a week in the life...

You may be wondering, what do we actually do day to day. You know the big picture. What about the small picture. Today we're going to endeavour to give you a very very brief day to day diary of the last week of our life.

Sunday: Went to a different church - Central South Seas Evangelical Church. Quite big, a thousand people or so. Very loud music. A sound system here seems to mean you turn it up to full capacity of sound! You don't just amplify you intensify. Left home at 8:50 came home about 12:10 so that was shorter than usual. Had iced coffee and cake. Relaxed, read books, played volleyball, dinner, read, sung a few hymns. Go to sleep.

Monday: First thing in the morning Jair went to town to get some prices for some parts. Lauretta prepared a staff devotion, organised some of the workers in the last minute preparations for a group that was coming, satisfied the demands of the leader of this group. Morning tea - staff meeting was a nice time with staff, sharing prayer needs, what was happening around the base. After morning tea, Lauretta headed off to the Hospital School (you wouldn't believe it. I think someone important has read my blog because the drive way was SMOOOOTH! A grader had been through to get rid of the ruts... I wonder if the same will happen with the education system...), met with a prospective new staff member, chaired a meeting in which we discussed this health unit we're all putting together. Got home, tired and hungry. Ate a quick lunch and got straight to work preparing for CBI the next day. Meanwhile, Jair had been working in the workshop. Had a good d&m with dinner (Lauretta's been working through the love dare). Pretty much went to bed afterwards.

Tuesday: Up and at 'em early to get ready for CBI. Lauretta organised work for our house girl (ahh, what a blessing!!). Left just after 8am. Signed in at the prison at 8:35 or so. First block, got in straight away (if we're late, we have to wait while they have a staff meeting). Got in the first wing, distributed and collected the lessons, chatted with the inmates. Jair had asked one of them to give a short devotion. It was a blessing to hear what he had prepared. All set to leave and go to the next wing but the officers were all in a meeting so they couldn't unlock the door to let us out. Jair was laxed, chatting happily, Lauretta couldn't help but try make eye contact through the window with the officers to let us out! just a tad nervous being locked in a prison wing with a whole lot of inmates... nice guys though :) After maybe 30 mins or more, someone

came to let us out. Next wing. Jair had a deep conversation with two muslims. Sometimes the muslims can be a big battle because I think they pressure the CBI students to not do their work. But today it was fine. We really pray hard for those muslims. Their influence is growing. Next wing, same same - it's a quieter wing. Prayed with them and shared a devotion. Then our road split. Jair went to another block while Lauretta went to the female wing. Surprised to find two women, rather than just one, as inmates in the female wing. The new woman was keen to join CBI so Lauretta went back to get an enrolement form, etc. After both of us had finished those wings, we went to the Long Term Unit. Same same. Nice talks with the guys. It was quite late already. Then we had to go to get all the material signed to take it out. A group of people were in the special signing place so we had to wait. Getting close to 12, were a bit afraid that we'd get caught in at lock down - when no one's allowed to come or go! Hungry as anything, hadn't

eaten since 7. Lauretta had a bit of a flu thing happening (go figure - it's 30+ degrees) so she felt terrible. Eventually the guy lets us in. Lauretta stamps the papers, Jair dates them, the officer signs them. Straight to the "gate lodge" to be let out again - 11:55. Went to the market to buy vegies for the workers. Went home, tired, hungry, sick, exhausted but exceedingly happy that the house was clean (and I didn't have to do it!). Ate. Jair went straight to work... Lauretta napped, then went to Bible study. She came back to find Jair had cooked a killer chicken pineapple pizza. He's becoming quite a gourmet chef (he cooks every Tuesday). After dinner, Lauretta checked on the guests at the transit house, had a good chat to them. Jair relaxed a bit. Early night.

Wednesday: Jair went over to SITAG (Solomon Islands Translation Advisory Group) to check on all their vehicles. He does it as part of his job, as they are fellow missionaries here. He was out all day, with one of the locals who he's kind of training up in all things cars. Lauretta decided to have an introverted day (she's an introvert... although you may not have guessed it). So she met with someone about taking over all the CBI work responsibilites, start doing the work, finally had a relaxed lunch hour, had a few d&ms. Did her pijin reading class with the local kids. Jair came home. Watched some plays put on by the group who stayed here - got an education into life here in the Solomons - what really happens! Cooked dinner. Ate dinner. Had fellowship night in the leaf hut. The singing is always so amazing! Played the guitar/read. Went to bed.

Thursday: After waking up and eating, Jair got to work repairing washing machines, a truck, odd mechanical jobs. Lauretta got to work finishing CBI work, doing typing work that was outstanding, organised people to clean up after the group that left. The house girl came, again (yay!... someone once said, "house work won't kill you but why take the chance" - pretty much my motto now. Besides, it gives her employment she wouldn't otherwise have and frees me up to do my other work.) Also baked some ANZAC biscuits but they didn't work out too well - faulty ingredients ;). After lunch, Lauretta taught the reading class again. Jair fixed her broken jandal under the threat of not getting afternoon tea... Thursday evening was relaxed.

Friday: Lauretta went to the bank - huge lines - to sort out some issues. Then went to the hospital school - caught up briefly with the teachers. Did some grocery shopping - what a nightmare. The last stop was the bulk store which was quiet when I first came in. Was inside quarter to twelve. Wanted to be back by twelve, so was already running late. Waited in line to get some self-raising flour and then all of a sudden, the one cashier line had like 10 people in it! So it was 20 past twelve by the time she walked out the door. Got home at 12:40, having picked up some kids who were walking home from school in the hot sun. Quickly put the vegies and cheese in the fridge, got lunch from the leaf kitchen as she was dying from hunger. Jair, who had been... left to visit Tetere prison farm to do CBI work there. We had a sport afternoon for all the staff at SWIM and Bethesda disability centre. That was a

lot of fun. A nice way to end the week. Had our non-alcoholic happy hour at 5. Karen, a lovely missionary who lives in a leaf house hear at the base, wanted to cut Lauretta's hair. Started snipping but found it was a lot more difficult than she first thought. Happily, one of the guests at the transit house cuts hair all the time, so she fixed up Karen's dodgy job. After the mop chop, we had dinner. We had some ausies stay over the night; they're in transit to another island. By the time we had washed the dishes, it was pretty much bedtime.

Saturday: Small sleep in. Lauretta made cinnamon banana pancakes for breakfast. Delicious! Entertained ausie guests, who left at about 11. Jair fixed some torches, did some work on an inverter, marshalled the troops (the guests at the transit house...) to do some digging, had a Saturday Special Iced Coffee with Kevin and Machi. Jair took the troops down for a quick rinse off in the sea. Lauretta typed (or rather is typing) the blog. After lunch, we're going to go to watch a soccer game, clean the church in the cool of the early evening and thus will end our week!

Sorry, there's only one photo of this week's advent

ures and that is one of Laki. We thought it was so funny. You see after playing sport on Friday afternoon, everyone was drinking cold coconuts (it is a tropical island after all...) and someone gave this half shell to Laki to eat. He loved it. I'd never seen a dog eating a coconut before, but then I guess, I'd never been in a country with a ready supply of coconuts either. It's not a very good photo cos the second I got closer, he picked up the coconut and ran off. He was so afraid that I'd try steal his coconut! So here it is. If you ever want to spoil your dog, forget the bone and give him a coconut shell!

SWIM Hospital School

Of all the places around where we live, it's the hospital that most reminds us that we live in a third world country. It's called "namba naen" as it was the number nine American field hospital in World War Two. You drive in, the ruts in the drive way are so big, you slow to a crawl and still lurch and totter as you make your way to the single line of cars which constitutes the car park. No parking meters here. In fact, very little has changed since the British left in the 70s.

So you tentatively park, making sure you haven't parked next to a mud puddle or a tent peg. They have this big tent outside the entrance, presumably as a waiting room of some sort. You walk up to the entrance, avoiding the red splatters of bettelnut, or blood, and walk up the ramp. Then there's this pharmacy area on your left, crowded with people waiting in line, and I think a waiting area on the right, even more crowded with people, some with drips, some lying down on a bench, some with bags of clothes and food. I guess they're the ones waiting to be admitted into a ward. Walking on through here, there's a long tiled, covered walkway which you need to walk on. When it's wet and rainy and you're wearing jandals (which you always wear here... oh that's right, "thongs" for you Ausies and "slipas" in pijin), you've got to be so careful that you don't slip because it's slippery in your slippers! And believe me, you wouldn't want to be admitted into the emergency ward... well, I wouldn't. When it's slippery, you dodge the tiles and walk on the bits where the tiles have broken away as that part isn't slippery.

As you're walking, you see that you're actually passing different areas. In patient clinic, hmmm, a few doors down they're cooking something (who knows what...) for lunch, ok, and there's the maternity ward with a number of people sitting outside. Then finally it's open now, and you can get a wiff of sea breeze (the sea is so close, I don't know how they cope in storms or a tsunami!!).

As you walk the pathway, you may see (as I did the other day) a patient, fresh from surgery, still knocked out with anethestic, with a sheet covering her being wheeled down the same pathway.

You look to the left and right as you walk this pathway and see the amputee ward, the orthopedic ward, the dental clinic, the pediatric ward. Going in the ward is another story, but you pass by today, unwilling to look at the crowded rooms with little light.

When a person goes to hospital, their family goes too. So in the wards, you'll have a patient on a bed, and their mum, brother, kids, whoever, sitting beside them, sleeping on the floor next to them. If they're from another island, which is very common, they've got a number of personal belongings surrounding them. But in an open room 6m by 12m (but my meter judging isn't the best...) you will find 12 beds, six line each side of the wall, for patients and then there is the family hanging about. So it's pretty squished.

Anyway, you keep walking, entirely skipping walking through the pediatric ward because you don't feel like looking at crying, helpless malnourished babies today. But just after the pediatric ward the path gives you the option of turning left, which you take. This path takes you to the midwifery area, but if you turn left, you see a fence, the ocean and the hospital school - a ray of sunshine in a miserable place. Well, people do get better in the hospital, so maybe it's not so miserable afterall. As you see from the picture, the Hospital School is a little school room, delightfully painted and built by SWIM teams. It doesn't have electricity or modern windows but it does the trick nicely (although, being close to the sea, it does get pretty wet in there when the sea is rough and the water sprays in).

So now that you're here, I'll tell you a bit about what happens here and what I do here (it's Lauretta writing here...). The hospital school has three teachers. Two of them go and teach the students in the pediatric and orthopedic wards, and the other one teaches the students who come into the school room. There are roughly between 1 and 6 students who are up to having tutoring in the wards and about 2-9 kids who come into the school room. The kids who come into the school room are usually the children of patients or patients who are doing fairly well, well enough to come to school.

School runs from about 8:45 (when the kids turn up) till about 12:15 with a short break for them to go and get a drink and go to the toilet back in the ward. They start with devotions and singing. It is absolutely delightful to hear their singing. When they know the songs, they sing with all their might. Parents peer in through the window from the pediatric ward next door to see whose making all the noise. Most of the songs have actions and some of them are little dances which they really enjoy. After that they do any number of different activities, depending on their ability and what the teacher has prepared. The other day when I was observing a teacher, she was doing maths with two boys. It was sad to see that they were both hungry, not having had any breakfast, and so they struggled to concentrate.

On top of that, the kids are all at a range of levels, some never having gone to school at all and some already able to do basic math. So it's certainly a challenge to teach there, but a delightful challenge - the teachers keep telling me that they love the kids they teach.

So I've come in, a fairly new teacher myself, and asked, well what can I do to help the teachers teach better. I'll be honest with you. The education system is, in my opinion, a miracle. I think it's a miracle that anyone comes out reasonably well educated. Teachers don't always turn up; they don't always have qualifications; they don't always teach lessons, much less prepare them.

So my main focus has been these three areas - meeting with the teachers regularly, developing very simple professional development (such as getting them to set and meet goals, having observations and mentoring) and helping them develop units to teach. In a sense, they're lucky because every three months at the most, they've got a different batch of kids (occasionally kids stay for longer or come and go).

So I'm trying to get them to the stage where they've got a couple of really sound units to teach (in different subject areas), they can teach children to read in their own language and they can do basic math (basic because of my abilities not theirs!! ;) I go there a couple days a week to meet with them, work with them and talk with them.

It's hard work with slow progress, but hearing those "pikinini" sing makes it all worth it!

Gecko Wars and Mould

Today's blog is going to be a random one. There's just numerous random things to pass on to you. Bear with me; I hope it enlightens you about day to day living in a hot, humid, wet country.

Ok, so firstly, mould. It's the rainy season so things get wet and damp for days. The problem that I've discovered is that if you're not careful, mould will just grow on something exceedingly quickly. Like, in three days a skirt could b

e covered with mould! And this is exactly what's been happening. I have to have daily mould checks on clothes, surfaces, bags - everything because I'm bound to find mould. It's really quite unappetising (not that I eat my clothes...) to

find your shirt covered in mould, or your shorts with a dusty green layer. I have one pencil case that seems to be a mould factory. I try to clean it every couple of days, but the mould comes back. I try to have this war on mould, but I think I'm losing ground!!

Next is gecko wars. Now I have this suspicion about gecko wars for a few reasons. Firstly, there are hardly any geckoes around... suspicious when they usually cover the walls. Secondly, there are a number of geckoes without tails... Thirdly, I saw some geckoes fighting the other day. Literally, one was trying to eat the other's head while the other was trying to hack away at its opponents legs. So, there's definitely some tribal gecko wars going on and the battle ground are the walls of my house. Charming. I'm just glad I haven't found any limbs. I think their cannibalistic tendencies kick in pretty quickly when they see a fellow gecko lying dead. There's plenty "siti blong gecko" (gecko poo) around the place...

Third random thing is ants. Ok, so ants are pretty normal. They come and go in my house without rhyme or simile, just whenever they like really. In NZ, I once had a big pile of sugar that was sitting outside (yes, I wasn't the most organised house wife) and I figured that that deterred them from coming inside because they had plenty of sugar to eat outside.

But here I don't need to worry about that because I have "Wonder Miraculous Insecticide Chalk". It's this random Asian chalk that you buy and it promises that "the insect's nervous system will fail to function' when it comes into contact with the chalk. The name of the chalk cracks me up. I felt a bit stupid when I asked for it in the shop. Who wants to go to a shop and ask for something as ridiculously titled as "Wonder Miraculous Insecticide Chalk".

Apparently it works. I have yet to see the positive results (I only applied the chalk this morning). I'm just afraid that I'll have a whole heap of dead ants on my kitchen bench. I hope they step on the chalk, and then go home and die there...

Oh, in scarier news, I almost forgot, I had a traumatic experience with my oven mit the other day. So, you see, I was roasting some vegies (which are so cheap and abundant here!!) and I got my hand into my oven mit to take out the roasting dish and I felt this rubbery bit of string thing in there and I thought, "halo, this is a bit odd..." I put my hand in further, still feeling this odd thing, and then quickly withdrew my hand. A small gecko quickly leaped out and ran for cover underneath the spice rack. Poor thing. It wouldn't move for a few minutes after that and when I poked it again, it quickly ran away over my coffee and spices to the window.

To be honest with you, I gave a small scream (no, I assure you, it was a small scream) when it came out. I don't know who was more traumatised, me or the gecko, probably the gecko. Needless to say, I give the oven mit a good shake out before I use it!!

wet soggy foundation

Well, we are in the rainy season after all, so it could hardly be a surprise. Rain tends to come in the rainy season here. And it comes in large quantities, we're finding. In fact, the average rainfall per year is 15 meters. Over the past few days we've had a lot of rainy, stormy, wintery weather. But we're still in shorts and tee-shirts cos it's still hot... go figure!
Now we do like a good thunder storm. There's nothing like the rumble to drive you further down into that blanket with a book, but with the heat, I hardly curl up here in the Solomon Islands when there's a thunder storm. The whole sky just seems to crash and boom and it shakes everything to the core. It's frightening as it just keeps going on and on. It's like having surround sound in your room as you hear the thunder rumbling along the heavens like an angry toddler giant who's throwing a tantrum. And when there's thunder, there comes a lot of rain and also a lot of wind.

So anyway, that's the weather for the last few days. Last week it was hot during the day, thundery in the evening and rainy at night. But now it's just rainy all the time. Not that we're complaining. It's nice as it's cooler. Ahh, mid-twenties, reach-for-your-hoodie kind of temperature.

The freakiest thing about the weather over the last few days is that a number of trees have fallen down. Last night at about six pm, a half of a big raintree split right down the centre and fell down on the fence, phone line and road. So the guys and some of the neighbours were busy quickly clearing it up. But then, during the night, the wind blew so hard, the ground was so soft and the middle of the tree was so rotten that the other half of this massive tree just fell down. We didn't hear the crash, but it must have been loud! We are very blessed that it didn't fall a different way as it would have landed right on top of a house. So, even though the tree came down, God kept us all safe last night.

So first thing this morning, I was out with the camera, taking some shots. It's a massive tree. Now that it's on the ground, we can get a better view of it. It's fascinating to see all the vines and branches intermingling. It's incredible to think that big thing can just come crashing down with a bit (or rather, a lot) of wind. I got our neighbour, Amanda, to stand in front so you could get some perspective of the size of the root system.

It was coincidental (or rather providential) that we'd already chosen to share a passage from Colossians with the inmates at the

prison today. It's from Colossians 2:6-7: "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness." We shared with them this incident about the tree, that it was rotten in it's core and it's roots don't go down very deep. The wet soil also gave it a shaky foundation. If your life is built like this, on a wet, soggy foundation, with weak roots and sin that rots your soul, then it's no wonder when you fall in life when temptation and trials come. But if you are deeply rooted in Christ and in His word, then when trials come, He will hold you up so you will not fall. The inmates responded warmly to this vivid picture which we were able to explain to them.

I must say, I'm eyeing the trees by our house more suspiciously now. My fears were somewhat allayed when the security guard explained that the raintree by our house is evenly weighted and obviously has a strong core. Thankfully, the tree by our house appears to be more deeply rooted in the ground! But even more than that, we trust in God. He won't let the tree come crashing down if he doesn't want it to. That's our prayer tonight as the wind howls!