Killing a Chicken
***Warning: This post is about killing a chicken! And there are pictures.
If you are eating breakfast while reading this post, it is your fault***
Stuff We Packed
We just got an email letting us know that all the stuff we shipped from America has arrived in Sydney and should be in Lae, PNG (a port city) at the end of October. After that, who knows–our neighbors had to wait over a month for their stuff to clear customs and make it to…
Our First Mumu
Here in PNG, one way to cook food is called a Mumu–it’s actually more of an event than just a way to cook food. Today we participated in our first one.
Adjustments
Taking out the trash is a bit more of a process here than at home. It starts with three separate receptacles in our house.
Mitupela Lainim Lo Tok Pisin*
We are full-time language learners now. We spend as much of our time talking with local people in the trade language (Pidgin) as we can. The rest of our “learning time,” we study, listen to our recordings and get ready for the next time we’ll talk with someone. We have a number of people who we meet with regularly to learn, but we also just walk around to find anyone willing to listen to our attempts. It’s an interesting, fun, challenging, humiliating experience.
*The two of us are learning to speak Pidgin
10 Pictures
Guess how many pictures there are.
The Cost of Friendship
Here in Papua New Guinea one of the important aspects of the culture we are learning about is the role of “friendships.” I put the word in quotes because a PNGian would translate the word “wantok” into english as “friend,” but it would not accurately reflect the true meaning of the word.
Bow Making
Yesterday one of our PNG friends took me (along with two other guys) on a hike a few miles away to visit some of his family (the actual relationship is not totally clear at this point.) When we got there, his cousin-ish relative showed us how to replace the “rope” on a bow (as in…