Exam Week

This has been a busy week in Hamelengan village.  There have been lots of extra people visiting here as this is the week of the Grade 8 school exams.

 

We have seen the school here in Hamelengan grow and flourish in our almost 10 years of working with the Nukna people.  When we first came, it was fairly ‘normal’ to have a school year where only 3 grades were offered (such as 1^st, 3^rd and 5^th) due to a shortage of teachers and classroom space.  But now, the school is growing and thriving.  Over the past few years they have added grades 7 and 8, as well as built a separate “Elementary” school (for the equivilent of grades 1 and 2).  And it’s also exciting that at least half of the teachers are from the Nukna area—something that is rare indeed – usually teachers are brought in from other parts of the country.

 

In many ways, school here is similar to any school you might find in the US.  In many other ways, it’s extremely different.  Aside from the lack of electricity in the classrooms, dirt floors and bamboo walls, and school starting with the kids working for half an hour or so cleaning the school grounds (ie:  weeding or cutting the soccer field grass with their machetes), one of the most stark differences (in my opinion) is the Grade 8 Exam.

 

In my home culture, Grade 8 is just one more year in the long 12 years of school.  It’s a bit exciting… it’s the finish of the “Middle School” years, where kids leave childhood behind and enter highschool as teens.  But there’s nothing terribly important or distinct about Grade 8.

 

Here, that’s not the case.  Every year, about this time, all the grade 8 students here in PNG must take an exam.   This exam is of the utmost importance to the students and their families.  When the results of the exam come back, the grade 8 students find out whether their school career is over, or whether they can continue on to Grade 9 and beyond.  (Grade 9 is not a grade currently taught at the Hamelengan school.  For those students who pass the grade 8 exam and continue on to 9^th grade, they must go to Derim, a several -days hike from here, where they board and only come home on school holidays.)  So this exam is a HUGE thing!  (And if they pass and go on to grades 9 and 10, they have to take another big exam at the end of grade 10 to see if they can move on to grades 11 and 12.)

 

So this week here in Hamelengan the Grade 8 Exam was given.  Last year, every single Grade 8 student here in Hamelengan passed the test – 21 out of 21!  That was a proud moment for both the students and their teachers, as a 100% pass rate is extremely rare.  This year, 23 students took the test.  About half of the students aren’t from Hamelengan village, so their families hiked here for the week to support them.  Some came from the beach, a 2 day hike from here, and some from over the mountains to the east.  All the local families from here in Hamelengan who have Grade 8 students just stayed home this week – no working in their gardens - cooking extra special foods for their kids so that they would have the energy and brain power for the exam.  Two of our main co-translators, Simendi and Muransi, have daughters who took the exam this year. 

 

So the village has been overflowing with guests who are staying with relatives and friends so they can encourage and pray for their kids while they take their exams.  On the last day, lots of men  went to Siang village (a 3-ish hour hike, one-way) to pick up a pig and carry it back for a feast for the kids to celebrate the end of their exams.  All the parents pooled their money to buy the pig as a special treat for the students.  Once the feast was over, the afternoon ended with prayer, speeches, and gifts such as homemade spears and woven mats for the exam proctor.

 

Today and tomorrow the village will start to shrink back to it’s ‘normal’ size as parents head back home now that the exam is done.  School will continue on through the rest of the school year (following the school year in Australia where the school year starts in Jan and ends in Dec).  And the students will wait, probably until January, for their exams to be graded at the educational admin offices in the provincial capital, Lae.  Once the grading is completed, the results will be carried back, first by airplane and then by hand over the mountainous jungle trails.  Only then will they find out which students are eligible to continue on to grade 9, and which have failed and are finished with schooling for the rest of their lives.  Talk about nerve-wracking!  But after last’s year’s incredible success, hopes are high that most or all will pass this year too.

Birthday Boy

 

Two years ago, (after the most painful labor I’ve experienced out of all my childbirth experiences)  I got to hold this tiny, perfect new little boy.  I kid you not… some of the first words out of my mouth were, “I’ve seen this baby before!”  It’s true!  Elijah definitely is a Taylor, and looks just like his older brothers (especially Nathan).

 

And now, two years have flown by.  Elijah’s gone from being a snuggly little newborn, to being a petite little toddler who races around, jabbering and singing away and trying his best to keep up with his four older siblings.  I’m amazed at how he has gone from barely talking about two months ago to talking non-stop.

 

For his birthday yesterday it was fairly low-key.  Being in the village for birthdays has both its good and bad.  We have to keep things fairly simple… we don’t have the resources or space to do a huge production.  And I don’t have to worry about throwing a birthday party!  I think Elijah’s first official birthday party will probably be for his 3^rd birthday, when we are in America (last October we were in the village too).  So yesterday afternoon we let Elijah open his 3 presents (a book, a bouncy ball, and some trains).  He was thrilled.  Choo-choos are some of his most favorite things in the world, with only choppers (helicopters) and balls coming in close behind.

 

Today (the officially designated “Birthday Party Day”) we’ll be having cake and playing party games later this afternoon in honor of Elijah and Justin’s birthdays.  More on that to come…….

Visitors!!!

Last weekend we had a (very) rare treat!  Visitors!!!  Now, PNG in general is not on the way to anywhere.  Our village is even less so.  And since a helicopter is the only way to get in here (unless you would prefer to hike a minimum of 6 hours over very steep, rugged mountains), well, let’s just say that we don’t have guests just dropping by on a regular basis.  We’ve actually had quite a few people who have said they would like to visit us and come out to see the village where we work.  But generally, they don’t actually make it.  The realities of how far PNG is from anywhere, and then the ruggedness and price of the helicopter to get out to Hamelengan are pretty dissuasive.

 

So it was a special treat to have a group of five people fly into our village last Saturday morning!  We had been contacted by the aviation department earlier in the week, asking us if we’d be open to having some international visitors drop in for a couple of hours.    We said, “Sure, why not!”  So on Friday morning we found out that the group would be coming Saturday morning.  So we spent Friday afternoon racing around straightening things up and making things nice.

 

The visitors who came were a group of ‘bigwigs’ from JAARS who were on a vision trip to see (in aviation primarily?) how things worked here in PNG.  One was actually the president of JAARS.  Three members of the group had never been to PNG before, so this flight was a chance for them to see a little more of the country, and actually get to go to a PNG village and meet/talk to some translators. (We got some good pictures, but you’ll have to wait a couple weeks until I’m back in Ukarumpa so I can insert them into this post.)  A group of men in the village stayed up till after 11pm on Friday night planning a Singsing (traditional dances/singing) to welcome the visitors.  After the pilot took them on a rather extended scenic tour of our valley, they landed and were greeted with flower necklaces, the singing and dancing group and then were presented with spears.  We took them on a tour of the village… showing them the school, church, aid post and other interesting things.  Then we came back to our house and spent about an hour or so just chatting about the translation work, what it’s like here, and about aviation and how they help us and the community here.  Then the maybe 2 ½ hours were up and the clouds were coming down so they headed back to the helicopter and back to Ukarumpa for the rest of their short stay here in PNG.

 

Aside from getting a chance to meet some really nice people who were such an encouragement to us, the unexpected flight was also able to bring out some goodies for us!  The most important were the alternator belts that enabled Matt to fix our broken generator so that power wouldn’t be quite as stressful of an issue.  Also, thanks to two dear friends who spent a good portion of Friday racing around throwing together a ‘care package’ at the last moment, we had a few other special treats that we’ve really been enjoying!

 

Out here, we pretty much don’t get any fresh fruits or veggies for the whole of our stay.  I generally bring out a few things at the beginning—some carrots, apples, bananas, potatoes, onions—to use at the start of our stay.  But then, aside from any dehydrated fruit I’ve prepared, that’s often it (as far as fresh produce goes) for the rest of our stay.  So it was a special treat to receive apples and carrots in our ‘care package’.  We also got some fresh mince and real cheese (having no refrigeration, we only eat the dehydrated versions of these) and we had a super special treat of hamburgers for dinner that night!  Matt got a still-cold coke and we got a bunch of chocolate goodies like TimTams and M&M’s.  We’ve been rationing out the carrots and apples, sharing like 1 each every couple of days.  I’ll be using some of the candy to decorate the boy’s birthday cake this afternoon!

 

It’s such a blessing to have such thoughtful, generous friends who are willing to just race around and throw some goodies together at the last moment.

 

We thoroughly enjoyed last weekend and were glad that we could show some guests around Hamelengan!

My Own One-Room School House

As a kid, some of my favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie books.  I remember daydreaming about what it would be like to be a pioneer who travelled in a covered wagon, made everything from scratch and went to/taught a 1-room school.  With the exception of travelling about in a covered wagon, at times, my life feels surprisingly like Laura’s.  Or maybe even a bit more cushy, as I have indoor plumbing!

 

But as an adult, I try to fathom how a 15 year old taught a 1 room school and stayed sane!  Now that I have my own “school”, I realize just how difficult it is!  Trying to teach just 4 children in different grades each day presents a huge amount of challenges.

 

This morning, if you had dropped in to visit this is the scene you would have encountered:

 

I was sitting on the floor in the front room.  Julianne was sitting across from me and we were playing a number/counting game to practice recognizing numbers and matching it to the correct number of marbles.  Elijah (still in potty-training mode) was running around, pants-less, chasing after marbles, while I tried to keep half an eye on him to see if he needed to use the toilet.  At the same time, Justin sat by my side, reading a book out loud to me as I half-listened and tried to talk over vocabulary words he didn’t know how to pronounce or know what they meant.  While this was going on, Kaitlyn kept coming into the room with questions about her spelling work.    Just an average morning of homeschool at the Taylor house.

 

Believe me, my romaticized notion of one-room schools have definitely been cured!

And the Battle Rages On.....

I’m enjoying my view right now:  in the distance the bright blue of the sky is in sharp contrast to the varigated greens of the jungle-clad mountains that surround us.  Up closer, the leaves of the banana, coffee and betel nut trees are shining in the sunshine.  For this California girl, the warm sun that is beating down makes my heart happy! 

 

We definitely haven’t seen much of the sun in our 2+ weeks out here in the village.  We’ve had rain for 17 out of 17 days so far.  Lots and lots of it.  According to our rain gauge, we’ve received over 10 ½ inches so far.  Let’s just say that grey and gloomy is the norm around here!

 

I’m finding more and more that the unseen battle that’s going on around us is way more visible to me here in the village.  I can feel the darts of discouragement and depression that are thrown repeatedly at us.  It just seems like one thing after another contrives to slow down the translation work, and drive (me, especially) to discouragement.

 

The grey, wet rain is one of those things.  We started off this stay with a working generator.  It was great!  For 2 weeks, whenever our batteries got too low because of the lack of sun, we could run the generator for a couple of hours and Matt could keep working.  But once again this week, the generator, which has been a nightmare these past 3 years, broke yet again.  When we think of the hundreds of dollars spent flying it back and forth to be fixed, and the months and months it’s sat in the repair shop, waiting for parts, it’s honestly depressing.  Now we’re back to having to strictly ration our battery power.  On the dark, cloudy days, all the power has to go to Matt’s computer so that he can work for as many hours as the power lasts.  Often that’s only ‘till early afternoon before they get run down too far and he needs to stop.  There’s no extra power to let the kids play a computer game or watch a movie to break up the monotony of a long, rainy afternoon ..  Or even for me to play a 30 minute Zumba or Aerobics video so I can get some exercise.  Definitely discouraging.

 

Another frustration (coincidence?  I think not!) is that it seems like whenever we make trips out to the village, situations arise that make working on translation impossible.  During our last village stay, I believe Matt worked with our co-translators on revising Luke for a total of 3 days.  Out of 6 entire weeks! (He was able to work on other language-related things, just not specifically translating/revising.)  All these ‘hevis’ just seem to crop up with impeccable timing.  This stay so far, it’s been a massive, painful boil that one of our co-translators is having to deal with.  He can’t sit and is in a great deal of pain.  So obviously, it’s impossible for him to come sit in the office and work on translating.

 

So this morning, as I enjoy the warmth that the sun brings, I am reminding myself as I watch the cottony white clouds creeping down the mountains, that discouragement and depression won’t win!  Verses such as “We are more than conquerors….” and “I can do all things through Him who gives me strength,” are floating through my head.  God knows about the boil, and the generator, and the heaps and heaps of rain, and being trapped inside a little house with five stir-crazy and fighting kids!  And He’s more powerful!  These frustrations (while definitely difficult) won’t stop us from accomplishing that to which He has called us.

 

 

It's That Time Again......

 

Yep, the days are rapidly ticking down toward Elijah’s 2^nd birthday, and my ‘finally get out of the diaper stage’ itch is getting more noticable.  So, in a moment of insanity, I decided to start potty training Elijah last week.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I had just started up the new term of homeschooling with the kids and was still struggling to get back into the swing of things with teacing 4 different grade levels at the same time.  But Elijah was waking up regularly with a dry diaper in the mornings and my thrifty self just thought, “If I get him to the potty now, I can keep using the clean diaper for several more hours.”  So I began to potty train him.

 

My enthusiasm was very short lived when reality sunk in and a super-hydrated little boy who needed to be watched constantly kept making puddles because I had 4 other kids I was trying to teach new math concepts to, or listen to their reading, or teach a new letter of the alphabet to.  So about halfway through the morning the diaper went back on. 

 

But, once I get that taste of diaper freedom, it’s hard to not stop thinking about it and moving toward it!  So, in the week following that first attempt I have kept half-heartedly potty training.  I know, I know, not quite the way it’s supposed to be done, especially if you follow the “Potty Training in One Day” method.  But I don’t think the people who wrote that book had four other children to care for and homeschool!  I finally got to the point where it’s just easier to let E run around naked, but since we’re in the village, that’s perfectly acceptable.  In fact, my toddlers are probably the most-dressed kids the people here have ever seen!  I would say that up until probably Julianne’s age (4ish) most kids just run around naked.  So letting E just run around “as nating” (ass nothing= naked) as we say in Tok Pisin, is perfectly acceptable.  (And as an added bonus, it sure cuts down on all the laundry from any accidents!)

 

I think we’re not quite there yet…. (my kids tend to follow the “Potty Train in 2 Weeks” or even the “Potty Train in 6 years” plans), but I’ve seen some encouraging signs this week!  My goal is that by the time we head back to Ukarumpa in about a month, I will be done with diapers for good! =)  So we’ll see if that really happens, but it sure would be nice.

Terror in the Jungle

There are plenty of things to be scared about out here in the jungle:  crazy huge spiders as big as an outspread hand (or even bigger, sometimes), snakes, raging rivers, landslides, malaria-infested mosquitos, being far away from any emergency medical help.

 

This week I think I had one of my scariest experiences here so far (well, that is, if I don’t count that one week many, many years ago when I found 2 giant spiders and 3 snakes in my outhouse, and began my life-long rule of NEVER, EVER setting foot in an outhouse after dark, no matter how desperately I may need it!)  This week, my terror came from one not-so-terrifying-looking object:  a pressure cooker.

 

Now, once you’ve picked yourself up off the floor and managed to stop laughing, I’m serious!  Have you ever used one of those things before?  I never had.  I bought it off of someone who had to leave Ukarumpa unexpectedly, and as we’re always trying to find ways to keep our kilograms to a minimum as we helicopter out to our village, I thought it would be helpful to be able to bring out dried beans, rather than cans and cans of them (beans are probably our main protien source while we’re in the village).  A pressure cooker looks harmless enough – just a mostly normal looking saucepan, with a lid that can be securely fastened.  I guess I should have tested it out ahead of time back in Ukarumpa so I would know what I was getting into.  But well, I didn’t.

 

So the day came and I followed all the instructions on how to cook some pinto beans in the pressure cooker.  It sounded simple enough.  “Bring up to pressure and cook for 4-5 minutes.”  “No problem,” I thought.  So into the pot the beans and water went, and the stove was lit.  Then the waiting began.  The old adage, “A watched pot never boils” is even more true with a watched pressure cooker.  I think I hovered for close to 15 minutes before it began hissing and spitting steam.  That’s when it started to get scary!  There was so much pressure built up that it was trying to escape through the screw hole and any tiny cracks it could force itself through.  I actually evacuated the room.  I thought, “what if this thing just gets too pressurized and explodes!”  Let me just say that those 4-5 minutes felt like an eternity!  Watching the steam forcing it’s way through the screw, I just kept waiting for the entire thing to blow!

 

Thankfully, nothing exploded.  The millisecond that the alloted cooking time was up, I rushed over to the stove, armed with hotpads, to turn off the burner and remove the pressure thingie from the top of the cooker.  Wow!  I think for almost 5 straight minutes there was a volcanic-strength erruption of steam out the top of the pressure cooker.  Seriously terrifying!  Thankfully, once everything quieted down, and I was able to pry the lid open (worried the whole time that there might be some residual steam waiting to shoot out and burn me!), there were my beans, happily pressure cooked in like 5 minutes, rather than 3 hours!

 

So, I managed to survive my first experience with a pressure cooker!  I can guarentee that it will never top my list of “Favorite Kitchen Appliances”, but well, if I can save on weight of the supplies we bring out to the village (and the gas used to cook them) than it’s a good thing!