in the neighborhood

THEY'VE ARRIVED!!  Our May / June team of Interface students has been here for a week now, and they've already been exposed to so much since walking through these bars at the airport just a few days ago!  Today we all took a walk around the village outside our gates.  Take a look!

This guy is selling his ripe coffee cherries cheap to someone else who'll dry them and sell them for more in town.

I'd never noticed how bananas grow UP!

Shelled coffee drying in the sun. 

I don't know about you, but I've never seen pigs cuddle before. :0)

The village gardens are HUGE.  Imagine gardening acres of this by hand. 

A bug in a banana tree...how fitting for this blog. :0)



Cherry pickin'

It's coffee season once again in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.  Coffee is a huge source of income here and the villagers are kept busy going to their coffee gardens and picking the ripe coffee "cherries." 

 

you fill bags with the picked cherries...or in my case you attempt to fill up bags.  I worked for hours and only got about 1/2 a bag.  No wonder coffee is so expensive.





the coffee cherries are then shelled to get 2 coffee beans inside.  These beans are then dried on huge tarps in the sun.  You can always tell it's coffee season by the stench of rotting coffee skins everywhere.  The dried coffee beans are then sold to factories in town that roast the beans and seperate them into grades to be packaged, sold and exported.





Kuela and I had just finished picking coffee for several hours and were taking a breather after lugging it (in the bags on our heads...PNG style) up from the garden.

This little pig went to market...

I live about 45 minutes from our closest town of Goroka, so we always take full advantage of the huge fruit and veggie market whenever we're there.   The ladies who live in the village next to our campus come to market their vegetables to us every monday, but the selection isn't always the greatest so we enjoy the variety in town.  We just have to remember to bring our mud shoes along. :0) 

 

a garden friend

No matter how many times I've ripped this web down this guy keeps coming back.  By his sheer determination he's earned the right to stay. 

Christmas in May

 


Off we go to pick up our boxes!  Jacob & Beth Devine were excited
to get some things from home, too.

 



It was a gorgeous day for being out driving.  I can't complain
about our views here! 

 


There is an awesome couple in California who have been faithfully helping us Papua New Guinea missionaries ship things overseas for years.  I packed up a few boxes to be sent while home in Canada and the container arrived last week!  A few of us who had shipped things went to help unpack.   It arrived the day after my birthday so that was a pretty nice gift. :0)

Party!!

I love birthdays...especially the ones that you try and let slip by unnoticed but your friends don't let you. :0)  I have the privelege of working with an incredible team of people who have not just become friends, but family.