There and back again...

There and back again my little hobbit...that's what my dad said to me at the beginning of this journey. Well dad, we have been there and we are on our way back again. We have had a fantastic journey, but we are ready to see you all again. This will be my final update since we leave for home tomorrow night. We will have lots of stories to tell when we get home...you know, the ones that were too gross or would have scared our mothers half to death. Papua was awesome and we both miss it already. We have been chillin' in Bali the last couple of days. We have tried surfing and have the bruises to show for it. It is actually a lot more violent of a sport than you would think. Mostly we have just been relaxing near our hotel, but we did venture around the island a couple of days ago, and ended up in Uluwatu.

The skirts are not because we thought they were pretty. It is a requirement when you are in a sacred Hindu area. This temple was built in the 11th or the 14th century depending on who you listen to...whatever...it was old and it was cool.
It is built on the edge of these cliffs.

And there are gigantic waves that surfers from around the world come to surf on. Actually...they surf a little bit further down the coast, and we watched them, if you tried to surf in this spot, you would be met with an untimely death. One of the surfers told us the waves were 15 feet high...all I know is they were HUGE!

These are the guys who drove us down to Uluwatu on their motorcycles. My "sopir" Chris, is on the right. He was very impressed with my indonesian and we chatted all the way down there. Actually, I had the opportunity to have some pretty awesome spiritual conversations, so that was a cool way to spend our journey.

And of course, Joerg was makin' friends with members of his own species as well. The monkeys there are quite anxious for treats and if you don't feed them they start pulling on your skirt and stuff.

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Thank you to everyone for your prayers and your comments. We will see you on the flip side in a couple of days. Love in Christ, Jen

Time and distance... (part 2)

Before I switch to pictures of our return travels through Sentani, I have to pause and show you some of the personalities that we have been with these last three months.

The unpictured person under the sarong is Selfi, and peeking out is Helmi. If you're wondering what they're doing, they are hiding from the sun because they might turn black. : ) No lie, that is really what they're doing.

This is Agus...and no, he didn't get dressed up for the picture. He was standing on the beach talking with his friends like this.

And of course, Lazarus. He asked to borrow my camera, and this is what I found later.

Okay...moving on. We flew to Sentani last Monday, leaving our friends behind. We set them up on facebook before we left and we have been keeping up with them that way. I took this picture on our way back from visiting the city of Jayapura, and if you are wondering why I posted it you need to read the yellow sign a little more closely. : )

We spent 2 of our days in Sentani out at the mission training center with Abi. There was a brand new class out there and this is Abi trying to teach them the indonesian alphabet...everyone one of these guys come from tribal villages where indonesian is a second language. It was actually really neat returning to the MTC, because it was awesome to see how far our language had come in the last 3 months.

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We had some good final days with Abi and Edy in Sentani and with some of the white missionaries as well. They had some pretty useful advice for our futures as missionaries, and I was able to start making some future plans, but I will keep you in suspense until I get home on that one.

Time and distance... (part 1)

Sorry y'all, we have traveled a lot of time and distance since I last posted pictures. I have lots of reasons but here's a recap of some of the best moments.

At the end of July we had the opportunity to go back out to SP11 one more time to spend time with our friends and this is us on the beach with Helmi, Nirmala, and Sepi.
We then came back to Manokwari for a quiet week in the house with Edy's family. This is Riama with her new keyboard. She has only had the keyboard a week and she is already planning ways that she can use it to minister.

For our last night before we left Manokwari to return to Sentani they planned to take us to Mansinam beach...but as with all good Papuan plans they didn't think out the timeframe and we ended up hanging out next to this trash heap on what we affectionately call "Pantai Kotor" (which means Dirty Beach).

We did however have a great time with our friends frying up fish on the beach.

Selfi and her fiance, Binet (in the middle) have been our friends since our first days in Manokwari, and Kigan on the far right is the youth leader at the church, also a very good friend of ours.

Packing up and moving on...

We have been packing up our things this evening and getting ready to move on to Sentani tomorrow morning. We spent the weekend with our friends from the church here in Manokwari smoking fish and hanging out on the beach. We are really going to miss some of the friends that we made here, and I know that's mutual for them as well. We have already had a lot of goodbyes out at SP and they have been saying goodbye to us all week at every "ibada" (biblestudy).

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Tomorrow we begin our journey home...first to Sentani for a couple of days to wrap up our time there and then on to Bali, and then home again. You can be praying for our journey home as we say goodbye here and as we travel. I will post a little more when we get to Sentani. Thanks for continuing to stay updated on our happenings.

Life is like a box of chocolates...

Yeah, that's right...you never know what you're gonna get. And that seems to be particularly true here in Papua. For one thing, planning is totally on the fly here. Plans that were made previously are almost for certain going to change. For instance, last week was supposed to be our last week in SP11 so we closed up the house, brought all of our stuff back to the city, said our goodbyes, only to find out that our plans had changed again and we were going back to SP11. And secondly, you never know what you might get, because life here is just plain full of surprises...like ending up in a muslim wedding or an earthquake (both good stories, I'll share later)...but, you never know what might happen next.

These are few more random shots from around SP...and this one in particular is for our mothers. The top bucket is the water that comes from the well and that is what we use for bucket baths and cleaning dishes. The bottom bucket is our drinking water after it has gone through the filter.

This has been our project the last 2 weeks. We have been painting the inside and outside of the school. We have definitely been taking advantage of Joerg's drawing talents.

We also helped clean out a chocolate garden last week. They gave us big machete type things and let us go to town. It was hot, buggy work, but we enjoyed being able to help out. The chocolate garden belongs to Lazarus and Diana, and Lazarus fell out of a truck last week and broke his leg (from what I understand). Lazarus and Diana are both people from the church and they are really cool people. They have a 2 year old and a 3 month old, and Diana is only 16 years old!

This is us with our friend Nirmala before we left SP11. Nirmala is originally from Sumatra but is living out at SP11, serving the people there for the next couple of months. There are several people that we have grown close with during our time here, but for me, my time with Nirmala has been some of the best. She is one friend that I will miss very much.