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It was one year ago that we moved into the Pal tribe. It’s been a whirlwind of a year since then but we’re still breathing and on our feet. In the last year we’ve adjusted to bush living, built our house, lost teammates, met potential new ones, dealt with homesickness, experienced hurricane strength winds and […]

We’ve been talking about it for months but now it has officially begun. Construction on the literacy school finally began a few days ago. We recently had a gathering (the first picture) where we discussed and decided upon a location for the school. The very next day a group of guys went and began clearing […]

Probably many of you have had bread on a stick before but it took me moving to the jungles of Papua New Guinea to have it for the first time. We had a German couple (with their 1 year old son) in Pal for a week and a half visiting (they’re thinking of joining the […]

Translating is always a tricky thing and when it comes to translating the Bible the trickiness goes to a whole new level of difficult. The trick is to find the right balance between literally translating the words and freely translating the meaning. If we’re too far on the literal side the translation will be confusing […]

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 […]