Evelyn and I are gearing up for our first Christmas out here in the jungle! It’s crazy that only last year, we were in Portlandia, soaking up all that rain and sweet Christmastime Family love.

We are celebrating the season with a different family this year, one that isn’t bound by blood, but by faith and mission. We are privileged to be living out here in the Jungle!

We’re PROGRESSING in our language abilities (that is actually the name of the level we’re at)… Evie is about 5/9 and I am about 6/9 of the way through study of language #1. We don’t even know what language #2 is yet, but we do know it will be in a pretty remote location here in PNG.

Luckily, we are not here without experienced friends to help us through this whole process, and veteran missionaries are helping us with each step we take here! It is so great to have such a rad new family!

The Murrays are part of our new family, and have been part of the New Tribes Mission here in PNG for nearly 30 years. Not long ago, they were as rookie as we are now – but have always been cooler than us. They are not American (+1 coolness point), but British (-1 coolness point), They talk funny (+1 coolness point), and he is a nuclear physicist turned missionary (+1,000,000ish coolness points), and they lived in the Nimo tribal group, helped develop literacy there, helped to develop a Nimo church, and translated much of the New Testament into the Nimo language (+4 coolness points).

Monday, I will be taking my first PNG bush trip with Andrew Murray and (a buddy/neighbor of mine) Ryan Webb. We will be getting on a bush plane (A) bound for the YembiYembi village (B) on Monday morning, where we will unload all our gear to lighten the plane. We will wait on the bush airstrip for the pilot to return, as he makes a side-trip to a nearby village, but can’t land the fully loaded plane on the softer airstrip. When we load back up again, we go west towards the Indonesian border to land in a village called Iteri (C).

More about Iteri…
More about YembiYembi…
More about Nakui…

Once we’re in Iteri, We’ll be greeted by Nimo believers, who will help us unload the plane and carry gear and (the purpose of the trip really…) translated bible lessons back to their village.

From Iteri, we will have a 2 hour haul to the Nakui tribe (D), and Nimo (E) is another 1.5 hour hike beyond that. (The last 2 were impossible to find on google maps, so I had to guess based on maps in the survey department here).

Once we get in, it will probably be afternoon, and we will have gifts of food to distribute, bible lessons to hand out, and plenty of people to meet and greet.

When things settle down a bit, some cooking will probably start up, and we’ll just mingle with Nimo believers until we’re too tired to do any more!

I am not exactly sure where we’re going to sleep, but when I started scouring the New Tribes photo archives for all these pictures of Nimo, I ran across this photo of one of the missionary bush houses there. Maybe we’ll sleep in there!

I couldn’t help but wonder what our bush house will be like one day… can’t wait to meet some tribal believers, and see the Nimo church and village in action! WHAT a privilege!

We can only bring about 7kg of stuff along (food, gear, backpack, toiletries)… and I am going to be taking my waterproof GoPro Hero, 3 8gig SD cards, 3 spare batteries, and a little tripod to get some video of the journey. I will hopefully be able to catch some great footage, but last time I used the GoPro here, the humidity kept fogging the camera housing and messing up the video! Hopefully, the anti-fog strips my mom sent me will work out, and the video will be clear as crystal and uploaded in a few weeks! Until then…

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