Prayer

Tomorrow morning at 8am we leave Ukarumpa to spend 3 weeks in the Benabena language area. We would appreciate your prayers for:

1) Good times with the Benabena people. Good conversations that glorify God.
2) Accurate, representative data collection. Please pray that we will be able to come closer to identifying the levels and causes of Scripture use.
3) Good relationships in the survey team. There'll be our team leader Bonnie, Juliann and myself. A dentist called Nelis who works at Ukarumpa and is from the Benabena area is coming with us for the first 4-5 days. Please pray that we'll get on well, work well together, get to know each other and God more, and have fun.
4) Safety. We'd like to keep healthy and safe. There have been some tribal fights in this area, so it would be good to avoid those.

Thanks!

Be back in 3 weeks.

God mi laikim yu tru

Here's the words of the song in the video below. I wasn't sure about the translation of 'banis' and 'sori long mi' so had to check with a friend. Often 'banis' means fence, but here means protection and 'sori long mi' means mercy.

God mi laikim yu tru, yu save sori long mi (Lord I love you for your mercy)

Yu save helpim mi long strongpela banis tru (You help me with your strong protection)

Banis bilong God em i strong tumas (The Lord's protection is so strong)

Satan i no inap kam insait (Satan is not able to come inside)

STEP

Over the past few weeks there has been a STEP course going on here at Ukarumpa. (STEP stands for Strengthening Tokples [vernacular] Education in Papua New Guinea.) So Papua New Guineans from all over the country have come for about 4 weeks to learn how to train teachers in their langauge area. On Thursday, during a morning in prayer, we spent some time worshiping and praying with the participants. Here's a (very low quality) clip of a Tok Pisin worship song. I'll post the words and translation tomorrow - when I've asked someone about a few phrases I'm not sure about :)

There have been 12 STEP courses since 1994, when STEP started. In this intake there are something like 15 languages represented.

Exciting survey

The reason I’m looking forward to this survey (we leave on Tuesday!!) is because I think we’re going to have lots of great conversations. The data collection part of language surveys is interesting, but personally I enjoy the informal conversations that inevitably follow each interview. Most interviews are group-based, with between 5 and 100 people present and we often get asked a range of questions - about why we left our countries to come here, about a particular Bible passage, about whether magic is ‘ok’, etc, etc.

And I think on this survey the conversations are going to be extra interesting. Because during the interviews we’re going to saying things like, ‘What do you have to do to get to heaven?.’ And ‘Do you know who Abraham/Moses/Paul is? Tell us about him.’ We want to ask that type of question to find out how much people really understand the Bible. When I’ve asked questions like that before, people give a response and then often say, ‘Why? What do you think?’ And voila – the chance to tell the gospel to the 20, 40, 80 people who’ve gathered from that village.

We hope to go to at least 18 villages during this survey. Although our primary intent is not to evangelise or pastor, we happily answer people’s questions. So please do pray that God would provide opportunities to minister to these Benabena language speakers.

The Madang coast, featuring a WWII gun
Picture taken by Andrew Williamson

Almost time...

...for a SURVEY!!

On Oct 11^th, a week on Tuesday, we will start one of Papua New Guinea’s first ever Scripture use surveys. In that three week trip we aim to 1) find out how much the Bible is being used, and 2) assuming a low usage, to investigate why. I’ve never done a survey like this before.

When I was training for this job in the UK at the end of 2006, I was told there was a need for these types of surveys here but that because no-one knew how to do them nothing much was being done about it. Since then, I and others here have been gradually working up to this point. And finally, it seems to be coming together.

We’ve got permission from the directors to give it a go, we’ve planned this pilot survey, designed the questionnaires, interviewed people from the area and got some very basic maps in order to plan the route. We’ve chosen to go to some remote villages, some less remote, some border villages and some in the centre of the language area. And, God’s provided a very enthusiastic friend and guide who can stay with us for the first 4 days to introduce us to the people he knows in the area.

We’re going to the Benabena language, near a town called Goroka. They’ve had a New Testament in their language for about 30 years but we suspect it’s not being used very much. That could be for the same reason that not many people read the Bible in England. However, especially with a relatively newly translated Bible, there could be other issues. I’ll mention what those are, and why I’m so excited for this survey in my next post. Don’t go away – it’s gonna be a good one :-)

Here are two of my favourite photos, taken on the first survey I went on, to the Sos Kundi language group in East Sepik Province.

Rye bread rising

When I'm in the kitchen there are inevitably two or three disasters before any success comes my way. Like when, on Saturday, I tried to make ice cream and instead of adding 4oz of sugar to the eggs, I added 14. (I thought the big numbers on the scale were oz but they were 100s of grams.) Then, in the same ice cream-making attempt, after getting the sugar mixture correct, I accidently brought the from-scratch custard to the boil, curdling it. Or when, on Sunday, trying to make bread, I assumed I could just substitute rye flour for normal flour, creating an inedible, stodgy dough.

Yesterday evening, however, it seemed to work

A friend's attempt when he, well, forgot about it

Advice for anyone wanting to work here: 1) learn how to cook, and 2) bring cookbooks that contain recipes with simple ingredients and (if you’re like me) instructions that a 4-year old couldn’t get wrong.

Morning in town

On Saturday I spent some of the day in Kainantu, the local town. A church group has put on a march and had set up a stage opposite the main supermarket to lead worship and preach from. First I went to the market, then headed over to the grassy field to sit and sing and listen to the energetic preacher. It was a nice morning - nice to get out of Ukarumpa (the missionary centre), and nice to experience how God is working in local churches. I need to stop using the word 'nice' so much. Here are some photos.

GingerDough balls and chicken feetAnd, my favourite

On appreciating others

Here I can't choose my friends to the same extent that I have been able to at other times, for example during university. I sometimes find that hard. The number one cause of missionaries leaving the field is because they can't get along with their fellow workers (or so I was told during training time and time again). I was reading CS Lewis' The Four Loves this evening. I found it helpful. In the section on 'Affection' he says:

By having a great many friends I do not prove that I have a wide appreciation of human excellence. You might as well say I prove the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy all the books in my own study. The answer is the same in both cases - 'You chose those books. You chose those friends. Of course they suit you.' The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who 'happen to be there'. Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

The intro bit

I'm 25, have been working in Papua New Guinea since January 2007, went to university in Sheffield, studied Biblical Studies (after realising Economics was for mathematical geeks...one of whom I am not), grew up in Liverpool and Africa, have one mum who's a good cook, one dad who's a bit crazy and one sister. She's getting married soon, which I think is pretty cool. Met the guy for the first time the other month and I think she's made a decent choice (I have to say that, he's probably going to read this...Just kidding Mike).

I do language surveys. I'm a sort of scout for Wycliffe Bible Translators, seeing where there are possibilities for them to go and work. It's fun. We get to hike around villages, chat to people, figure out language boundaries, ask about their traditional culture and language, generally just learn a lot, and hopefully eventually give a bit back. I lead a grade 8 boys’ Bible study every week, and I’m involved in their youth group too. Every Saturday morning I try to get out of the missionary centre on my motorbike. I go to the local town, Kainantu, or take a drive down the dirt tracks of the Aiyura valley that Ukarumpa, our centre, is in. I read, hang out with friends, attempt to cook, spend a lot of time cleaning up the charcoal-like remains of cooking that didn’t quite turn out, help out at a local youth drop-in centre, and now blog!

And this is too long. So I’ll end here. Glad to have got the boring first post out of the way where you kind of feel you have to introduce yourself.

PS Couldn’t think of a clever or funny name for this blog. Yep, that probably says a lot about me :) Any suggestions? Oh, and here are a couple of pictures. Just because everyone likes photos. The first is the valley I live in. The second is of me and one of the guys who introduced me to this country...I stayed with him and his family for 5 weeks in March last year. If you'd like to see more photos, go to www.thebigpicturelibrary.com/whenisurvey

So...

My first blog! A few months ago I had the idea that if Wycliffe members are interested in working in Papua New Guinea, or if friends or others want to know more about what’s going on here, a blog would be a pretty good way of communicating. The people in charge of Wycliffe work here even said they'd pay for the internet use because they like getting publicity! (We have a satellite uplink which costs a fortune to use, so that's a pretty big deal.) So me and a couple of others are starting a 3-month trial blogging period. If it seems to go well, we’ll continue.

So that means that if you’d like this blog to continue, let me know! If you want to know more about life or work here, email me! Be great to hear from you.