst of packing for the village and getting ready to go to Australia, I thought I’d do a little navel gazing about one of my favorite topics: food!

I spend a great deal of time thinking about, preparing and eating food. Because we live in a country where we can’t eat out or buy much pre-packaged food, I find myself working hard to make things from scratch. It activates the creative itch I have and it settles a basic need for me to feed my family of seven. I usually don’t know what I am going to cook until the day of because I have to have an urge to cook something before I can make myself do it. I usually try out at least one or two new recipes a week just to keep things interesting. I also make large portions of food because my kids are eating more as they get bigger.

I grew up in Indonesia and Malaysia, where flavorful food is plentiful and delightful. In my years here in PNG, I’ve worked on learning to cook my favorite dishes and it makes me feel a teeny bit less homesick for those faraway lands.

One of the consequences of loving to cook and eat is gaining weight (sigh) Before I had children, it seemed like I could eat anything I wanted and the pounds never added up. I added weight with every child and the pounds are a lot harder than I ever thought to lose! I would do it all again, though, for the chance to be a mom to my beloved children.

With missionary life comes a share of transition, culture stress and just general living stress (these are topics which I seem to cycle back to regularly on this blog). I often find myself stress eating…a little chocolate here, a few bites of leftovers there and voila! I’m back where I started. I think cold weather also makes me want to eat more, since when I am in our hot village sweating profusely I hardly wish to eat at all. Ukarumpa is located in the highlands so we have chilly nights…which means I want my comfort food!

One of the things I have appreciated over the past year is encouragement from my friend Kristen, who is a successful Weight Watcher. I tried doing South Beach but got fed up trying to figure out how to do that here with the lack of ingredients. With Weight Watchers, I learned that I could eat vegetarian food for a lot less points AND not go hungry. Also since coming back from furlough, the price of groceries has gone up and so losing weight and keeping my store bills down has led me to work on increasing vegetarian foods in our diet. I found that not only is it serving those purposes but I’ve also felt better physically since doing this. We still have meat but in smaller portions and I limit my carb intake. Additionally, I’ve been working hard to get myself to the market at 6:30 am several times a week so that we have plenty of fresh fruits and veggies…veggies are free on WW.

So far I haven’t lost much weight because I need to start exercising. But, one step at a time, right?

denial, concern and trust…

Here’s how I really feel about having skin cancer…

When it started to dawn on me that this ‘little spot’ I have was not a little something, that I would have to leave my family here in Papua New Guinea and get it taken care of in Australia, I was a bit shocked. I suppose that I had been living in denial for too long, thinking this wasn’t serious and I’d get it taken care of eventually.

My next concern came in the form of our translation project. It’s time to do consultant checking on the book of Acts! We sacrificed and longed for this time to come—because we want our friends and their people to have this important piece of Scripture in their language. Our Papua New Guinean colleagues labored diligently to translate, revise and pour over their work. I felt dismayed, thinking that this medical problem of mine was going to delay this process. (Please note that when I voiced this, Ben quickly pointed out that taking care of my health was the most important thing to him.) Of course, this was going to be a huge expense, to leave the country and then deal with the hospital and doctor’s bills.

I’ve had a couple of months to process this with friends and here’s where I am now. Not once in this missionary life of ours has God ever left us in the middle of a problem. He has always provided the timing and means to deal with things. Sometimes that has come in the form of us making good choices (like saying ‘no’ or ‘later’ to things that were too much for us) but other times it has been plain miraculous how things have worked out. No other explanation besides “God did it.” I’ve already had confirmation that He’s at work: appointments, place to stay, people to help me when I need to be picked up after my surgery, and a bonus visit from my sister Jenny for the weekend before all the appointments start. Why shouldn’t I trust Him now for all of the other things?? Some moments I can trust him easily and other moments I have to tell Him that it’s hard. I want to put my trust in Him more than the doctors I am going to see in Australia as well.

I am thankful for opportunities like this that remind me of God’s faithfulness in my life, even when it means leaving my family in PNG to go to another country to get something done medically. In the whole scheme of things, those 10 days might just cause me to love God more and to be grateful for the mundane things I will be doing when I get back. (I will be heading to the village, so that means cooking with no refrigeration, homeschooling, etc.) Additionally, if everything goes as planned, (and they can get all of the cancer out in one go) I will make it back to PNG to meet my family in Wewak in time for the translation workshop after all. If not, well, we will cross that bridge when it comes. No gat samting (no worries).

baby oil, tanning and skin cancer…

I debated writing out the whole story of how we learned that I had skin cancer. I finally decided that if one person reads this and wonders if they should get a mole or a funny spot checked then it’s worth putting this out in cyberspace.

Back up to my teenage years. Do you remember when we slathered ourselves with baby oil or some other kind of burn inducing agent in order to get a good tan? I remember doing it often with my sisters and friends. We believed that the browner we got, the better we looked. Back in those days, we didn’t know the things we know now about skin cancer!

A few years ago, I asked a doctor about a spot right in the middle my forehead, right on the hairline. He said “let me measure it” and then told me we’d keep an eye on it.

On our last furlough, as another doctor filled in my ‘Pre-field Health Forms’ (ie the ones we need to be ok’ed to come back to PNG) I asked him about this spot. It was scabbing over and itching by this time. He explained that it was skin damage and proceeded to freeze it off for me. That was two years ago.

For a while I didn’t notice it anymore. However, it developed into something else. I would annoy me because it would scab over and bleed profusely if I bumped it or got it wet in the shower. I kept putting off a whole doctor’s visit just for that, believing that it was still skin damage until a couple of months ago when I had to go to to our clinic anyway for a toe infection. When the doctor looked at it, she said that our other doctor here would probably want to look at it and possibly biopsy it.

As soon as he began the biopsy, he told me with certainty that he believed it was skin cancer. He mentioned that the location of this spot is one of the most common places for skin cancer. He said I would probably have to go to Cairns or Brisbane, Australia to get it taken care of. Oh, and one side note: my next door neighbor was the nurse assisting the doctor. That is one of the ‘funny’ things around here, we live with the people who take care of us.

We waited five weeks for the results, and my doctor called to tell me I had skin cancer. However, if one is going to have skin cancer, this is the kind to have…it is basal cell carcinoma. Even after I heard it was skin cancer, I wasn’t really sure how serious this was. My first inkling came when I asked if I could wait until my parents visit in June and travel to Australia with them. No, he really wanted me to get it taken care of as soon as possible.

So here I am a few more weeks later. I have three appointments set up, for May 8, 9 and 10, the final of which is a Mohs procedure. Apparently I will be ‘put under’ for this. The two things I am most looking forward to is: I get to stay with a close friend, and my big sister will be flying up for the weekend to hang out with me.

Stay tuned because tomorrow I will post how all of this makes me feel.

Next year in new Jerusalem!

 

 

 

Ellie eats her matzah bread while Ben explains its meaning. We celebrated a Passover Seder with another family last night.

I thought I’d write a quick update about our first Passover Seder since I had written about my pre-seder thoughts a couple of days ago. We did a simplified version but included the following elements:

Hiding/getting rid of all the yeast bread. The children found bread around the living room to hide. On this night we eat only unleavened bread in remembrance of the Israelites flight from Egypt–they didn’t have time to let their bread rise.

Ceremonial hand washing

The Seder plate:

• Bitter herbs (parsley):  symbolizing the hardship that the Israelites had as the slaves of the Egyptians. These we dipped into salt water, which represented the tears they shed.

• Roasted egg: representing the cycle of life, endurance of of God’s people and a hope for the future

• Charoset: a sauce made of apples, raisins, wine, cinnamon and walnuts (we used pandanus nuts) to represent the mortar between the bricks that the Israelites made

• Lamb shank bone: signifying the sacrificial lamb

Children asking questions

Leaving a place for Elijah

Communion, connecting Jesus’ sacrifice with the Passover

Each activity is done so that we are able to focus on Christ’s sacrifice for us. I think the most meaningful part of the meal was sharing in communion with our kids and the friends who had joined us. We’ll definitely do this again next year!

 

 

holy week preparation

Ellie picked these flowers in our yard and arranged them herself in preparation for Easter.

It seems like I am finally coming out of the ‘giving birth to twins’ fog. Last week I realized that although we had read Bible stories to the older kids, we hadn’t really done much of that outside of family worship (mostly singing) with our two year olds. To be honest, only one of them enjoys sitting and reading books at this point—the other prefers jumping off the couch! And yet, they are at the age where they are soaking up everything. I don’t want to neglect the most important thing: teaching them about Jesus.

I have resisted doing a lot of ‘spiritualized crafts’ and things in the past because I was afraid of becoming legalistic or appearing competative with other moms. However, the biggest reason centers around being just plain tired and worn out from the mundane tasks I do every day: cooking, cleaning, urging my kids to pick up after themselves, changing diapers, settling disputes and wiping noses to name a few.

It dawned on me that Easter was just around the corner and I had done NOTHING with the kids. Nada. I haven’t felt much like doing anything about Easter since the twins came along, aside from making sure everybody had enough chocolate Easter eggs to eat. When we were home on furlough it was easy to let the church fulfill that role. So last week I asked for some ideas on facebook and did some internet searches…and one night I thought about putting on a Seder that explained the Passover but also highlighted Jesus’ sacrifice. It all seemed very foreign to me but as I was researching it, I started hungering for tradition and rituals. Being over here without many of the perks of our churches back home, I wanted to do something that would help us focus on Jesus this Easter. Ben was still enroute to home, (he’s home now!) so I talked it over with him and he was all for it, in fact he was making the Passover connections before he even saw the material I was working with.

The thing is, I didn’t realize how putting together this meal would affect me. I took a powerpoint from a friend and simplified it greatly so that hopefully the littles won’t get too distractable. As I went through the slides, the words from “Once Again” by Matt Redman came to mind, especially the words “thank you for the cross…thank you for the cross my friend” washed over me. And so, as this holy week progresses, I hope to keep the cross at the forefront of my mind, not because I have to or because I want to look spiritual, but because I love Him. And I want to share that with my kids. If we get around to taking pictures I’ll try to post some of our Seder, and hopefully it won’t be a flop. I guess if it is, I will have had the benefit of the preparation I had going into it. I want my home to be a holy place where God is evident…

Decisions, guilt and doing the right thing…

This week has been an emotional one for me personally because of a decision that we had to revisit.

The Plan seemed like a good one: Ben goes to the village for three weeks, while I stay at our regional center of Ukarumpa. The reason the family didn’t go with him this time mainly centered around difficulty in traveling. Being on jungle roads which are muddy and slippery for hours on end did not seem like a good option for the kids and I, so I volunteered to stay here in the comfort of our Ukarumpa home. Not only that, but Ben and his translators were making a push to get through Acts and if he didn’t have us there to distract him, they could make really good progress.

Having Ben away has been difficult, not because we have had any major things go wrong but it’s just regular life that can get exhausting. It’s the ‘normal’ happenings which require my attention and concentration and with five kids, it feels like I’m dealing with something all day long. I am tired and I miss my husband, who I rely on to help make the steady stream of decisions that rush at me throughout the day. With our pre-teen I’m making more emotional/mental decisions, whereas with the two year olds it is more physically demanding.

The original plan was for Ben to come home, stay for a week, and then go back to Wewak for 2 ½ weeks for a Dictionary workshop that our team had signed up for. We have three or four translators going from our project plus some literacy people in addition to Emil and Jessie who are advisors.

Last week I came down with a sinus infection and for various reasons had a couple of sleepless nights. I think it took something like this for me to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to cope with Ben going to the Dictionary workshop only a week after he returned from being gone for three weeks. Since he was away, my option was to e-mail him or Skype chat, so I chose chatting. It was a really hard conversation to have, but I knew that I needed Ben to be home or else I might have to be medevac’ed out of here. Although it was a bit of a shock at first, he agreed and arranged for the team to go without him.

On top of living cross culturally and dealing with hard things about living in community, if my sanity starts cracking, I won’t last long here…there are definite triggers and I know when the alarm bells are going off. So I’m following the advice of a good friend and doing the right thing and learning to live with a little guilt.

I won’t lie to you, I feel like the weakest link in the chain. For many of us missionary women, if we find that we need to STOP or CHANGE plans it is painful to admit, because we don’t want to be the reason that The Project isn’t moving forward. I feel enormous pressure from the people who fund our project. (ie supporting our national translators) What if they find out that it’s my fault that we aren’t progressing? What if I’m just being a big wimp and I really should be able to handle it? Since I have had these thoughts recently and I have heard them time and time again from my friends and colleagues, I thought I would put it out there so that you can pray for missionaries who are making these same kinds of choices. Yes, we are trusting God. Yes, we are doing so prayerfully. But we are still human and have to deal with a lot of human emotions when we have to say “enough” “I shouldn’t do this” or “I really need a break.” Thankfully the friends who I confided in this week affirmed the things I was saying (and so did Ben!) so the angst only lasted a few days.

Journey to the Lagoon…

As the translators wrapped up the Acts revising and Luke recording workshop, we asked our Arop friends what the road situation was like. Everybody we talked to told us that four-wheel-drive trucks couldn’t get in and out of the village. The dirt roads had become soupy. A huge truck blocked the road as well.

We began to brainstorm about our next options. We could walk to the lagoon and take a boat out to the Bismarck Sea to get to the town of Aitape, where we could get another car to take us to Wewak. Ben and I realized that although this had been a possible exit plan, it only lived in the idea stage. Our old life jackets had disintegrated, so it wouldn’t be safe for our children. Taking them out onto the open sea through a narrow inlet called The Otto (named after Otto von Bismarck, from the colonial days), where boats are known to capsize didn’t seem like a wise thing to do.

At one point, I asked, “Can we ask the Samaritan Aviation guy to come get us in the float plane?” A few years ago our director came to visit our project via this plane equipped with pontoons. Our managers in Wewak contacted the pilot and he was willing to pick us up, despite the fact that he usually only delivers medicines and flies patients in life threatening medevacs! He was concerned about the wind, so we began to pray for good weather.

(all photos by Dan Bauman, who came out with us to record Luke with Andy Weaver. I am grateful because I was too busy to take any pictures myself!)

Back to the wee hours of that Saturday morning…

We woke at 4:00 am set out around 5:30…I hadn’t slept all night just for the sheer excitement of the day ahead of us. “What if it rains while we are hiking,” and other questions kept rolling around in my head. That’s me carrying Jenny Beth on the left and Kenny (Sissano translator) on the right. Thankfully most of us had flashlights or headlamps to get us through that first part of the journey.

This swamp was my least favorite portion of the hike…we were up to our knees in the mangrove mud and had to take our shoes off in order to get through it. I had a couple of ladies holding up my arms to help me. I felt humbled, but grateful for their help!

Surprise of all surprises, in the middle of the jungle there was this large escavator submerged in the mud! It was brand new and working its first ever job when it got stuck.

We all breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when we came upon this path…this meant that the muddy swamp walking moments were over.

Here is Andy Weaver and Ben walking across a log bridge… notice the hand rail…sometimes we don’t have the luxury of something to hold onto!

Upon arriving in Wauroiyn, the village nearest the lagoon, we were able to rinse off our muddy feet and shoes.

Ben shaking hands with our friend Rosa, one of the ladies who helped us carry our cargo on the hike.

From Wauroiyn we took a boat down the long narrow stream to get out to the lagoon…

The lagoon appeared before us, calm and peaceful… perfect for the plane to land!

And the float plane, in all its glory landed smoothly!

Mark Palm, the pilot, greeted us. Jessie, the kids and I flew with Mark to Wewak, while Ben, Dan and Andy went on this small boat to then find a car from Aitape to Wewak. Their journey took over 14 hours!

The rest of our journey that day was a little more normal for us. We landed in Wewak and met up with the managers there who gave us cold drinks and snacks. A few other friends who live there came by to chat while our older kids played with friends. Then our pilot friend Chris came and picked us up and expertly flew us home to Ukarumpa! As I think back on that day, I can only be thankful for Jessie traveling with the kids and me, good weather, airplanes that worked well, gifted pilots, and willing friends who fed us. God is good, all the time!

A great place to grow up…

Day 2: I love raising my kids in Papua New Guinea!

Jacob ‘talking’ with an Arop boy. No toys needed for fun with friends. Just dirt and rocks.

Jenny Beth watching a lady fill up her water jug outside our house. The twins love watching ducks, dogs and chickens go by as well.

Ellie playing with friends in the village.

When the Arop kids get together to play a game, Josiah and Noah often join in. This particular game was frustrating because the girls kept winning!

Josiah joined us in the village after spending one week in a children’s home (hostel) in Ukarumpa. Having him there enabled us to make it to the translation workshop in time.

When asked why they like living in Papua New Guinea, Noah said, “here you don’t have to wear shoes all the time.” Josiah added, “I don’t get to stay in a hostel in the U.S.” Both boys commented that they like living close to the majority of their friends (although they miss the friends they made while on furlough.) For my part, I am thankful for the simplicity of life here. Much of the time, our kids are out of doors. They are also really good travellers, going to and from our village to our mission community. Sometimes they have to wait 2-4 hours at an airstrip or in a town, waiting for a car without any entertainment but themselves. In addition, I love watching them with their missionary aunts and uncles and am grateful for the input these adults have in their lives. I think they are starting to develop good strategies for handling transition and relating to people of other cultures. Although “home” is a hard concept for a lot of MKs (missionary kids) I think our kids would agree that Papua New Guinea is where they are deeply rooted and they love it here.