Did you remove your helmet?

A petrol station near Madang town

Free haircuts!

Well, if any of you are in need of a haircut, you are welcome to come to Papua New Guinea and get a free one, because I went to a haircutting class this weekend! There's a lady here who is quite good at the aforementioned skill and on Saturday she gave a free demonstration of her talents . . . so since I watched someone give three haircuts, I'm clearly an expert now, right? One thing, though, before you book your tickets . . . I WILL require signed evidence that you will in no way hold me responsible for any loss of style and/or bits of ears. Seriously, though, if I had to give a haircut now it would be much better than it would have been before. I like it that people here are always ready and willing to share their talents and experience.

Maybe after your haircut you can have a delicious Papua New Guinean meal, like this one we had in Wagi . . .

Corn, greens, cabbage, fish and sweet potatoes . . . probably all cooked in coconut milk. Mmmm!

Cool Playground!

I just finished comparing the Wagi word lists, which, I must say, is my favorite part of any survey report. I took five lists of 170 words, lined them up and decided which words were similar and which were different (there is a detailed set of guidelines for this process, I don't just follow my own whim, but I will spare you the details here!). Then I used a computer program to calculate the percentage of words that are similar. So at the end of the process I'm able to say, for example, "If you're comparing Village A with Village B, 95% of the words on the list are similar between these two villages." This helps us get a general idea of where dialect boundaries are and which villages can probably understand each other.

On another note . . . who needs a playground when you have a tree like this?!

Evening service

Here's a Papua New Guinean evening church service in the Wagi language area. Churches are usually built with very low walls and huge, wide open windows, as you can see here. There are two very useful things about this style: one is that it allows lots of air to flow through. In the lowlands of PNG (where Wagi is) it is very hot almost all of the time, and in a crowded space everyone wants as much air as they can get! The other benefit is that if the church fills up, people can just stand outside along the walls, lean in the windows and worship along with everyone else! Who needs a building expansion when the walls don't keep people out?

I work, ants play

I think I already mentioned that Sara (my survey team mate) went to Australia to help take care of Krista, who needed surgery on her foot. Well, Sara's shoulder has really been bothering her, so she decided to go ahead and see a doctor while she was down there, and it turns out she needed surgery too! So I guess they're kind of taking care of each other. Please do pray for Sara and Krista, especially because Sara's recovery time is going to be a little longer than she first expected. They're hoping to be back in Ukarumpa later this week.

As for me, I am still deep in the world of survey reports. Today I'm taking a break from writing about Wagi language use to edit our Bena Scripture Use report. Whenever we write a report it gets checked by consultants, who write lots of useful comments before they send it back to us. Then we read the useful comments, make lots of brilliant changes and send it back to the consultants so they can read it again and make more useful comments. This process continues until everyone is happy with it.

I know this picture is a bit random, but it makes me laugh. There were about 20 ants partying at the drinking hole when I started getting my camera out, but I guess I scared most of them away.

Inventing new words . . .

Languages are always changing. That's a fact. Tok Pisin, the common trade language in many parts of PNG, is no exception. In fact, because Tok Pisin originally developed as a mixture of several languages, and because in many ways it is still developing, I would venture to say that Tok Pisin may be changing even more quickly than the average language. Tok Pisin has a relatively limited vocabulary so, although it is possible to say anything you want to say, sometimes it takes several words or even a whole sentence to explain a particular concept. That's no problem if you're not in a hurry, but sometimes people take a "shortcut" and simply stick in an English word, often adding Tok Pisin verb endings or changing the sounds to fit with common Tok Pisin sounds. If a particular English word is used often enough, by enough people in enough places, it eventually becomes "adopted" into Tok Pisin and people begin to think of it as an actual Tok Pisin word rather than a borrowed English word.

For example, take the English word 'catch', change it to 'kets' (since 'ch' is not a common sound in Tok Pisin), add the Tok Pisin verb ending -im, and you have 'ketsim', a brand new Tok Pisin verb. When does it officially become Tok Pisin? Please let me know if you ever find out . . .

PNG Cooking 101

Probably the most typical Papua New Guinean meal is sweet potatoes (the Tok Pisin word is 'kaukau' and it's pronounced like 'cow-cow') boiled in coconut milk, often with some cooked greens on top. To make this succulent dish, you first must 'sigarap', or scrape, the coconut, which is what this handy little bench is for. If you look closely on the far end (the end the coconut is sitting on), you'll see a strip of metal sticking out. Break open a coconut, sit on the bench, and use the metal edge to scrape the coconut out into a bowl set below. You can then squeeze the milk out of your scraped coconut, add some water and kaukau, and you're ready to go!

Traditions and Tones

It's a bit late, I guess, but Happy Easter! On Thursday night some friends and I had a passover seder dinner together. It meant a lot to experience that little window of Jesus' life, to have a glimpse into what He was doing the night before He died, and see when it was that He washed His disciples' feet and handed Judas the piece of bread to show who would betray Him. It was also cool to see how the passover celebration pointed to Jesus for thousands of years before He ever came to earth! At one point during the meal, there are three pieces of flat bread in a napkin. The middle piece is taken out, broken, and hidden. Later the kids (or the adults if there are none!) hunt for the broken bread and whoever finds it gets a prize. Just like Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, left His home to be broken and hidden in the earth so that whoever finds Him will have the greatest reward! And that tradition was established before He was even born!

Last night a visiting Australian linguist gave a presentation about some work he's done in Cameroon. Many languages there are "tonal", which basically means that the meaning of a word can change depending on the pitch you use when you pronounce it. It can be pretty complicated to devlop an alphabet for a tonal language . . . how do you mark the tone? Should you mark ALL the tones or only the tones on words that could easily be confused with another word? This guy did an experiment and found that, in one language, people could actually read it MORE quickly and with FEWER mistakes when tone was NOT marked at all! Fascinating.