Rescued in Agali

What do you do when you're stranded in the middle of the jungle in an airplane that won't start? You could try calling Triple A, but last I heard they weren't servicing Western Province.

Our pilot had a look under the cowling (I just learned that word and I'm very proud of it . . . the cowling of an airplane is like the hood of a car) and decided that a spring in the starter clutch was broken. Wouldn't you know it, not a single one of us had packed an extra Cessna 206 starter clutch spring! Whatever were we thinking? So we called back to Ukarumpa aviation with our satellite phone, and a noble pilot and mechanic spent their Saturday flying out to Agali to bring us a spring and fix the airplane. Meanwhile, Sara and I rechecked our word list and had a nice chat with lots of curious people.
Finally, on Saturday afternoon, over 24 hours after we had planned to arrive, we touched down in Selbang. We were still sitting in the plane, as the pilot slowed the engine, when I saw someone with a large backpack walking towards us and I did a double take, because at first glance I almost thought he wasn't a Papua New Guinean. My second glance revealed that he was most definitely NOT Papua New Guinean . . . a Caucasian male of unknown identity was walking down the airstrip towards our plane! Now, bear in mind that this is an extremely remote area . . . the nearest town takes four days to walk to, and there are no drivable roads. I'm not sure whether we were more surprised to see him or he was more surprised to see us! Turns out he was on a backpacking adventure, hurt his knee near that village and decided to wait for a plane to land . . . and 12 hours later ours landed! Our pilot flew him back to Agali (where the pilot was asked to preach in a church service the next day!) and then on to his next destination.

When the plane didn't start in Agali, as our pilot was poking around under the cowling, we prayed specifically that God would somehow use this series of (from our perspective) unfortunate events for good. I'm sure He has and will in ways we may never be aware of, but He also let us see a few of the good things He did with it. We were able to help the stranded backpacker . . . if we had landed the day before, when we'd planned to, he wouldn't have been there yet! The pilot had the opportunity to share God's truth with people in Agali the next day . . . if the starter spring hadn't broken he wouldn't have been there long enough to do that!

As you can see, we had our share of adventure before the survey really even started. And if you think the adventure ended when the survey began . . . well . . . you just keep thinking that and come back later to find out how wrong you were!

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow!

One thing that originally drew me to survey was my craving for adventure. I never wanted to just live a "normal life" . . . and while everyday life in Ukarumpa honestly is pretty "normal", the past ten days have definitely fallen closer to the adventure side of things! There is no way I can do this survey justice in one blog post, so with your permission (or without it, actually) I'm gonna spread out the excitement and take the next few days to tell you about the past few days.

I see that the day before I left I presumptuously wrote, "tomorrow . . . the aviation van will pick us up at 6am and take us to the airstrip, where we will leave at 7am in a Cessna 206." A very wise man, inspired by the Holy Spirit, once wrote, "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city . . .' Why you do not even know what will happen tomorrow . . . Instead you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.' " James 4:13-15 should've been our theme song for this survey.

But I should start at the beginning. The aviation van did pick us up at 6 am and take us to the airstrip, where the Cessna 206 was waiting for us.

And there it waited for us, and there we waited for it, until 7 am, when we began waiting with it . . . for the fog to lift. It was too cloudy to take off, so we waited until 8 am . . . and then we waited until 9 am, at which time we began waiting until 10 am. Just when we were wondering if the aviation van would be taking us home that night, the weather cleared enough to leave, so off we flew, heading for Selbang village, our first stop in the Setaman language area.

Or, so we thought. Setaman is in a very mountainous region, and as we approached the area there were thick clouds hanging all around the mountains. Not so great for landing, or flying through mountains for that matter. So our pilot wisely turned back and landed at Agali, a nearby airstrip that we could actually see from the air. We waited there for a couple hours and then made a second attempt to fly into Selbang, but with no success. So there we were, in Agali for the night. It wasn't even in the language area we were trying to get to, but we didn't really know much about this language either, so we took a word list, chatted with some people, and did a whole mini survey within our survey!

It was a gorgeous area, and the next morning revealed a gorgeous day. Perfect for flying through mountains. We packed up our stuff, got in the plane, and . . .

THE PLANE WOULDN'T START!

What did the survey team do? Were they stuck in Agali forever? Did they spend the next 6 months hiking back to Ukarumpa, or did pterodactyls appear from behind the mountains and carry them to their destination? You'll have to check back later to find out! In the meantime, you can have a look at some of the new photos in the slide show.

Off tomorrow!

Dude, I feel like it's been ages since I've blogged . . . I've been madly trying to finish up one last report before we leave for

survey . . . tomorrow!!! I got the report sent off to our consultant right before I left the office yesterday and I am very relieved. Now I can focus on getting ready to go tomorrow . . . the aviation van will pick us up at 6am and take us to the airstrip, where we will leave at 7am in a Cessna 206 (for those of you to whom that means anything . . . it would have meant nothing to me before I came here), a tiny 4-seater plane!

The other day I made trail mix for our long hikes, this morning I got my backpack mostly packed, so now I need to print out the questionnaires that we'll use when we interview people, meet with the translator who's coming with us to discuss a few last minute details, make sure we have copies of maps to bring with us, return books to the linguistics library, find blank minidiscs so we can record the word lists . . . hmmmm, what else? Maybe clean my desk if I have time.

And now one of our friends has arrived in the office with a "last dessert" as an afternoon snack . . . so I'm going to go have dessert and I'll get back to you in a week!

Another report done!

Well, sorry if you're tired of good news, because I have more of it! We had yet another survey report approved last week, this time a report about the Domung language in Madang Province. Four guys from the Domung language area recently attended the Translators' Training Course (TTC) in Ukarumpa and they are starting to translate portions of Scripture into the Domung language! You can see them on the left, in the TTC dining hall, along with our team leader Bonnie, who went on the Domung survey. Pray for these guys and the huge job ahead of them!

You know you are in PNG when . . .

. . . you are neither surprised nor alarmed by "randomly" burning hillsides. Here is the view from my porch last weekend.

As one of my friends from California recently said, "If I was at home right now, I would so be calling the fire department." It is very common in PNG to clear an area of land for a garden by simply lighting a fire and letting it go. These fires are rarely attended, but it is so moist here that they never get out of control. Well, OK, I guess one should never say never, because maybe it happened one time a hundred years ago or something. I have never heard of one getting out of control. I have been told that these fires can also be useful for getting rid of tall grass that raskols (Tok Pisin for "criminal") could hide in, or for chasing out animals during a hunt.

Here, let me play you a video of the fire across from my house, so you can hear it crackle!

Happy 4th of July!

We had a fabulous 4th of July party on Saturday night. It was fun because there were people from five different countries there, so we ended up singing everybody's national anthems! We even had a couple of our British friends there to help us celebrate.

Fireworks are not readily available in PNG, but we have found a very fun substitute in "flaming steel wool" . . . you know, that stuff you use to scrub really nasty pots that have lots of stuff burned on to the bottom. If you get a little piece of steel wool, tie it to a string, light it on fire and then swing it around in a huge circle it gives a pretty specatcular show, as you can see for yourself in the photo. You just have to make sure that you swing it in the right direction so you don't shower flaming bits of steel wool onto your audience. Hmmm, now I feel like I should give a disclaimer: do not try this outside of PNG!

LCORE

Yesterday I got to give a tour of our linguistics building (shown on the left) to a group of college students who are here visiting for a week. We call our department LCORE, which stands for Language Collaboration, Opportunities, Resources and Encouragement . . . basically it's a resource centre for all the language work going on in PNG. Lots of people work in LCORE besides our survey team: consultants, an ethnomusicologist, literacy specialists, people who specialize in finding creative ways to help people use Scripture, people who are working to get our linguistic papers published. It was fun for me to take this group of students around and hear everyone explain what they do . . . I always enjoy hearing people who love their work tell other people about it. Who knows . . . maybe someday one of those students will be working here themselves!

Approved!!!

We got a survey report approved last week!!! I think I may have mentioned the process before, but here's a recap: we write a report, then a sociolinguistics consultant goes through and makes lots of wise comments. We read the wise comments, edit the report and send it back to the consultant, who makes more wise comments and sends it back to us again . . . and so it goes until everybody is happy with it. This process can take quite awhile: the report that was approved last week was from my very first survey, in March 2008. Here's a picture of the team that was involved in that survey: