We're home!

We are so glad to have returned to our own home in Papua New Guinea and to have completed the long journey back here.  The following picture was taken during one of the better moments of our 12-hour layover in San Francisco; the children had already been awake for 16 hours at that point.  Twenty-nine hours later we arrived in Cairns, Australia.

After some swimming, repacking and two nights of sleeping, two short flights brought us to our home on the Ukarumpa centre.

* We praise God for allowing us to return to Papua New Guinea.  We are grateful that our luggage made it too!
* We are thankful that our home and dog were well taken care of by missionary colleagues.  The children were particularly concerned about the dog while we were away!
* We've felt the effect of your prayers as we've parented Levi, Heidi and Eowyn through this time of transition.  We've gained various helpful insights as we continue to raise our children.
* We would appreciate prayer as we return to our roles on the Ukarumpa centre and find our place amongst our colleagues.

Future Travel Plans

This photo was taken last time we were in the USA:

That was way back in 2011.  Clearly it's time to start planning another Home Assignment, so we're working on booking a trip to our home countries next year. In March 2017 we'll travel to Brisbane, Australia, where Eowyn has a check-up with the kidney specialist.  From there we'll fly to England, where we'll be based in Haslemere, Surrey, from April - July.  From August - December we'll live in North Carolina (where our organisation has housing), making sure we fit in trips to Tennessee and Florida.

We're looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible during our time away from PNG.  We'll also have the chance to take some training courses, have health check-ups, and make the most of opportunities for spiritual and emotional refreshment.  The children will get to attend school/preschool in their passport countries for the first time. (The little baby in the photo above will be in year 1/1st grade in 2017!)

Levi says he's most excited to see grandparents, while Heidi's aim is to ride a toy chicken on a merry-go-round!

If you would like to see us, please let us know!

We would appreciate your prayers as we start to plan and book our travel for next year.  There are so many things to think about including tickets, visas, clothing, speaking engagements, road trips, health insurance and preparing our house here.

On a different note, thank you for praying for the staffing situation at Autoshop.  We are very relieved that Andrew now has a temporary manager, and that the permanent manager is on schedule to return after Christmas. 

Bridge to Kainantu

        One morning, early in August, we received word that the bridge leading into the Aiyura Valley, where we live, had fallen down.   Naturally, because this sort of thing has a direct impact on the Auto Shop department, we decided to go out and take a look.  This is what we found:

       Early in the morning, the bridge had finally collapsed while a truck carrying a load of diesel fuel was attempting to cross it.   We had all been expecting something like this for quite some time, so it was almost a relief to hear that it had finally gone down.  Thankfully the driver of the truck and his assistant were not seriously injured, and in fact the truck you see here was pulled out of the water and driven under its own power to Lae (230 km away) for repairs.  Even the big fuel tank was not serious damaged, in spite of this large group of people industriously trying to poke a hole into it with a big crowbar!

        Unfortunately, this bridge is part of the only good road into the Aiyura Valley, which means that anybody living in the Valley now no longer had a good way to get supplies in.  We had no idea how long it was going to take to replace the bridge, so we started rationing what supplies we had and settled in for a potentially long wait.  We sent a couple of 4x4 vehicles out to see if they could find a way out via a little used dirt road that runs many miles out of our way, but this option proved not to be a good one.  That road was too rough and only skilled drivers in 4x4's could use it, and there were serious concerns about the condition of some of the bridges in that road.

        Anyway, much to our delight, the government very quickly sent in a bridge building expert, and under his able direction the new bridge came together fairly quickly.  By early September the new bridge was in place!  It's still not quite done yet (there is a plan to improve the foundations and then to shift the whole bridge over onto the new foundations), but it is usable.  The dirt ramps going up to the bridge are still too rough for 2 wheel drive vehicles, especially if it has rained, so things are still not quite back to normal yet, but al in all, we are very excited about this new bridge:

   

Rescue Truck

Here's a picture of the AutoShop Rescue Truck:



          This is a late '90's Toyota Land Cruiser--this is the truck we have been using to go out and rescue people when they have breakdowns in this area.  In its day, it was a nice truck, but now it has 480,000 km on it, and those have not been easy kilometres.  I (Andrew) would estimate that 90% of that has been on rough dirt roads, and not everybody who has used it before us has been a careful owner.  It's missing various bits and pieces, (the driver's door can only be opened from the outside, for example, as all the interior door mechanism is gone), the home made tool box in the back has been broken into and is awkward to work around, the engine runs alright, but doesn't have as much power as it should, etc.  You get the idea.  Anyway, this old truck is getting to the point where it often breaks down when we are rescuing people, so we got the go-ahead to replace it.  We looked around at local options but the price for any new vehicle that could do what we needed it to do was astronomically high, and good used vehicles are very difficult to find here.  We carefully weighed our options and decided to go ahead and import a used truck from the USA.  So, after hours of searching eBay and various other internet car dealers, I finally picked out this 2002 Ford F350 4x4 from a Craigslist ad in Tennessee:



         It has everything we were looking for: the good International diesel engine, a manual transmission, even a manual transfer case, and under 100,000 miles.  The utility bed was not something that we were looking for, but it is definitely a bonus.   Once purchased, the truck went to some of our colleagues in North Carolina to be outfitted for us in PNG.  Working within the budget I was given, I managed (working via e-mail from here in PNG) to specify all kinds of good stuff to put into the truck, including locking differentials in both axles, a winch bumper (the winch will be removed from our old rescue truck and put on to this one), better wheels and tires, work lights, a sturdy roll bar (made by our colleagues in NC), and a few other things.  We tried to make the truck as capable as possible for our needs while staying under budget, and I think we did pretty well.

         Since it got here, we've already been using it a lot, and so far it has performed very well.  It's nice to have a truck that actually has enough power to safely pull our crash trailer and which has been set up to be hard to get stuck.  It's nice to finally have the right tool for the job!

         In other news, July is going to be a busy month for me --in addition to my normal work as assistant manager/motorcycle and small engine mechanic at AutoShop, I've also got meetings in Port Moresby (capital city) for the Pacific Orientation Course Oversight Committee and then later in the month at least 2 weeks of Executive Committee meetings here in Ukarumpa.