Paul's PNG Mission Trip - Ep 07

[pandrews]

(March 2nd, 2010)

Praise God!
I made it safely to Papua New Guinea and to the home of the Lutz's in
Mambis on Saturday, February 20th, 2010! That is almost exactly a
year
after being officially accepted for the GEO missionary position
through
LCMS (Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod). From my notes it looks like
it
took just under 27 hours of wheels up time, to say nothing of the
layovers, to fly from Fairbanks, Seattle, Tokyo, Singapore, Port
Moresby, Mt Hagen. That's a lot of seat time.

The weather here has been absolutely beautiful. It's been partly
cloudy
with showers in the mid-afternoon and at night with daytime highs in
the
low 80's and overnight lows in the mid 60's. The people here have
been
similarly warm as it's very common to wave at everyone
walking/driving/sitting by the roadsides here. Just about like rural
Nebraska was when I was growing up.

The mission house here is as nice or nicer than any house in the
states
with solar hot water, indoor plumbing, hydro electricity from the
local
stream, wood floors, and a bed that provides an excellent nights
sleep.
Feels like home already. There's even a TV that gets the one local
channel broadcast from Port Moresby with sports from Australia shown
at
night.

Besides recovering from jet lag, I've started to concentrate on
learning
Melanesian Pidgin, the local (perhaps universal is a better word here
as
Enga is the real "local" language) trade language. It's a blend of
English, Dutch and local languages that is similar enough to English
that I've already gotten a few words down, but there's a very long way
to go before I'd consider myself fluent.

The way different people groups function seems to be very similar to
the
way that time exists in their day to day dealings. For most of the
US,
time the bottom line. You want to know what the time is to the
minute,
or at least within five minutes. When I moved to Alaska, I was
informed
about Alaskan time, which was give or take about fifteen minutes. On
the mission trip to Kenya, the feelings on time were much more lax,
somewhere along the lines of "if it doesn't get done today, there's
always tomorrow". Time here seems to reflect much of that mentality.
Church officially starts at 9:30 (I think), but we don't actually
start
thinking of walking the short distance to the building until after 10,
and then it may not start until 11. Meetings tend to start whenever
it
appears the enough people are present to begin, and when deciding
things
in a group everyone has the opportunity to express their thoughts on
the
matter and the group comes to a consensuses on what direction to
proceed. This process can take hours, or more it seems. It will all
take a little getting used to for a westerner that still is tied to
that
little ticking band on his arm.

Thank you all for the prayers and support you have given me over the
past year. I hope that if you have any questions about life here that
you don't hesitate to ask, but don't be surprised if the response
happens to be significantly delayed as time has a very different
meaning
in PNG. Please rest assured that a response will appear in your inbox
in due time.

In Christ,
Paul Andrews
http://zloof.blogspot.com/