My First Birthday (In PNG)

People often ask us what we do for entertainment here in Ukarumpa. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are fairly regular community activities, especially as the end of each school term approaches. Last week we attended a chorus concert and a marching band concert, both of which were held in the meeting house. Since it wasn’t outdoors, the marching band actually marched around the benches in the meeting house!

However, there are often times when we have to make our own fun—particularly during school breaks. One common pastime of ours is to play games. We shipped over three games, but we soon found that game nights are such a frequent occurrence here that we got tired of our three games really quickly! During our current school break (last two weeks of September), Eric borrowed a game from a friend for us to play. It has so many components that we just left it out on the table for a week to play when we weren’t busy preparing for next term (or teaching English lessons!).

My birthday also occurred over the school break, so Eric designed a scavenger hunt that led to my birthday present. He had a hard time finding a gift because there aren’t many present-y items available here! Eventually the clues led to a ziploc bag of Red Vine bites. Our store is not well stocked at the moment, so the best thing he could think of to do was buy a combo bag of red and black licorice and take out all the black pieces! It was the sweetest birthday present I’ve ever gotten.

What Is it?

These are some common sights in PNG. Can you figure out what they are? Answers are at the bottom.

1

2

3

4

5

6

Photo by Kristy Johnson

7

1: “Cradle” (baby sleeping in a bilum, or a woven string bag)

2: Bathroom in the village (like an outhouse, but just a hole in the ground)

3: Shower (Bucket showers that we used during training. In the village we just used the river. In Ukarumpa, we have modern showers.)

4: Bush gas station (there are several stops like this along the highway in between cities to buy petrol)

5: Turtle eggs (boiled, to be eaten)

6: School bus (kids from a local high school piled in the back to come to Ukarumpa for a sports tournament)

7: Ambulance (used by our clinic to transport people if they can’t get to the clinic on their own)

In the Studio

When we arrived in Ukarumpa, I discovered that there was a need for English as a Second Language tutors, which is one of the subjects I minored in at college. I decided to devote my mornings to working in the English Assistance department, which offers tutoring for non-native English speakers, and spend my afternoons teaching social studies at the primary campus. Currently, I have four adult students I work with in the mornings: two Korean translators, a construction worker from the Netherlands, and one national woman.

In addition to tutoring, I am also working as part of a team that is developing mobile apps to be used in PNG classrooms to help students learn English. Once students in PNG reach third grade, all of their instruction is in English, but not all schools have the resources they need to teach English.

We are just in the beginning stages of designing a series of apps to progress students toward fluency. One of the apps that has already been designed is a listening library. We have a collection of illustrated short stories which you can listen to as the words are highlighted on the screen. Some of the stories have been recorded already, but several more still need to be recorded and added to the library.

I had the opportunity recently to record five of the stories that will be added to the library. We have a recording studio here (often used for recording the Bible in various languages), and I was set up with a mic and headphones in a soundproof room, looking through a window at the people who were recording me on the other side. It was a bit intimidating!

Since then, we’ve started using an Australian English speaker to record the stories, because Australian pronunciation and accent is the standard for English in PNG. It’s neat to think, though, that someday kids in a classroom in PNG may be listening to my voice as they learn English!