Guest Blog: Eric (on Coaching Basketball)

Bright and early at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, the Ukarumpa International School’s boys’ basketball and girls’ soccer teams loaded up in a convoy of four 15-seater vans to make the trek to Goroka for a day of sports competition with teams from the New Tribes missions school. The roughly 50-mile drive led us along winding ridges and pothole-infested roads for two and a half hours!

The games against New Tribes were the first official games for our teams this term. The games were also a unique experience for our boys’ basketball team; most of our games and practices take place on an outdoor court, but New Tribes has a full-size international court in their gymnasium. For the first, and possibly the only time, our players had to deal with a raucous crowd. I lost my voice by the end of the day trying to shout over the crowd to be heard.

There will be another tournament in the middle of March, which will be the only other set of official games the team has. Every Tuesday, a group of nationals who work on center play a scrimmage against the team, and a game against a group of expatriate men in Ukarumpa was also organized earlier in the season. I have had to share reffing responsibilities at these games, since we don’t have any official refs!

Super Bowl Monday

In the US, I’ve heard of people taking off work the day after the Super Bowl. On the other side of the world, you HAVE to take the day off if you want to watch the Super Bowl! Eric and I both have a few hours off after 11:30 a.m. on Mondays, so we were able to catch the second half of the game. With the recent introduction of satellite TV by one of the major mobile providers, some places on center have access to live TV. We went to the training center (where they regularly hold classes to teach computer/linguistic/etc. skills to national translators) where they had set up a screen to project the game for anyone who wanted to watch.

As we hurried along the ten-minute walk from our house to the training center, an awful thought hit Eric. The electricity had been out at our house all morning; what if it were out at the training center, too? Some places on center run almost exclusively on solar power. Others are powered mainly from batteries that collect excess solar power from those who have solar panels. And others, like us, depend on traditional power sources. We weren’t sure which category the training center fell in, so we didn’t know whether we would actually be able to watch the game or not!

When we arrived, we found out the electricity was on! Many people who showed up to watch the game brought their laptops with them so they could actually work during the game. We muted during all the commercials so they could focus on their work. Most of us who went to watch the game were Americans, but we did have one Australian and two Papua New Guineans join us!

Communication Faux Pas

Learning a new language and a new culture inevitably leads to mistakes now and again. Here are a few entertaining examples of miscommunication we have had while learning Tok Pisin.

During our month in village living, Eric often wanted to use the phrase “you don’t need to,” e.g. “You don’t need to spend your whole day giving us a tour,” or “You don’t need to find a spider to show Joella.” However, we didn’t know the word for “need” at the time, so he used the closest phrase he could think of. As it turns out, instead of telling people “you don’t need to,” he kept telling them “you must not” – “You must not give us a tour!”

When we were at training after we’d first arrived here, I had to go into the city to see a doctor. The nurse for our training group set up an appointment for me. The doctor told us to come on Saturday morning. When we arrived, he was the only one in the office—no other patients, secretaries, nurses, etc. He seemed surprised when the nurse told him I was there for my appointment; he had thought we were coming to tell him about our organization! He saw me anyway and told us to come back the following week to pay the bill because he didn’t know how to charge us!

One morning early on in our village stay, I was sitting with a group of people under (yes, under) our house. As one of them rolled a cigarette—tobacco was fairly commonly grown in the area where we did our village stay—they said, “Bruce! Bruce!” and held up the cigarette. I thought they were telling me that “bruce” was the word for tobacco, but then someone gestured with the cigarette for me to turn around, where I saw a man waiting to be introduced to me. I thought, “Phew, I’m glad I realized they were telling me that man’s name is Bruce and it’s not the word for tobacco.” The man joined the other men who were teaching Eric various crafts, and he taught Eric how to weave a mat. Later, someone asked Eric who had taught him to weave it, and I told Eric the man’s name was Bruce. He continued to tell people for a few days that Bruce had taught him. People seemed to have trouble figuring out who that was. Later we realized that the group I had been with was telling me that “bruce” is the word for tobacco—the man’s name was actually Terry!

Ten More Things About Life in Ukarumpa

1. You flip the light switch down to turn on the lights and up to turn them off.

2. Even in our rural mountain location, we often hear airplanes overhead. Our pilots make trips almost every day, whether to take people to the international airport in the capital, take translation teams to or from villages, or make supply/mail runs. We have helicopters and small 9-passenger planes.

3. Air conditioning is opening your windows. Heat (some mornings are in the 40’s during dry season) is building a fire, wrapping up in a blanket, or cuddling with your pets.

4. The clinic recommends that we bleach all of the fruits and vegetables we buy at the local market to clean them. One morning after bleaching, I found a black bug crawling around my lettuce. (Eric wasn’t home to kill it, so I had to kill it myself!) A few days later, a worm crawled out of my broccoli while I was cleaning it, and I found an inchworm on a carrot when I rinsed it!

5. Our two water sources are water that is collected in a rain tank (everyone has at least one in their yard) and treated water that is pumped in from the nearby river. We filter the rain water for drinking and use river water for laundry and showers.

6. All of our trash (“rubbish”) has to be burned, with obvious exceptions such as metal, ceramic, plastic, etc. Our trash gets separated into three bins: burnable, non-burnable (which is collected once a week), and food scraps (which get buried in the yard).

7. Several national ladies make tortillas to sell. We have a standing order with Rose, who comes to our house every Tuesday morning to deliver our dozen freshly-made tortillas, which cost about $3.

8. Most toilets have two options when flushing: full flush or half flush.

9. Because we are so close to the equator, the sun rises and sets at about the same time every day all year long, with sunlight from roughly 6:30-6:30.

10. Our (only) grocery store has to do an inventory every year, which meant it was closed for a week in September!

I'm Dreaming of an Ukarumpa Christmas Part II

Christmas Eve

• Participating in Norwegian Christmas Eve traditions:
• Viewing a 1986 Czech production of Cinderella that has been dubbed over in Norwegian with one man doing the voice of all the characters. This live-action movie is always shown on TV in Norway at 11 a.m. on Christmas Eve.
• Eating rice pudding, which is traditionally served around 12 p.m. on Christmas Eve in Norway (following the showing of Cinderella). There was a peeled almond hidden in each pot, so the two people who found the almond in their bowl of rice pudding won a chocolate marzipan bar. If you found the almond in your bowl, you had to hide it until everyone was finished eating, and then we discovered who had won.

• Sharing Christmas Eve dinner with friends on the veranda in the beautiful summer weather
• Attending a Christmas Eve service...BYOC (Bring Your Own Candle)

Photo by the Dedes

Christmas Day

• Following the end of the Bills game on Twitter
• Opening presents under our “tree” sent to us by our family, including 5 new T-shirts which is good because clothing wears out fast here!

• Gathering for a community Christmas service, during which we sang Christmas songs in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Korean, and Tok Pisin
• Planning to drink hot chocolate while watching a Christmas movie in the afternoon, but having to forgo both until the evening because it was so hot during the day, and the electricity went out for quite a while
• Watching a Christmas lights show that was created by a newly-arrived family here

I'm Dreaming of an Ukarumpa Christmas Part I

Though Christmas in Ukarumpa certainly has its differences, it is not quite as different as you might expect. Here are a few things we have done (and some improvisations we have made):

• Using my warm socks (not needed as much right now because it’s summertime!) for stockings

• Baking Christmas cookies together—Eric had to roll the dough because I fractured my pinky playing goalie at the fifth grade Christmas party

• Using a flashlight to see the cookie dough because the electricity went out periodically during the process
• Realizing after it was too late that I only had blue food coloring (the store closes at 4)...I decided the theme of my Christmas tree cookies was “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you”
• Attending a live nativity scene put on by community children, complete with a “live star”

Photo by Jenise Burgess

• Stocking up on food for two weeks because all of the departments, including the store, shut down for a two-week break
• Spotting the differences in a PNG nativity scene

Things You Don't Expect to See at a Basketball Game

Eric played on a national team during a weekly basketball tournament held by a local basketball association during the month of November. Here are some things I observed that I had never seen at a basketball game before:

• People playing with no shoes

• A dog running across the court during the game 
• The bench sitting under umbrellas (in this case, to keep the sun off...at other times because of rain!)

• Outdoor games that continued to be played when it started to rain

On the first weekend of December, the two top teams played in a championship game. Eric’s team won by one point! Eric was awarded one of two MVP awards.

For the first four weekends of the tournament, the weather was beautiful in the morning, but by the time Eric’s team played in the afternoon, rainstorms rolled in. The championship game was the kickoff event for the installation of the Aiyura Basketball Association, so there were multiple events planned in addition to the game. The group asked our community to pray for good weather.

The morning of the event started out beautiful like all the others had...but as the time for Eric’s game approached, dark clouds started to spread across the sky. I thought he would be playing another game in the rain. Before his game started, I went home to refill his water bottle. When I got back, the clouds that had been covering the whole sky were completely gone! There was not a single drop of rain during the entire event, which lasted from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m...a great answer to prayer during rainy season!