Survey Update + Future Plans

Keriau River Survey

Hello friends and family, we wanted to send you all an update and we realize it has been a while. We were hoping to wait until after the survey trip that Eric was able to participate in and that trip was postponed a couple of times but here we are….finally.

We were able to drive into the village by car because it has been dry season here lately. The roads were really rough and there were a couple of times we wanted to inspect the wooden bridges before driving across them. We had borrowed a 4×4 SUV and we were very thankful for it because of the bad road conditions. After picking up our local coworkers in a couple of spots and about ten hours of driving we arrived at the first village.

The evening that we got there we gathered a word list from some of the people that lived in the village there in order to compare it to other local languages and also to other local villages that could possible have the same language or just a dialectal difference. The video above shows me and another guy named Pak Aska listening to specific words and attempting to write them down phonetically.

We made plans for how we would go upriver from there using an old handwritten map that someone else had made about the area. We were even able to update the map as we got new information about the area. Because it was a holiday we actually had a difficult time getting two boats to take us and so we had to split up into two groups. Pak Aska, Pak Kris, Pak Piola, and myself went up river by boat, while Tim, Philip and Pak Imponius tried to continue by road to the next village.

The furthest we were able to go upriver was the village that can be seen in the video above. We stayed the night in that village and we were able to gather two more sets of language data. We were told that 11 languages were spoken along the river and we wanted to narrow down how many of those were actually local languages and of the local languages, how closely related were they.

While we were upriver I was able to get a few text messages from the other group and we found out that they were able to find a driver and a boat to take them to two different villages and they were able to gather some language data as well.

Finally we all returned back to the first village after gathering data from 6 different villages along the river and made plans to head home.

Future Plans

Currently we are still on track to head back to the states this August. However for now we are more focused on a new baby that will be here in about 7 weeks!

Cherie and I are planning on having our last(hopefully) language evaluation sometime after the baby is born. For now the plan will be to keep studying and to get the house more ready for the new baby

We greatly appreciate your prayers as we expect to open a new chapter of life and anticipate many transitions for our family. We ask you to join us in prayer as we consider three future locations of ministry. We desire for the Lord to direct us to one of these three people groups. Thank you for partnering with our family.

Family Photos