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.