Bush orientation is a pretty intense time of total immersion in language and culture. It is a kind of a dry run of the whole tribal church planting experience. The living conditions will closely mirror the conditions we will face when we move into our own tribe, and so it is a good time to get a really clear picture of what precisely this job demands of us out here in the Sepik Region of PNG.

On Friday, Jan20, we leave for a village called Sino. This village has a church established there in the tribal language, and it is this tribal church that will be evaluating whether or not we are prepared to “hack it” as missionaries in the bush. This is an awesome way for new believers out in the middle of the jungle, who are not in a position to financially support the work being done in their country, to support the expanding of the kingdom in another important way. We will be discipled by the believing men and women of the Sino church, and get some serious instruction on language, culture, and how to live in the jungle.

Sino is stationed right on the Sepik river, which is a highway of sorts here in PNG. Along the river, culture, ideas, cargo, money, and language move pretty freely, affecting villages perched along this meandering waterway in as many ways as there are villages. Below are some views of the Sepik river from the house we’ll be living in. There are perks to being a missionary out here in the middle of nowhere.

Here is an image of the house we’ll call home for the next two-ish months…

Living in a home like this, as rad as it may seem, takes anyone some adjustment. This is another huge reason for bush orientation. To keep from getting completely fried with shock at the contrast, bush orientation is the perfect blend of immersion and adjustment; a great environment to recalibrate expectations, and do some planning for the future when we’ll be building your own ministry center (office/clinic/home/teaching house) for life and work in our own tribe one day.

Sino has an airstrip, so we’ll fly right into the tribe, and unload all the stuff we’ll be bring straight into the house we’ll be living in. Being on the Sepik river, however, this airstrip is key to supplying other missionaries’ Bible Translation and Church Development efforts as cargo moved into the airstrip can easily be boated up river to neighboring villages.

There are two other tribal churches the airstrip in Sino services, Uriai and Siawi. While in Sino, it is our desire to visit the missionaries and the churches in these villages and learn all we can from their hard work. Huge resources to tap, and great people who have given their lives to seeing the Gospel taken to a tongue that has not yet had it.

Here is a video describing a bit of the work in Uriai (only a canoe ride away from Sino!)

Here is a video describing the work going on in neighboring Siawi (only a canoe ride + hike away from Sino!)

SUCH a privilege it is to be so close to such giants in our faith, such faithful servants. We have a lot to learn yet, and who better to learn from, right? We are encouraged by these awesome people, and pray we can encourage them as they finish the task of carrying the truth into these dark places.

So the team at Sino is now comprised of these two couples, none of which are American. The great commission is not only something for Americans, I am reminded! From left to right in the photo above, Sien (who calls Holland home) and her husband Kelly (a Canadian) are the people who built the house we’ll be living in. We have had the privilege of getting to know them well over the last four months here, as they serve in administration roles from the base here in Wewak as the translation work they are doing doesn’t require them to be on site in Sino all the time. As I write this, they are on a bush plane heading back here from a trip into Sino where they continue to disciple believers as well (they live in the apartment directly above us when they are here in Wewak). The Tertels are the other couple in Sino (both of them are German) and have been in Sino for the majority of our stay here in PNG, so we have not really had much time to get to know them. That is going to change here soon, as they will be the only other white and english-speaking folk anywhere near us! Please pray for our relationship with this couple, and for grace as these couples from different parts of the world, who’s native languages are completely different, are thrown together for two months. We are confident this is going to be a great time, but we can use all the prayer we can get!

So we’re a bit fried from packing and prep already, planning and not having “all the information” is trying, and we sometimes feel like we are only guessing at what we’ll need and what we have to bring. Constantly feeling behind and unprepared is jarring and discouraging… but we need to remind ourselves that there is nothing we can really do to prepare completely for this stuff. We are going to have these small regrets like “I wish I would have brought ___ ” or “Why did I bring this, I haven’t used it the whole time I’ve been here!” but this is all part of the training. Please pray for our morale during this time of moving AGAIN… When we come back, there will be even more people on base here for the Annual Sepik Conference, so all of our stuff needs to go into storage, and we will not be moving right back into the apartment we’re in right now… we’ll be sharing a house with our friends’ the Rees family temporarily. The excitement never ends here in the land of mystery.

So my little bush trip to the Nimo tribe went GREAT. I made it back safe and sound, and learned a TON about life in the bush while I was there. I put together a little highlight reel to share the great experience – but be warned, there is a *bit* of indigenous nudity, so I’d slap a PG-13 rating right on this post.

Video Caption 1: At the beginning, you got to see a big chunk of NTM’s Regional flight program… our Pilot Jon and the Cessna 206. This job could not be done without these two, and all the churches and individuals that support them doing this work!

Video Caption 2: We got the opportunity to fly into one of our most remote airstrips in PNG located on the land of the Iteri tribe. Missionaries have phased out of this tribe as the work there is done, and the Iteris have a growing church there to this day.

Video Caption 3: When the plane left… A slight feeling of dread ran over me – I am stuck. The nearest radio is a 2 day hike away, and things in the jungle could potentially get really scary, really fast. We then proceeded to hike through the jungle for a long time.

Video Caption 4: After a long hike over log bridges, through waist high mud, and river crossings, we made it to the village, and the real work began… for Andrew. Discipleship.

Video Caption 5: BAPTISM! There were quite a few new believers since Andrew had been to the village last, as well as some growth in some of the church leadership. It was SO great to be a part of the baptisms with these guys (and gals).

So that was it. It felt a lot dirtier than it looked in the video, and swamp hiking is not really too much fun at all- but it was so amazing to meet brothers and sisters in Christ out there in the bush.

I have way too much to talk about to bore everyone with the details here, so please… if you are interested, get the play-by-play as I write about it over at my personal blog by clicking the link below.

onechrisjon.es – Nimo Day by Day

Thanks for praying, as I know many of you did. Thankfully nobody had to attempt that hike with broken bones!

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…

Video Caption 1: We have TONS of these huge fruit bats here that everyone calls “flying foxes” and they swarm here at nights. Reminds us of that part in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where they are all riding the elephants under a canopy of huge bats. It really does happen, and apparently you can even “fish” them out of the sky by swinging an empty hook around on the end of your fishing pole! These things are nasty looking, and seeing them dead in the markets smoked and splayed is pretty nasty!

Video Caption 4: Our buddy willie is officially a man in his village, and has been through the coming of age ritual which involves some drugs, some starvation, some dehydration, some hunting, and finally some scarification. They carve themselves up to look like crocodiles here on the septic river. Pretty intimidating, huh?

Being so close to the sea, and almost right on the equator, we get lots of direct sunlight, which makes for lots of humidity and rain. Lightning strikes more frequently and intensely the closer you get to the equator, and it is lightning that has stolen internet from our entire base for this whole last month! We hope to get it back up again by christmas, but until then, we must travel to an upscale hotel on the outskirts of town to stay connected, as 3G has not quite made it to our neck of the woods yet!

There is so much green here, TONS of edible stuff grows wild here, and if all you did was forage, you could (and many do) thrive here. We have a great many creepy crawly friends we share our house with – Geckos, roaches, rats, and ants are the most prevalent of our house guests, but every once in a while we will find a creature we had never seen before! It all comes with the territory, and our friends and new family here in PNG are teaching us to take it all in stride!

Our Next-Door Neighbor’s Blog

Oh, and by the way… you should check out our next-door neighbors’ blog – their family has recently just returned from their bush orientation in a tribe called Mariama, and we regularly find her writing accurate and entertaining.
We think you’ll dig it!

These are most of the Kreer Heights Hoodlums, the the boys Chris hangs out with.

The older boys are involved with a weekly Bible study that we (our mission) has started. It is a great experience for all involved, discipleship and teaching done here will hopefully bear fruit in the form of a nationalized church planting movement one day.

The last month has been a blur, and here is a really inadequate highlight reel thrown together on our phone from the videos we’ve been collecting with it. We’ve been here 6 weeks, and it feels like 2. A bit of a better video is in the works here, coming down the pipe, for sure.

Lots more to come, there is almost too much to cover, so we’ll have to cover it all as it becomes more pertinent to ministry here!

Life has been all about orientation lately… seeing how things work here in PNG. We live in a city in PNG called Wewak, and the bases here are populated by support workers and 3 other orientee families. Everyone works hard to keep missionaries in the jungle equipped to do ministry there – Really an amazing place to be. Because we will one day be supported by these guys when we are in the bush, it really helps to know the kinds of things they can and can’t do, so we know what exactly we are asking of them when we need, for example, literacy materials printed, or medical supplies flown in, or a house built in the middle of the jungle. Good stuff to know!

Video

Step1 LAX

Our flight left LAX at 11:20pm Pacific time on Saturday, Sep10. The day of our flight was filled with family and farewells in ChinoHills, CA – about an hour from LosAngeles International Airport [LAX]. We had all of our bags packed ahead of time, and really got to enjoy family and friends before our departure.

Qantas Airlines was our service to Brisbane, and the airline personnel at check in were very accomodating of all of our excess baggage. We ended up paying only half of what we expected in overweight and excess baggage fees!

The flight was an overnight, and went smoothly, the 747 landed 12 hours later at 06:15am local time on Monday, Sep12.

Step2 BNE

Our layover in Brisbane International [BNE] lasted a few hours, which we used to browse the Duty Free, brush our teeth, exchange some currency, and snag some Australian Coffee (WIN).

The cleanliness and friendliness stood in sharp contrast to LosAngeles, and watching people driving on the opposite side of the road was a bit disorienting (we’re used to it now, though!).

Step3 POM

Port Moresby International [POM] is where our travels really started to get interesting. Our PacificBlue flight was delayed about an hour and our schedule started looking pretty tight. We were pretty worried about making our last flight to our final destination.

One of the first things you notice walking into the POM terminal is the way the air hangs with humidity. Next, is the excellent way the wet stagnant air conducts the strong scent of body odor. Welcome to the third world.

We had to clear Immigration and Customs in record time in order to make our next flight, and once our bags had been collected, inspected, and X-Rayed, our Mission’s Government Representatives helped get us onto our AirNiugini flight for our final Destination, Wewak.

Step4 WWK

The last leg of our giant leap was (surprisingly) the longest, and (surprisingly) the most stressful of any this far. Thinking we were in the home stretch, and thankful that we made it through customs without hitch and in time for the last flight had us walking on air.

We boarded our flight from POM with about 65 other nationals, and 5 or so other white skins sprinkled in. AirNiugini is a way that many nationals commute between jobs in Moresby and surrounding industrial areas and their homes in the more rural parts of the country. The smell of the airport hung steady in the recycled air in the cabin of the plane, but (surprisingly) you get used to it.

The flight to Wewak [WWK] from POM is usually a 2.5 hour affair that stops about halfway through at the regional airport of Madang. Passengers were let off who lived in the region, and others commuting to Wewak boarded. The plane was refueled and then we sat.

The Flight Attendant then announced over the F100′s intercom that due to technical difficulties, passengers would all have to get off the plane taking all personal items with them.

We grabbed all our carry-on baggage, dragged it into the one-room “airport terminal”, and found seats on one of the wooden benches awaiting further instructions or information from an authority. It never came.

Hours later, we realized how reliant westerners are on some sort of authority to constantly provide information and instruction. We found ourselves fighting frustration that nobody was communicating what was going on with the flight, or what to do with our stuff, or where to get food or drink… High and Dry. It didn’t look like anybody was doing anything. Everyone just sat in wait.

To make the rest of the long story short, We ended up staying at a “resort” in the region, awaiting another plane to finish the flight to WWK.

Tired and frustrated at the lack of communication, we set out alarm for 04:30am so we would be certain to catch the shuttle back to the airport in the morning (nobody knew when it would come, but we did know that the flight would leave between 06:30am and 08:30am).

FINAL DESTINATION
We arrived at our final destination at about 07:45am local time on Tuesday, Sep13. We were greeted at the airport by friends and new family, but were disappointed to find that our bags had been left in Madang.

View Larger Map

We were driven to our new home in Wewak (see the green arrow in the map above), only a five minute drive from the airport. We were exhausted from the adventure, but excited to experience this new place. Everyone stares at you with what seems to be a scowl, but a wave or greeting quickly turns into a smile. So many people walking the streets or driving tough looking Toyota HiLux pickups on the “wrong” side of the road reminds us of pictures we have seen of Africa and Haiti.

One small step taken… Visas and Plane tickets secured. September 10 at 2300h is our ETD – to arrive 2 days later at 1730h local time. We’ll be in the air all day 9/11 (headed AWAY from the USA). This day has been a long time coming!

Wewak is the city where we’re headed (black dot in the dark red shape in the map above – click the map for the wikipedia article on The Sepik), in the part of PNG known as the East Sepik Province (a.k.a. “The Sepik”). Known for its CRAZY long, winding and unpredictable Sepik River, This region is home to about 350,000 natives… PNG is BEAUTIFUL!

This is an HQ for all the missionaries that work in this region, and will be home for us during this next 1-2 year phase of mission work. Here we will determine the people group we will end up working in, the best way to reach them, the teammates we will be reaching them with, and learning a trade language. LOTS of work to get started on soon, and we can’t wait to dive in! Please keep praying!

The last 6 years have been a crazy journey. Marriage is hard work, but worth every minute of it. We enjoyed the sights and each others’ company at the Monterey Aquarium a few hours from where we are staying here in Livermore, CA. Above is the video we made with the interesting animal footage we captured! I love taking pictures and video of stuff we don’t see everyday (and I love making psychadelic aquarium videos).

We were also fortunate to have had Rogers and Susan Shaw out for a little vacation here in the Bay Area before we left for good – above are the images of our fun with them. They sure know how to party!

Things are wrapping up for us here in the states pretty soon, and goodbyes are never fun. More to come for sure, but we are encouraged regularly by The Body that this is worthy of our time!

5 years ago, when we moved to WinonaLake, Indiana in pursuit of more education, finding a sending church was NOT on our radar. We fully expected that being out of touch with our little missionary “commune” would drain our interest for cross-cultural ministry, and sought the Lord that this wouldn’t happen. Years passed, and the red ink ran black on our balance sheets eventually, and we realized that the community fellowship of Christ’s Covenant Church held a special place in our hearts. We were so encouraged that CCC was also excited about reaching the unreached. Half a decade later, on May 22nd 2011, we were officially commissioned by CCC to head to Papua New Guinea. Nothing is better than being surrounded by loved ones!

*Christs Covenant Church (and Winona Lake/Warsaw residents in general) – We love you guys and can’t thank you enough for helping out these two punk missionaries head to “the bush”. When we get there, visit ANY time. We’ll have a hammock out for you!

Step 1 – Procure Work Permit
You need a work permit to live and work in PNG. To procure one of these, you have to assemble documentation that you are qualified to work in the field you have declared, fill out an application form, procure australian-sized passport photos, and send all this to Papua New Guinea to get processed and approved.

Easy enough right? Well, apparently things take an extremely long time to get where they are supposed to go in PNG, and sometimes don’t quite make it altogether. Se we sent two identical packages with identical copies of all the stuff. However, putting the stuff together, and getting all copies notarized and assembled was time consuming and costly. Passport photos aren’t cheap either, and even though 86$ “guarantees” one package makes it to its international destination in 3-5 days… It really doesn’t.

Step 2 – Entry Visa
So you have a work permit? Well that is dandy, but you still cannot just get a tourist stamp in your passport at the airport- that permits you to stay in the country only 90 days legally, and we are planning on being there for 4ish years at a stretch! So we apply for long-term visas, which first require a work permit number (Hence step 1). Not only that, but they also want to know that you are healthy enough to work in the country for long periods of time, and will not spread disease around if you are carrying any, so we need to send documentation that we have had all these vaccines, tests, and physicals… the whole 9 yards. So we have thoroughly been poked, irradiated, and measured.

So we went and got some shots today, we have to pick up 4 typhoid pills on Friday, and we are STILL trying to figure out who will take our $600.00 in exchange for a Japanese Encephalitis Vaccine – They seem to be completely out everywhere we call, and the vaccine is 2 shots 30 days apart!

The last week or so was a barrage of setting up meetings with a really knowledgeable veteran missionary, setting up visits to the local clinic and health department, and finally making those visits- so now all of our paperwork is compiled and ready to go as soon as we get that work permit number! This is where we are in the process now, and so we wait.

Lastly, We have decided to WAIT ANOTHER MONTH to get out to PNG. It looks as if late August is going to work best for everyone involved. This is big news to us, but it will give us a bit more time to raise the necessary support, and spend a bit more quality time with the fam. Yay. We appreciate your prayers, and hope to see most of you one more time before we launch. Thanks for the attention, and the support.