Flat Stanley was one of the many of us crammed into the canoe! Can you see the close quarters?

 

Pretty narrow paths at times!

 

Some Business Trips are More Rigorous Than Others!

It’s been awhile but I thought this trip to Siawi was worth a blog report!  Linda Krieg, a missionary and translation consultant that lives in a neighboring village had graciously agreed to check the first three chapters of Romans for their clarity and comprehension.  I say neighboring but it’s not like it’s in the suburb across town or something.  This business trip took a bit more travel than that.  So let me get right to the story…

 

We left here around 8:30 on January 6^th.  Linda had gotten sick the weekend before so dates changed and it was a mad dash to get things ready to go.  But we left around 8:30 to begin the journey to her village.  We’re in wet season but it’s been a very dry season so far.  Our river is really low but it had come up just a bit in time for this trip.  We made good time getting to the Weyya baret.  This small tributary is the way to get to the village from the main Sepik river, without a three hour hike.  The water was so low that the Sepik turned into the baret.  Normally you can stay on the Sepik and pass by this tributary without seeing it.  So we had passed the village of Weydo and were on our way up the smaller river.  I thought we’d just passed a couple of bush houses like we did last time, not realizing that we’d passed Weydo already.  We didn’t see the guys from Linda’s village and we were slowly making our way up the tributary through some tricky parts as the water was so low. I finally asked Wobre if we had passed Weydo and he said yes, we were going up the Weyya tributary.  I told him what Jason had said several times on the radio the night before – that if we got to Weydo, we had passed the baret and needed to turn around and go back.  But we were pretty sure that you needed to pass Weydo first but since he was so insistent, I thought maybe something had changed that we didn’t know about.  So we turned around and went back to Weydo – where some of another village’s folks told us what we already knew – that there wasn’t another baret.  So one of the kids, Alex was standing there and because it was now 11:30am, we didn’t have enough time to go all the way to Siawi and get our guys back to Wabuku that night, I asked him to jump on and just show us where the road started next to the river once we got half-way up or whatever it would be. So we headed back up the baret – and finally met up with the Siawi guys around 12:15.  I was SO glad to see them – I had begun to wonder a couple times if we were going to make it to Siawi or not!  But we met those guys and started heading upriver by 12:30 or so.  It was slow-going as the water was so low and we kept having to stop and push/pull the canoe over logs and such.  The driver was literally under water pushing the canoe from underneath to get it over some of the logs while other guys pulled and tugged the canoe over.  The further we got, the more stones we got stuck on (instead of sand) and so it took us about 3 ½ hours to get to where they shored the canoe and we hiked the 20 minutes or so to the village.  We arrived around 4:30 and everyone thought we had motor problems – as opposed to just not finding each other for awhile and the slow ride up the river.  If the Siawi guys had been there the first time up the river, we could have been there a couple hours earlier but we were there!  It was better than the three hour hike but it would have probably been more like a two hour hike with how dry the trail is and how low the water is – as you have to cross the river a number of times.  But we were there! 

 

Then Linda and I needed to work through the pre-check stuff so I ended up cooking dinner while she made the adjustments to her English back translations with my changes.  I was dead on my feet but it made sense so I made a big stir-fry while she worked on the computer and asked me questions from across the room.  She asked me something at one point, and I finally just told her that I was too tired to figure out how many packs of noodles we needed in the stir fry – she needed to make that decision!  We finally ate around 8:30 and worked until 10:30 – but we were fed and ready to go for the next morning! 

 

The check itself went well although we definitely found a few spots that needed work.   Tomas was doing a great job – obviously processing all that he was hearing as well as giving it back.  Wobre was less helpful but he inserted some smaller details.  He talks a lot in Melanesian Pidgin, PNG’s trade language, but in this check, he spoke almost totally in Uriay - even when we were sitting at the lunch table or something.  Tomas asked some good questions at lunch that first day – about his ancestors based on what he’d heard in the first half of chapter one.  Linda basically told him to keep listening to the rest of chapter one and even into chapter three and he’d get the answer to his question through them.  It was pretty neat.  We got through most of chapter two in the afternoon but we hit verse 24 and realized they had hit the wall.  I could already see it in Tomas’ face but he was still pushing so I thought maybe he’d get a second wind.  But we gave up about 4:30 and figured that we could finish on Sat morning.  I ended up sitting outside talking with the guys until it was time to go to the other missionary’s house for dinner.  We talked about all kinds of things that Tomas had questions on – some in Romans and some in other stories and books.  It was really fun and I can’t help but think that he’s a believer that’s lacking a lot of teaching. 

 

The next day was a bit slower – the guys were a bit sluggish from the start and those fun verses in Romans 3:5,7 didn’t come across as well as we wouid have liked. It was good though – we didn’t get done until 1pm or so but we got it done and Linda felt like I’d do well on the rest of the book.  As soon as we got done, we started working on dinner for that night – to host the other missionary couple.  I worked on potato salad – peeling and chopping potatoes.  Then I made the deviled eggs and got those stuffed.  Then later I made the brownies and cut up carrot sticks and did other little things - like pulling Linda’s laundry off the line and helping her fold it all.  I was glad to help but I was literally dead on my feet by the time they got there for dinner!  They loved it – a lot of what Linda made was what she was going to make for New Year’s Eve so the kids really enjoyed it!  Pigs in a blanket, potato salad, deviled eggs and brownies!  They wanted to play WII but neither Linda and I were up for it so we ended up watching a really cheesy Hallmark movie which involved no brain power!  

 

After the slow haul up the river, the guys were asking me about our return trip.  We decided that if we didn’t get any rain, it would make more sense to hike than go by canoe.  As of Saturday night, we were planning on hiking as it hadn’t rained.  Jason said the trail was so dry that we could probably make it in two hours.  But it poured down rain that night – which kept me awake for quite awhile so I didn’t sleep well at all.  But the river was up so were going to canoe down rather than hike.  We left Linda’s before 8 but didn’t get loaded into the canoe and moving until 9am.  It was a much different ride down!  It started out with 13 Siawi guys in the canoe and then us – but we were too tippy and some of the guys were sitting on top of our stuff – including my computer!  (I forgot to mention that my computer screen went out again mid-day on Friday!  This is the third time my screen has been so bad it needs to go to Cairns, Australia to get fixed!  It’s already spent 7 of the 20 months I’ve owned it in Australia!)  So I asked that they not sit on top and so three guys eventually hopped off the canoe.  But there were still 13 of us and we were sitting really low in the water!  It was much like one of those log rides – where the people in the middle get soaked!  The little rapids we were riding through kept splashing into the canoe – onto me and Tomas – and no one else!  It was cold and wet!  We had to stop once just to throw debris out of the way so the path was open again for the canoe.  Then later we had a much longer delay as they cut a fairly large log at one end that totally blocks the river (we went under it on the way up) and pushed that out of the way to open up the road again.  It wasn’t bad though – about 40 minutes of hanging out there on the side of the river.  From there it was pretty smooth sailing and we met up with our Wabuku folks around noon.  There were only about three times that I thought we might actually capsize!  Seriously!  One time the right side of the canoe was laying flat on the water – we took on water but somehow managed to stay afloat!  It was quite the adrenaline rush until we got past that last log!  The ride back up the Bapi was relatively innocuous. 

 

I can think of other business trips that might involve flight delays or even traffic delays but they don’t really compare to sitting in a canoe for 8 hours or having your back muscles ache from trying to stay upright in a canoe while it tips from side to side for hours!  I don’t usually have to go to the bathroom in the woods or sit in water-soaked clothes for hours or wonder if my computer is going to get lost in the river or not.  So I think this business trip classifies itself as a ‘narapela kain’ – a different kind!  I’ve only hit on the highlights – not describing in detail the time and manpower that it took to get the canoe up and over logs and across stones.  Or of some of the smaller details of what it means to travel from one village to another when the main mode of transportation is a motor canoe and hiking!  Think jungle cruise at Disney but multiplied a few times!  It was great though – the Lord undertook and another chunk of verses are ready to be printed in the Uriay language!