AND… we’re back in PNG! Consider being one who responds to Go! yourself!
One of the weird things about working overseas – at least with our model – is the coming and going, and therefore the stopping and starting. But the stopping and starting provides an opportunity to reflect, learn, and grow. Since God made people to need sleep, giving us each new day as an act of grace, it’s logical that stopping and starting can be healthy.
The lessons we’re mulling at the moment are simple. Yes, simplicity is one of them: how can we limit the physical and mental clutter so that we can be more at peace as we engage in God’s work? Being present is another: not only to shrug off unnecessary concerns, but also to invest in now, in the people and tasks immediately to hand. Sometimes we get to focusing on some grand plan and miss the things right in front of us.
Things here haven’t changed drastically in the 8 months we were gone, or even in the 11.5 years since we first arrived in PNG. Hundreds of language communities await translation. The challenges to doing Scripture translation and engagement remain significant. But we’ve built relationships, learned a lot, have conducted research in 70+ language communities, and have had three girls join our family in those years! Our task now is to remain patiently engaged, present in the now, celebrating every blessing from God and every good thing he allows us to participate in.
One of those good things is the Participatory Methods for Engaging Communities workshop in a few weeks. We’ve been using participatory approaches since 2011 in our research, and I finally got a trainer to PNG in 2017. It seems to have stuck, as this is now the 4th or 5th workshop since then, and we know of various staff using these skills in their work! Katie is organizing groups for students to practice newly-learned skills with… and those groups or teams will get a free facilitated team-building or decision-making activity. These approaches are excellent in PNG, where relationships and collaborative decision-making are highly valued.
