Some Snapshots of our House Building Trip to Indonesia
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!
Tim was seen grimacing like this for 5 hours during one leg of our trip as he sat right behind 500 smelly, chirpy, chicks.
Dave, was trying to prove his point to Judge Tim that it was on the black and not the yellow.
(It is ok Dave, we let you have that one because it was your birthday…)
Here are some final shots of the living room, office, and kitchen areas.
Note: their oven sits on top of that flat stove…weird! I don’t think they are into using the oven folks!
PNG National Anthem
I thought you would enjoy seeing and hearing exactly what it sounds like when the kids in PNG sing there National Anthem in a special school program. English is the “official” spoken language of Papua New Guinea.
Air Nuigini – Commercial seen on local TV
From a western perspective, I find that PNG has some really funny commercials. However, I honestly believe this is by far the best quality commercial I have seen aired over EM TV…their only local TV Station.
Bamboo joints explain justification!
How would you explain the Biblical concept of justification to your next door neighbor? How about explaining it to a recent immigrant to your area who is learning English? What about a group of people who speak a language with no one word for “justification”?
For us, one way to answer that last question involved bamboo joints and dirty sticks.
So what does justification have to do with bamboo joints and dirty sticks?
Well, a lot, if you happen to be a Tobo believer coming to our weekly gatherings to study Romans.
At the end of chapter 3, we discussed the fact that our faith in Christ does not mean that we stop sinning and become perfect people in our daily lives on this earth. But it does mean that God says of us, or declares of us, that we are straight and righteous people now. This not of ourselves, we know that we still mess up and sin on a daily basis. But the righteousness we have is that of our Lord Jesus Christ! When God sees us, He no longer sees our sinfulness, since Christ took care of the penalty for that when He died on the cross. Instead, He sees us as covered with the righteousness of His Son and our Savior. Wow! All that is wrapped up in that big term “justification”.
To communicate this important (and freeing!) concept of justification, I had Tingon bring me a nasty brown bamboo joint that was old and covered in dirt, and another freshly-cut shiny clean green bamboo joint (bamboo joints are hollow tubes with segments between the hollow spaces at top and bottom). These two joints were cut open at the top, and the bottoms left on, so they formed 2 long cylinders like large cups that a small child could reach their arm into. I then had Tingon bring me several dirty sticks, which I put into the dirty joint.
I had a number of curious eyes on me as I held up the dirty joint and pulled one of the dirty sticks out of it.
“Is this stick clean or dirty?” I asked.
“Dirty!” was the response.
“What about the bamboo joint?”
“It too is very dirty!”
I then took the stick and put it into the glistening green joint. “Is the stick clean now?”
“No, the stick’s still dirty.”
“That’s true. What about this joint?”
“The joint’s very clean!”
“Can you see the stick now that I put in down into the joint?”
“No, only if you take the stick back out.”
Then I put a few sticks into the clean joint, and left the rest in the dirty one. “These sticks are all dirty, and they represent us people. At first, we were all in the dirty joint, stuck in our sinfulness, in Satan’s joint and under the hand of (meaning control or power of) Satan and sin.
“Then, just as I grabbed some sticks and put them into the clean joint, God has put us into the clean joint of Yesu. Just as the stick is still dirty, we are still people who sin even after being placed into Yesu’s clean joint. However, just as the stick is hidden in the clean joint and all we see is the good cleanness of the joint now, so now God looks at us as hidden inside of Yesu and His cleanness. Because of the cleanness of Yesu, He now says of us that we are straight people in his eyes.”
At this point, there were lots of nods, smiles, and whispers of “Élok!’ (“True!”) from the group. I then asked them this:
“So, did God take some of these sticks and put them in there because they were a little bit cleaner or better than the other dirty sticks still in the dirty joint?”
“No, they are all the same, all dirty.”
“You’re right! So then we too are not better or cleaner than our friends who have not believed in Yesu. But we are now in a better place in God’s eyes, aren’t we?”
“Oh, yeah! We still sin even now, but God still took us out of Satan’s joint and put us into Yesu’s joint because of what He did for us!”
So, readers of this email, if you have trusted in Christ to pay the penalty for your sin once and for all, then you along with our Tobo brothers and sisters are all safely in His bamboo joint and God sees us in that special place as perfectly clean—not because we are better than other people, but as a result of the righteousness of Christ He covered us with when we first believed! Can I get an “Amen” now? Or perhaps an “Égat migi i élagék yamda,” (Tobo for “This talk is hugely true”)?
(Taken from Chad Mankins – a PNG missionary with the Tobo people.)