Dear co-laborers,
It’s hard to believe that in just a few weeks we will be moving into Tobo. Our days right now are very busy with house building preparations, but we want to keep you involved in the details and organization of house building in Toboland.
So… what does it take to organize house building in Papua New Guinea? Well frankly- a lot! And since it’s a bit more complicated than back home I thought you might like to hear about what building in the bush is like here in PNG. Well, at least our experience so far!
Unlike Home Depot; the famous one stop home improvement store, in PNG you have to go to three or four stores to try to get all of your supplies. Even then you can bet that they won’t have what you need. And when you DO find what you need, you can count on it being at least twice as expensive as in the States. So last month I had to spend a week in Lae, one of the bigger cities in PNG, to buy all our house building supplies. Another big reason I bought our supplies from there is that it is only about a 20 minute flight into Tobo as opposed to an hour flight from where we are living in Madang (The shorter the flight, the less expensive it is) So we have been able to save some money having our wood and house building supplies flown in from Lae. But what do you do with all your supplies once they’re bought? Since we are flying our supplies out of Lae I had to rent a 20 foot shipping container to store all of our supplies in. This is necessary because in PNG things have a tendency to walk away if they’re not locked up!
Since it is very expensive to fly supplies into the bush we want to take advantage of all bush materials that we can. So we talked with some of the Tobo people and they agreed to cut quite a bit of wood for us from the bush. Of course they’ll be compensated for all their work, but this still saves us a lot of money. So, our partners divided out our materials list as evenly as possible to the different families in Tobo. They will be cutting our rafters, our floor bearers, 2x3’s, bamboo for the inside walls, and more.
Flying our supplies into Tobo is another job in and of itself. This is where things get costly. One 20 minute flight costs $800 while others are around $1000 each. Last Tuesday we had our first flight carrying our supplies into Lengbati. For this I had to fly from Madang to Lae and help load the MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship, which New Tribes Missionaries often use because they have a bigger plane) Twin Otter. For the first flight I flew in with our supplies to Tobo and helped to unload it. The weather allowed for two flights on Tuesday and we’ll have one more next Tuesday (one was just cancelled today) to get more supplies in… if the weather’s good, and one more the following Tuesday…if the weather’s good! Because of the weather and an assured flight cancellation or two, we were sure to plan on a month to get all of our supplies in- good thing!
Thanks to the help of our coworkers and a ton of Tobos we were able to unload the flights very quickly. We threw together a temporary shelter for the wood to keep it dry until we begin house building on October 2nd. I stayed in Tobo for 4 more days and during that time we marked out where the house will be, cut down trees, and double checked our supplies.
I had a great time reconnecting with the people there. They were excited to see me & I was able to be there for the Thursday morning believer’s meeting and it was a huge encouragement. As I sat and watched one of the believers, Nikkos read translated scripture portions in his own language I was reminded of the importance of the work here in Tobo. House building here in PNG is not the easiest and cheapest thing to do in the world but being able to remain here in Tobo to be a light in the darkness and see God’s church brought to maturity in Christ is absolutely priceless and well worth all the headaches of house building in a bush location.
We thank the Lord daily for each prayer and dollar given for our house building efforts. We could not do any of this without you! We’ll continue to keep you updated on the process… here are some dates for you to remember and be in prayer about:
~ September 4th… early morning supply flight into Tobo
~ September 11th…hopefully the last supply flight into Tobo.
~ October 2nd…we’re loading up our family and moving into Tobo to start house-building!!
~ Please also pray that the Lord would provide for some unexpected additional expenses. Thank you for all you’ve given to help & we know the Lord will continue to provide.
Your Hands and Feet to the Tobo people,
Jason, Nisae, Kadynn, Judah and Eden
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