On Friday morning all the students at POC will be getting into vehicles with all their needed supplies and be sent off to different villages. We will be gone for 5 weeks, none of the villages have electricity, let alone a phone line so you probably won’t hear from us. Heidi and I have a 45min – 1hr hike into our village, Bemal 3. The people of Bemal will meet us and help us carry in all our boxes. We are situated in a valley close to a river, where we will wash ourselves, our clothes, and our dishes. We will be living in a village house of our own, which we are looking forward to. All the POC student families are within a fairly small area, and we can all see each other if we are willing to hike up to 5 hours. The closest POC students to us will be Peter & Jessica Schaafsma, another young couple who we get along well with and enjoy spending time with. Our village has a basketball court (probably a hoop, and a packed mud court floor), so we’re bringing out a new basketball for them, and are already planning to have basketball tournaments with Peter & Jessica’s village! So five weeks from now, we know we will have lots of stories to tell and lots of pictures to post for you all.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
3 Day Hike Report
Heidi providing first aid for a little boy in Girau.
We left POC to head out on our 3 day hike bright and early on Tuesday morning. Our group of 5 POC’ers and 2 national staff were dropped off at a side road off the highway about 1 hr drive from here, where we met our 4 guides. The first day of hiking was challenging, and also very beautiful, hiking through lots of rainforest and stopping at a beautiful natural swimming hole at lunch, where we all took a refreshing dip. We arrived at the first village, called Moad, and were warmly received by the very friendly people of that village. We had a very enjoyable evening with the people, and had a short singsing with them too, when they sang praise songs in their mother tongue, as well as in Tok Pisin. The next morning we set off at around 10:30 for the next village, called Girau. We got there about 2:30 in the afternoon, and also enjoyed our time there. The highlight of the evening was making popcorn for the people of the village. The last day, we had a 1 hour hike to the highway, where we were picked up by POC staff. Though we felt that the hike was a little bit too short (we would have loved to stay in the villages longer) we had a great time, and are now even more excited for village living…
When we came back from our hike, we had the joy of taking care of little Jonathan while his parents were gone on their hike. Below is a picture of Jonathan & Paul saying night time prayers.
