New Bananas and New Friends

BANANAS!
A highlight this week was to cut down our first bunch of bananas from a banana plant in our backyard.

STAFF SUPPER & WILD ANDCRAZY PING-PONG!

Yesterday evening we enjoyed hosting the Telefomin MAF staff at our house for a farewell supper for Rose, a national lady who has worked with MAF here in Telefomin for the past 18 years. Rose will be missed but her skills and experience will be a huge help at the MAF base in the village of Kiunga where she is moving to.

With Rose leaving the MAF staff here in Telefomin is down to Steven as the only Papua New Guinean on staff now, besides three of us expat families. Steven and his wife, Maris, are our next-door neighbors and he works as the MAF agent here in Tele – reporting weather on the radio, serving as a traffic officer on some flights, preparing manifests, etc.

After a delicious potluck supper of chicken, rice, sausages, macaroni salad, tossed salad, potato bake and fresh pineapple slices we played ping-pong on the home-built table Dale set up in the storage room-turned classroom/ping-pong table room underneath our house. Steven and Rose (national staff) had never played ping-pong before so we had a blast teaching them the game! (At one point Steven and Rose were on the same team, playing doubles, and then passed the ball to each other – kind of like a “set” in volleyball! What a riot!)

Playing ping-pong in our school room (Steven and Rose on the left)

MYSTERIOUS WAYS
We had been in Telefomin just a few days when we realized that Steven was the same man who was our language helper when we went for one week of “bush orientation” when we were in PNG back in 1997! Little did we know back then that 12 years later our children would be playing with his grandchildren next door! God works in mysterious ways!

MAKING NEW FRIENDS
We love living in Telefomin. The climate and countryside is breathtaking and the people are lovely. Our kids have made fast friends with the other children in the community and we are all enjoying growing relationships with the friendly folks of Telefomin.

Christmas preparations

Christmas around here is very quiet! There are 3 or 4 little trade stores (a counter with a few things for sale behind it) where the kids did their Christmas shopping all by themselves. (They told us they had picked out a gift for Daddy but decided on something else when they realized what they were going to buy was a pack of cigarettes!) The girls were delighted to find some little bottles of nail polish at the corner market (a few women sitting on the ground selling miscellaneous items) which they bought each other as Christmas gifts!

This being a less busy holiday season I took the opportunity to do some Christmas baking with the kids this year, which was fun. We made gingersnaps, crunchy little "Paepanate", chocolate crinkle cookies and coconut Christmas cake. The kids also made some salt dough ornaments which they painted and hung on our little Christmas tree to dress it up a little! Although we miss the gatherings and get-togethers with friends and family, we are enjoying a more reflective holiday season this year.

Best wishes to you this Christmas and we wish you a blessed New Year!

The Derksens in PNG.

Moving to Telefomin

The village of Telefomin has been our home now for just over 3 weeks. Telefomin and the other nearby villages are on a plateau surrounded by mountains all around so we are enjoying the change from the prairies of Manitoba! There is one other MAF family here right now (the only other white people here besides us) with 3 girls, ages 2,4 and 6. The people are very friendly and the kids spend much of their time playing with national kids in the neighborhood - climbing trees, making forts, playing soccer, tag, etc. or making fires (burning the dry bush grass). It rains nearly every day but lately we've had less rain, which means the hydro electricity is on only for a couple of hours throughout the day and evening. (We have a back-up generator to make sure our freezer doesn't defrost with 3 months worth of meat all at once!) We are really enjoying living here and feeling more and more at home.

Sydney airport

It seems like our To-Do list keeps growing just as fast as we check things off! Looking back at our "Have-already-done" list, though, it's encouraging to see God's hand in it all as we move forward in faith. This is what we've been up to in order to prepare to move to Papua New Guinea...

* shared about MAF's work around the world and in PNG with several church groups, small groups, friends, S.S. kids, Awana club kids and anyone else who would stop long enough to listen!

* went for medical checks, dental checks, eye checks, blood checks, police checks -- and waited for people to send in cheques!

* got shots for all sorts of wonderful diseases with fancy names (and updated our will while we were at it!)

* filled in stacks of forms and paperwork making sure to dot our i's and cross our t's -- until we were going cross-eyed!

* collected two years worth of homeschool materials to try to keep our kids semi-civilized while living out in the bush!

* watched God do a miracle at a fundraiser supper put on by some very special friends.

* packed and sorted and tried to cram two year's worth of "everything" into two suitcases each.

* were humbled to have friends and family clean our house until it was so sparkling clean we wanted to move back in!

* enjoyed lots of fun times of camping, birthday parties, family camp, kids' basketball games, kids' baseball games, swimming lessons and wonderful times building memories with friends and family.

It's certainly been a bit of a whirlwind these last months, but we have been so richly blessed thanks to many of you. Thanks for all your help in getting us ready to go.

We are currently doing more orientation and training at the MAF Australia headquarters in Cairns, Australia and plan to head for PNG at the end of August.

We love reading your e-mails and are grateful for your prayers. God bless.

ld

April News Letter

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