The Starbucks Experience

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!