Monday, October 29, 2007
Troolin news flash - 29 October 2007
Dear Friends and Family,
We are in the middle of packing and last-minute jobs for our departure tomorrow. We have a prayer point to share with you. At this point, we do not have visas for the three younger children, so they cannot enter PNG. We have decided to fly to Cairns, since those tickets are costly to change, and wait. We hope to have their visas back in time to fly up to Papua New Guinea all together on Friday. If the visas do not come by then, Dave and Joanna will fly up on Friday and Sarah will stay in Cairns with the other three children until the visas arrive. Please pray that the visas will come in time so we can all fly up to Papua New Guinea together!
Thank you for your prayers!
Love,
Dave and Sarah
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Email Update: 18 October 2007
Dear Friends and Family,
We have been having a wonderful time here in Adelaide! It's been a time for adding a new person to our family, doing all the associated paperwork for the three governments with which we relate, catching up with many friends (some we haven't seen for nearly ten years!), reuniting with our family, and writing technical papers about the Sam culture.
Family
We've been living with Sarah's family, and it's been really fun to see they and the kids connect and get to know each other better! We like connecting with them too. :) We were also able to spend about five days with some of their cousins in Wodonga, and they got along very well together. We thought about leaving them there, as they all bounced on the trampoline, but Sarah said we shouldn't. :)
Work
Dave has been working on writing one of the two anthropology papers we need to finish about the Sam culture. It's about the social organization of the Sam people, and encompasses a huge amount of information. At the moment, he has a good rough draft, and is in a good position to finish that before the end of the year. He has also been working on a rough draft of another anthropology paper for the conference he attended in February. This paper deals with literacy, and a theory about how to encourage greater interest among the Sam people in their literacy program. This paper is due Nov. 1, and is causing Dave some stress.
Government
The children are all finished with getting updated with new Australian passports. We have submitted all the paperwork needed for their US passports and Rebekah's report of birth abroad certificate, and now we just have to wait for them to mail the documents back to us. However, we are facing a difficulty with the visas to go back to PNG. We hope the visas will be ready before Oct. 30, but at the moment it's a bit uncertain. Please pray with us that we will be able to get the visas in time, and don't have to change or forfeit our airline tickets!
This brief summary gives you an idea of what we have been doing. At least it gives you an overview - we don't have time or space to tell you all about the donuts, lattes, bookstores, fish & chips, ABC kid shows on TV, a Colin Buchanan concert (an Christian Australian kids' entertainer), the biggest library in the southern hemisphere, holding a koala, seeing all the cousins, anties, uncles, and all the other things we have enjoyed while we have been here. But we also look forward to getting back to PNG and seeing friends and getting back into the work there. We are feeling like it is time to go back, and we are thankful to the Lord for giving us that peace!
Love,
Dave and Sarah, and Joanna, Samuel, Matthew, and Rebekah
