"The Tale of Two Erickson's"- (well, actually 6 Erickson's). We are safely home from Papua New Guinea. I bought a hat to prove I was really there. What a trip!! It began when our 6 am taxi didn't get here until 7:15 am. The taxi was a 6 passenger car with
no trunk and there were 8 of us and luggage, a playpen and a carseat. It was tight. AND...even though we all took anti-motion medicine, Emma got quite sick and was puking. This is Emma- throwing up with her head in the bag saying "Mom, it feels like my head is being cut off!!!" She has always been the dramatic one. SO, that was a long 2 hours to the border. The driver would just pull over and put the barf bag on the side of the road and keep driving. Everything went 
well with all of our passports and then we walked over. Richard was our taxi driver from there and he showed up with a pickup truck ( which was great for the luggage) but tight for all of our bodies. And another hour or so over rain water covered bridges, (Richard counted 23 of them). PNG is SO differnet than Indonesia. The houses were thatch instead of cement and up on stilts. The jungle is amazingly thick and the trees just keep going and going up to the sky. They have cicadas there all the time. So that was a familar sound. They do speak English and pigeon so many of them could understand us. However, Cale kept speaking to them in Indonesian- they looked the same to him. The PNGers kept touching us and rubbing our faces and hair. We were the only white skinned people there except for a young couple that we met at the border from California. They have been backpacking through Asia for 10 months and are headed towards Sentani so we may see them again. There were a few people that followed us and took videos of us.
We did encounter some problems. The hotel that our friend Andy called and made us reservations at said that they had no record of it and that they were full. Along with the other hotel in town. Those were our two choices since we didn't have
any transportaion. Those hotels would be close to the market, the ocean, the consolate, restuarants...but we had to find something else. So we found a place way up on the top of the mountain that let us stay for 96 kina, they said at first, then 196 kina, then they said it would be 396 kina. They told us that after we had showered and gotten ready for bed and Cale was already asleep. They said we would have to move. But we managed to sweet talk her and plead our case (plus I gave her one of the Good Housekeeping magazines someone had just given me) So she let us stay for 196 kina. Thank you Lord!!! The only problem was there was no food. Thankfully I brought some snacks and we just tried to make it hold us over.
God sent me an angel yesterday. We turned in all of our visa stuff and they g
ave us a stack of papers to fill out. So we walked from the consolate to the ocean (Pacific) so the kids could play while I filled them all out. I had grabbed a pen to use and half -way through the first form the pen ran out. Now this is in the middle of nowhere-I had a time crunch to get these forms filled out, and no pen. I looked behind me and there were two PNG ladies sitting there watching me. I asked them if they had a pen and one of them did. Praise the Lord again!! If you knew where I was sitting and the odds of someone right by me having a pen you would have been as blown away as I was. She was an angel! While we were on the beach 4 little kids were running around us, staring. Brenda, you will love this story...One little boy, Max only had a shirt on, nothing else
. I could tell that Sophie was watching him and after awhile she said to me, "Mom, is, that part of his shorts?" I said "Uh, No." She said "His privates are hanging out!"
And Emma's funny line of the trip, "Mom, I can't see my eyeballs." The kids really did great considering the circumstances. Cale had 2 days of no naps. It was hard for all of us but they hardly complained. Our taxi driver, Richard, took us to a supermarket today and I found ice cream bars so there are 2 pictures on the blog of us enjoying them with him.
We asked a young couple that teaches at the school here to stay at the dorm while we were gone and we were told that it went well. So that is a relief. We missed the kids. Wyatt picked pieces of coral out of the ocean for each kid, and he
thinks that he found a bloody shark tooth, so he is pretty excited about that. They can't wait to go back to the ocean.. That was the highlight of the trip.
I was reminded on this trip how patient Garth is. I am patient to a point and then I just don't feel like being patient anymore. I am constantly reminding myself to work on that. Still, even though I am here, I expect things to kind of go as I planned. That is so not the Papua way. They have their own set of rules here. Things will get done when they get done and time is never a factor. I have a hard time reprogramming my brain that way. I am so time focused. I am still in the frame of mind "Hurry up, hurry..." I need to just slow down. I am reading a great book about that right now called Breathe by Keri Wyatt Kent. Hopefully I will learn from this culture and this book to slow down so I don't miss what I am supposed to notice.
O.k. I can't wait to sleep in my bed tonight. We had 4 twin beds for all of us in the hotel last night. Try sleeping like that...with things crawling around. Makes you really appreciate your own bed.
World's apart-still in our heart,
Rachel
no trunk and there were 8 of us and luggage, a playpen and a carseat. It was tight. AND...even though we all took anti-motion medicine, Emma got quite sick and was puking. This is Emma- throwing up with her head in the bag saying "Mom, it feels like my head is being cut off!!!" She has always been the dramatic one. SO, that was a long 2 hours to the border. The driver would just pull over and put the barf bag on the side of the road and keep driving. Everything went 
well with all of our passports and then we walked over. Richard was our taxi driver from there and he showed up with a pickup truck ( which was great for the luggage) but tight for all of our bodies. And another hour or so over rain water covered bridges, (Richard counted 23 of them). PNG is SO differnet than Indonesia. The houses were thatch instead of cement and up on stilts. The jungle is amazingly thick and the trees just keep going and going up to the sky. They have cicadas there all the time. So that was a familar sound. They do speak English and pigeon so many of them could understand us. However, Cale kept speaking to them in Indonesian- they looked the same to him. The PNGers kept touching us and rubbing our faces and hair. We were the only white skinned people there except for a young couple that we met at the border from California. They have been backpacking through Asia for 10 months and are headed towards Sentani so we may see them again. There were a few people that followed us and took videos of us.We did encounter some problems. The hotel that our friend Andy called and made us reservations at said that they had no record of it and that they were full. Along with the other hotel in town. Those were our two choices since we didn't have
any transportaion. Those hotels would be close to the market, the ocean, the consolate, restuarants...but we had to find something else. So we found a place way up on the top of the mountain that let us stay for 96 kina, they said at first, then 196 kina, then they said it would be 396 kina. They told us that after we had showered and gotten ready for bed and Cale was already asleep. They said we would have to move. But we managed to sweet talk her and plead our case (plus I gave her one of the Good Housekeeping magazines someone had just given me) So she let us stay for 196 kina. Thank you Lord!!! The only problem was there was no food. Thankfully I brought some snacks and we just tried to make it hold us over.God sent me an angel yesterday. We turned in all of our visa stuff and they g
ave us a stack of papers to fill out. So we walked from the consolate to the ocean (Pacific) so the kids could play while I filled them all out. I had grabbed a pen to use and half -way through the first form the pen ran out. Now this is in the middle of nowhere-I had a time crunch to get these forms filled out, and no pen. I looked behind me and there were two PNG ladies sitting there watching me. I asked them if they had a pen and one of them did. Praise the Lord again!! If you knew where I was sitting and the odds of someone right by me having a pen you would have been as blown away as I was. She was an angel! While we were on the beach 4 little kids were running around us, staring. Brenda, you will love this story...One little boy, Max only had a shirt on, nothing else
. I could tell that Sophie was watching him and after awhile she said to me, "Mom, is, that part of his shorts?" I said "Uh, No." She said "His privates are hanging out!"And Emma's funny line of the trip, "Mom, I can't see my eyeballs." The kids really did great considering the circumstances. Cale had 2 days of no naps. It was hard for all of us but they hardly complained. Our taxi driver, Richard, took us to a supermarket today and I found ice cream bars so there are 2 pictures on the blog of us enjoying them with him.
We asked a young couple that teaches at the school here to stay at the dorm while we were gone and we were told that it went well. So that is a relief. We missed the kids. Wyatt picked pieces of coral out of the ocean for each kid, and he
thinks that he found a bloody shark tooth, so he is pretty excited about that. They can't wait to go back to the ocean.. That was the highlight of the trip.I was reminded on this trip how patient Garth is. I am patient to a point and then I just don't feel like being patient anymore. I am constantly reminding myself to work on that. Still, even though I am here, I expect things to kind of go as I planned. That is so not the Papua way. They have their own set of rules here. Things will get done when they get done and time is never a factor. I have a hard time reprogramming my brain that way. I am so time focused. I am still in the frame of mind "Hurry up, hurry..." I need to just slow down. I am reading a great book about that right now called Breathe by Keri Wyatt Kent. Hopefully I will learn from this culture and this book to slow down so I don't miss what I am supposed to notice.
O.k. I can't wait to sleep in my bed tonight. We had 4 twin beds for all of us in the hotel last night. Try sleeping like that...with things crawling around. Makes you really appreciate your own bed.
World's apart-still in our heart,
Rachel
No comments:
Post a Comment