Some Snapshots of our House Building Trip to Indonesia

January 17, 2010 by admin
Filed under Ministry

This view is from the Sepik Valley in Papua New Guinea.

Our house building location was nestled in the rugged and isolated mountain ranges of Papua, Indonesia…there were snow on some peaks we flew by that day.

It was neat how the Lord brought each one of us together on this work team. Each with different talents and trades. We did not lack in any skill except someone who was good at keeping the rain away. It rained almost every day we were there and it was supposed to be their dry season.

This small chunk of change equal to 1 MILLION Rupiah is equivalent to $100. At least now we can say that we have been millionaire’s at least once in our lives.

While we worked on the house for the single girls…the tribal people continued to work on leveling the airstrip, one wheelbarrow at a time. Some of those rocks you see jutting up turned out to be larger then they were so they had to build large fires by them to cause the rocks to split and crack up into smaller pieces. Then they could be carried away off to the side of the airstrip.

I particularly enjoyed this moment watching the two girls practice their tribal language skills by trying to get the boys to wrap their clothesline around the proper fork in the tree. Everyone was exhausted when it was all done.

Don’t think the fire marshal would have been too happy with our temporary wire job to enable all the computers and peripherals to get power for our tech help session at night.

When the plainer bearing burned up 3/4 of the way through the project, we were lucky to find a portable plainer we could use to finish up the really rough spots.

The wires for the premade kit arrived too short to fit in their designated spot so we had to invert everything and put each 70kg/250 amp/hr battery on a top shelf up above our heads.

I wish I could say that I was trying to explain why I was putting aluminum on top of a septic tank but in reality I was probably telling him that I wanted him to help us redig the hole that had just collapsed because of heavy rains during the night. NOT FUN!

We were more then a few pieces short of plumbing parts on this job. We were trying hard to figure out how we were going to “rig” it to give them water…by that time Dave, the Master Plumber had already given up on keeping anything to code. “it will work…” would be his favorite line….he would then pause…and say, “out in the middle of nowhere”!

The tribal people were trying to get Porter to climb the rickety ladder because they were worried I would topple it for sure and then they would be without ANY ladder!

As going away gifts…we gave the kids some balloons to play with. You think we had given them some real treasures…and really got excited when I showed them how to make the balloons make noise by pulling the flaps of the balloon tight.

We met someone who had studied in PNG when he was a kid and had learned the Tok Pisin. (the everyday language of PNG) and it was neat to be able to communicate with the tribe through him. I would say a PNG joke and he would laugh with me and then get really serious and say, we can’t say that here…they will not think it is funny!