Troozshoes

Dear Friends and Family,

Here's an update of things that have been happening here during the last few weeks.  

Dave went to the village to find out who wants to attend the translation training course held in April and May. He was gone for a week. He was able to drive to one of the Sam speaking villages, which was the one closest to the road and NOT the one in which we live. He then hiked up to Buan, and saw firsthand how the river has flooded and destroyed the road. After collecting the application forms and references for three Buan men, he then hiked back to the first village and gathered the applications and references from two men there.

The night before Dave was to drive back to Ukarumpa it rained very hard. The rivers between the village and Madang all flooded. One man said that the flooding only gets this high once every rainy season – and it was right when Dave wanted to drive out! After checking the water level throughout the day, he decided not to chance it. The next day, he saw an amazing attempt by the Sam men that came with him, as they forded the river about 800 feet upstream where the river spread out wider, made a new road down a stream and up another stream, up a steep 8 foot high (45 degree slope) bank (an awesome display of manpower, as they pushed and the truck spun it's way up the hill), only to find that the next big river was even worse than the first. Dave left the truck at the house of the Lutheran district president, and came to Madang by dinghy, and then up to Ukarumpa by public transport.

Two days later, we went to the city of Lae to talk to the house building folks about our kit house plans. They are now working up adjusted plans for approval. Then they will start working on the house to get it ready to deliver to Madang in June!

When we returned to Ukarumpa, we worked with our regional area directors to finalize plans for what we hope to accomplish for 2008. We were encouraged to see how the things we accomplished in 2007 feed into the overall plan for the language program!

We are currently planning for our next village stay, March 4 – April 15. We would appreciate your prayers for us as we work on getting ready. Please also pray for the village stay, that we would see good progress in our spoken language abilities and that the two workshops we hope to run (an English refresher course for the translators and a trial literacy course to test out some literacy primers) would be well-received. Please also pray starting now for the good group of people coming in June to build our village house!

God bless you,
Dave and Sarah, and Joanna, Samuel, Matthew and Rebekah