Author: Chris and Maggie Hostetter

Ready to learn to read Pal? Good. It’s easy. First, we learn the syllables /ki/ and /i/ as taught to us from the word /kikiak/. Now, we can’t really say anything yet with just those syllables so let’s learn some more! Now we introduce the syllables /lǝ/ and /ǝ/ from the word /lǝkǝsua/. /ǝ/ is […]

Our literacy consultants, along with two national fellows, came and spent a week in Pal to help us get ready to start our literacy program. We had a very busy week but we learned a lot and accomplished a lot. We started by seeing what we could say with the fewest sounds possible in Pal […]

The other day my wife pointed out that she uses four languages daily and I said, “That sounds like a good blog post.” Unfortunately, for you, she’s been too busy (or lazy) to write that blog post and so you’re stuck with me. Daily we’re using English (with the white skins), Tok Pisin and Pal […]

Our team is back down to two. The Lockwoods have decided that “for multiple reasons, living in Pal has become an unwise/unhealthy situation for their family to continue in.” We will miss them dearly but we are glad they are not that far away. They’ve accepted a support role position on one of New Tribes’ […]

I’ve never thought of pigs as scary creatures. Dirty? Yes. Stinky? You betcha. Tasty? Absolutely. But not exactly fear-inducing. Then I went for a walk with my coworker to see some friends who live in a village on the other side of the ridge. We stopped to talk to a group of people we found […]

We’re sitting around the table yesterday evening having a spaghetti family dinner when we hear Pal kids outside playing excitedly. Now they often come around to play on the swings just down the hill from our house or to see what the white people are up to but we’ve never heard them making this much […]

The bamboo siding was finished on our house Tuesday of this week and so Friday was marked for our big house opening party. The Pal people’s custom is to have a house opening party for every new house before the owner of the house sleeps in his house or cooks in his house. We’ve been […]

It’s been a rather busy week but with good reason. Some of the people have finished planting their yams in their gardens and so they started working on the outside walls for our house this week. Monday morning we went up the nearby mountain to a patch of bamboo and cut a couple hundred down. […]

Before I share about my day, the pictures are of the living room, kitchen, loft and girls’ room. There’s still a good deal of things that need to get done but you wouldn’t really know it looking at our house now. Anyways, Monday November 12, the day I was hoping to dive back in to […]

At 6:45 am the kids and I (Maggie) were driving to the airport to come to our new home! We boarded a plane and flew to an air-strip in a language group close to Pal to meet the helicopter. The helicopter flew us the rest of the way over the mountains and back home. Tons […]