Date: 6/17/04
Location: Village living near Madang, Papua New Guinea
This morning, we got up and went out to the gardens. We got to help plant taro, banana, and yams. We also helped identify mature yams as seed or kaikai ("food"). Kaikai yams are yellower, while seeds are all brown. Then we "cleaned" the kaikai yams by scraping the mud off them. We sat on banana leaves and the children came and held other banana leaves over us for shade. We put the food in bilums and carried it back to the village. A lot of people in this village chew buai.
This afternoon, we went to swim and had a strange situation. Our men had come to swim at the same place we wanted to bathe. It was culturally inappropriate for us to swim/bathe with the men there, so we had to wait until they were done and gone before we went in the water.
This evening, we watched the Jesus film. We pulled the wire loose on one of the sound cables by accident, but we prayed, and everything worked out. Many people came and sat or stood in and around the haus-win where we were.
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