OE is done and I am home, PTL. Even though it has taken some adjustment, I am home and we are back together as a family once again. Janna and the kids seem to do well while I was away.
Eipomek is a village in the mountains of central Papua. This year it was the home of Outdoor Education which saw 82 people fly into the village and work on different projects, do kids clubs, and try to serve the local missionaries in any way that we could. We were there for 2 weeks living in rooms and going to the bathroom in the jungle. Our shower was the river and our food was made up of things that we had brought in and local foods. The local food included sweet potatos, white potatos, different types of vegetables, and of course pig meat. The first day there we bought a pig and butchered it for meat with our meals. Some of our students killed the pig and ground up the meat. So needless to say, this is what I would call "roughing it".
One other thing we were able to do was to hike into different surrounding villages for 4 days and 3 nights. This was a very interesting experience. Each leader was in charge of 9 students and so 9 students and I hiked for a while through the mountains to get to the village of Sarabom. There we stayed in a traditional hut with the people for 3 nights. I am sure that you can not even imagine what this is like. The huts are round with a fire in the middle and a penned up pig in the hut as well. Our 6 girls slept in this area with around 9 other women and the pig with the fire in the middle. The hut is no bigger than about 15 feet in diameter, so you can imagine how the girls slept. Women and men rarely sleep in the same place and it just so happened that our house had a mans area attached to the round hut. It was a rectangle that 5 men slept "comfortably" if by comfortably you think of basically sleeping touching each other the entire night. What a time of group bonding! Also on the mens side there was no fire place and at the altitude that we were at it gets cold during the night. After the 3 nights of bonding we returned to Eipomek to our regular rooms.
The last chapel that we had students shared about the things that they had learned and it was interesting to listen to the stories of how God was working in their lives.
Experience of a lifetime and I am happy to be home. Thank you God for answering prayers.
