In
Ukarumpa, it’s uncommon to have just one job, and one of my many
jobs is working in the community library once a month. The library is
housed in the basement of what is called the Elim Haus (pronounced
“house”). Upstairs, there are small meeting rooms, and many
Saturdays a team of people on center host a coffee house for two
hours with food, tea, and coffee, so we get the “Starbucks
experience” for a few hours each week!
My
responsibilities at the library include opening it up for two hours
on my scheduled Saturday, re-shelving books, sorting check out cards,
and preparing donated books to be added to the collection. We have
quite a large selection of books, including fiction,
non-fiction, classics, and science fiction, as well as a children’s
section with everything from early readers to teen selections.
After
my shift ends, I often stop by our local movie rental place on the
way home! Many of the houses here have outbuildings, and one family
has turned their outbuilding into the Ukarumpa version of
Blockbuster. For three kina (roughly one dollar), you can check out a
movie from their collection for three nights. The family who
currently runs the movie rentals (called R&R) came back from
furlough at the beginning of this school year, so they brought some
new movies and TV shows with them. We were thrilled to discover they
had brought the most recent season of NCIS (which is no longer the
most recent season) because we had left for PNG in the middle of the
season. Several months later, we were able to find out what happened!
