The inside of a church !!

Yesterday morning (Sunday) I went to church for the 1st time in many, many years. Henri (the Ozzie that is livinng with me until 12th of May) made arrangements with a local called Peter to pick us up 8:45am Sunday. And guess what Peter didn't turn up until 10:00am !!  PNG time !!! There are many, many churches in PNG, the missionaries have been very busy here for the past 130 years or so. The church we went to was of Baptist pursuasion. There was really great singing and a sermon that went on for about 1.5 hours !!! AT the beginning of the service (or when we turned up anyway), I was introduced to the congregation and I had to get up and say a few words. Apparently I was the 1st “white” visitor for at least a couple of years. And yes the service was in “Tok Pisin” !! A lot of the locals came up to me after service to shake hands with me. I felt very welcomed by all. Nearly everyone in PNG is associated with a church and the locals take their religion very seriously. It is important to meet and interact with people in PNG as the Wantok dynamic can work for you or against you, depending on one's level of interaction.

There have been power outages here nearly everyday !! Unbelievable !!!  Yesterday the power was on and off all day. The power would come on, stay on for 2 mins and go out again !!!  This went on the essentially the whole day. I am learning patience very quickly !!! The campus does not have any backup power and without adequate protection you can imagine the impact this has on IT equipment. So if anyone out there has a spare UPS (or 2x), we could sure use them here.

Yesterday afternoon the phones were working so I decided to ring home. Called 4x numbers and not one person home !!! Everyone must have been at church !!!

Anyway, time for some lunch and then on to a tutorial at 1:00pm.

Hope you are well.