Building buildings, building relationships

The sun is beating down, but we are sheltered under our blue tarp. A welcome breeze occasionally finds its way to us, but sweat still floods our faces as we work to finish constructing our bamboo table. It is haus kuk building weekend, and we have spent the last day building a cooking shelter and picnic table of sorts. The national workers here at POC (Pacific Orientation Course) demonstrated building a haus kuk and table for us in just over one hour, and then turned us loose to build our own. We have all spent hours and hours since then working on our own!

In addition to the tent-like structure and table, we will have to build a fire pit for cooking in our haus kuk. Next weekend, we will have to cook all of our meals here. Eventually we are going to host our wasfamili for dinner in our haus kuk. Each family at POC has a local wasfamili that is like our adopted PNG family while we are here. Was literally means “guardian,” and wasmama and waspapa mean foster mother and father.

On Thursday, we met our wasfamili for the first time, although our waspapa works at POC (mostly chopping wood and other maintenance things), so we had met him once before. He has worked at POC since it began! In addition to our wasmama and papa, they brought three of their grandchildren with them. Everyone in our POC group sat with their wasfamili (on the floor) in our big meeting room, and we were served dinner: rice, sweet potato stew, and bread, followed by tea and what they called “cake” (which to us was banana bread).

Communicating with our famili was tricky because our Tok Pisin isn’t very strong yet, and our vocabulary is limited. We talked about where they are from, what kinds of food they like, where we are from, our family, and some other basic things. We had some cards with us from a game called Bohnanza, which was too difficult to teach them with limited language, but we made up a Go Fish-type game to play with the kids. About two hours before the families were due to show up, it started downpouring and never let up. It rains almost every night here (it’s rainy season), usually turning into beautiful, sunny days, but sometimes we get rain during the day, too. We were glad for no rain while building our haus kuk, but now we are ready for it to come cool down the temperature!