Reaching New Fields: At Home in the Village

Hi Friends! Greetings from the village of Mawerero!

Yes, we made it! On January 21st, we officially moved into our home here in the Finisterre Mountains.

In typical PNG style, our move happened on a slightly different timeline than we had planned. The full explanation is long and boring, but simply put, due to internet complications in the village, we delayed our move-in date by one week. I spent a lot of that week working to trouble shoot the set-up procedure for a new VSAT system that our teammate was working to install in the village. Thankfully, it works and we can communicate with you all! After making the decision to delay by one week, we realized that our original move-in date would have been 6 years to the day from when we first left the USA headed to PNG in 2020. While there would have been something fun about the timing of that date, ultimately we’re just grateful that we are here now, and we saw the Lord’s kindness in several aspects of our extra week in town before the move.

This step of moving into the village has been a long time coming, and in many ways, it’s both an ending and a beginning. We’ve spent enough time in various remote areas of PNG that parts of village life already feel quite normal, but there are certainly other aspects that are new, different, and will take time to learn and adjust to.

For the past three weeks, we’ve been working to get unpacked and settled into our new house, completing a number of smaller projects that still needed to be done but could wait until move in, spending time with our teammates, having several meetings with village leaders, attending three burials, going around meeting and getting to know people in the village, sitting in on literacy and reading classes, working on figuring out and adjusting to several new aspects of everyday life (such as cloth diapering, and the very detail-intensive work of tracking and ordering food and supplies that will be sent in to us in the coming months), and working to get family schedules and rhythms figured out in this new setting.

One of the aspects of PNG that we often mention when people ask us what we really like about life in PNG is how much we are continually learning to appreciate and treasure simple things that probably wouldn’t stand out to us or cause us to be grateful in the US. One of those simple but significant things that we’re appreciating right now is having a home with bedrooms. Since moving to PNG last June, we had lived in a studio apartment in Madang; it was very homey and more than sufficient for our needs. Still, when your living room, bedroom, and kitchen are all just one open space, conversations and work gets very limited anytime that a baby is sleeping. Now that we’ve moved into our village home, Autumn and I find ourselves quite grateful for the ability to spend time together and actually have conversations and enjoy each other’s company after Rowen is asleep in the evenings.

Since moving into our house here, I find myself contemplating the concept of “home” and the various places we have called home over the years. In nearly eight years of marriage, Autumn and I have moved 8 times; each of those places felt like home to some degree. We’ve lived in a few very small spaces, and most of our “homes” have been attached to another house or apartment, often with shared living space. While our current home, which is just under 780 square feet, certainly isn’t big by US standards, it’s nearly the largest place we’ve lived in, and we’re finding that already in many ways it feels the most like “ours.”

Stepping outside our house though certainly puts us into a setting that will take longer to feel like home. It’s beautiful for sure, but also still foreign.

We sure appreciate your prayers for us as we adjust, settle in, learn cultural norms specific to this village and language group, and work to form friendships and start to integrate into the ministry work already being done here. Ultimately, any feeling of “home” will fall short of being completely satisfying until we reach our eternal home where we truly belong! In the meantime, we are grateful for this temporary earthly “home for now.”

I’m going to keep this update a bit shorter, and we’ll work to send out another update in the coming weeks to share more about our everyday life here and give glimpses into a couple ways we hope to start contributing to and preparing for future ministry and work here in nDo. I will say that there’s an upcoming building project for our team that I’m already preparing for, and our family is looking forward to welcoming and hosting a very special visitor from the USA who will be involved in that project as well.

We are thankful each day for all of you who are faithfully supporting us in prayer and with finances so that we can serve here in PNG. We are grateful the Lord has used you to enable us to follow His leading.