Compilation post about this beautiful survey trip – helicopter, tropical island, wonderful people, win-win! – with daughter Anya, teammate Kristy, and translators Denis, Simon, and Christabel. From Sep 2022.
Tag Archives: Pray!
3/3 Muratayak Survey (Apr’22)
We enjoy telling stories on FB, but when one trip get spread across 33 posts – actually, 34 – the narrative gets a bit chopped up. We’ll combine original posts in three compilations here. Enjoy!
2/3 Muratayak Survey (Apr’22)
We enjoy telling stories on FB, but when one trip get spread across 33 posts, the narrative gets a bit chopped up. We’ll combine original posts in three compilations here. Enjoy!
Beginning Again
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.
Carter Action News! – Nov12
Sadly, the girls were disinclined to be enthused about news today, though immediately after the video, Anya and Mira started racing up and down the bridge…
We’re looking for 19 partners in 43 days! Sounds impossible! Then again, we serve a God who sent his Son to earth for you, me, and people from every nation and tongue.
Partner with us!
Partnership opportunities graph below video if you prefer that.
Carter Action News! – Nov5
Our girls were quite a bit younger when we started Carter Action News. It typically airs when we want to share life from their perspective – which would be valuable to do more often! For those who’ve seen our presentations in-person, you know we like to give the girls a chance to share.
The update below includes our financial partnership status as of Nov 5, see video starting at 0:54. Partner with us!
People and Opportunities
Language research is about people. It’s easy to talk about the adventure – the heat, the bugs, the mountains, the mud. Or about the work – facilitating group discussions on language vitality, collecting wordlists. But ultimately it’s about getting to know the people and discover opportunities to serve them.
A 2012 survey was particularly memorable, being more adventurous than most trips. Here are a few of the people we met along the way:
- The people of the first village, so remote in their river valley that we reached them by helicopter. Only women, children, and a few old men present. Most of the working men were two days’ walk away at a mine. Those remaining in the village were timid, uncertain about how to handle their foreign visitors.
- Children – We’re conscious of our ‘bling’ factor on survey. We have to carry papers and pens for research, water and food for sustenance, something to sleep in, medical supplies. Very quickly this begins to look like a great deal of wealth to rural PNGans, and, relatively speaking, it is. I pulled out the GPS to mark our location, the kids watched me curiously. In 2012, smartphones were very rare in the rural parts of PNG, and the GPS must have looked doubly strange.
- Guide – Lazarus, the man who volunteered to guide us on a path so seldom used that – many times that day – I could be standing on the trail and not be sure where it went from there. We later learned that Lazarus didn’t know the path either, but his jungle literacy was far better than ours. As he scouted far ahead to discern the path’s direction, he would leave sticks pointing the way. In a jungle full of sticks, our ability to read the sign he’d left was at kindergarten reading level, at best. Lazarus had to come back to show us the way.
- Armed local – Two of the surveyors were battered by falling throughout the day on the tricky trail, one a bit delirious. We descended a precipice after dark and were met be men with a rifle. They were afraid of retaliation from a nearby tribe with whom they were in conflict.
- Dead daughter – An old man asked for conversation with a female surveyor. We were mystified, as this is culturally inappropriate. It turned out that he thought she resembled a dead daughter of his. He wondered whether our colleague was his daughter, returned from the grave with white skin.
- Boatsman – We floated downstream in a forever-long dugout canoe, all four surveyors crowded together on a small bench in the middle. Bumping sideways over hidden logs, trying to remember if everything damageable had been sealed tight. The man with the pole at the far end of the canoe looked on with amusement.
- Translation enthusiast – A man accompanied me around a village, assisting with information about the language use habits of residents. At one point he asked, “There were three ladies that came in 1990. We thought they were going to begin translation. Why has no work begun?”
These people remain without vernacular Scripture. They are family, or could be. Some need a clear invitation. Probably best to give that invitation in their language!
For groups like this one, our research’s conclusion is clear: they’d benefit enormously from the Bible in their language! Pray that people would answer God’s call to serve this group and many others like them.
72 days until our return to PNG!
Carrying Burdens
We shared about Papua New Guinea 11 times during two trips this month. From ten minutes with an excited group of kids to an hour-plus with a group around a fire, what we shared was different each time. We enjoy and are blessed by these opportunities to connect with others and focus on PNG.
However, my overriding sentiment by that fire was frustration with trying to communicate cogently about the people of PNG. Why frustration?
- Because PNG is fantastically varied. Its languages, cultures, and environment are strange to many in the USA.
- Because I tend to provide a multitude of facts for those unfamiliar with PNG. Facts can educate, but they don’t necessarily impel action.
- And because yes, I desire to impel people to action for PNG, in a world where everyone has a stage and all are shouting about a cause they care about. A world where most of the audience is weary of the noise.
Jesus’ call is to radical faith-lived-out, to sacrifice, to being transformed each day into the new being he originally designed us to be. His commands to Pray! Give! Go! are for you, me, and the people of Papua New Guinea too. For PNGans, ‘the ends of the earth’ is places like America, which needs Jesus’ saving and sanctifying every bit as much as PNG does. Disciples of Jesus should expect to crisscross the globe – and other earthly barriers – until Jesus comes.
Feeling frustrated brings reminds us of Jesus’ words: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30) And so we pray that the urgency appropriate to the task be paired with the peace that passes understanding (Phil 4:7).
I’ve been around Bible-less peoples my whole life, and the question below still don’t have good answers. There are some answers – we’re not without hope, and God has his ways – but the lack of vernacular Scriptures in a huge barrier!
- How can a non-believer learn who God is – and how he’s different from local deities – without a Bible in their language?
- How can a new believer come to know God’s character – and how God wants her to live – without a Bible in her language?
- How can a believer become spiritually mature without the wealth of history and truth a Bible in her language would provide?
- How can a pastor or lay leader teach and disciple others without having comprehensible Scriptures to guide him?
Praise God for the work he accomplishes in hearts and minds even where vernacular Scripture doesn’t exist! Pray that he would be swift to rally his children to translate Scripture for all peoples.
May Jesus “do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” Indeed, may it be in PNG, the USA, and among every tribe and tongue, that “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!” (Eph 3:20-21).
78 days to PNG!
See more pictures from the PNG gallery at beautiful PNG. Other galleries at the Carters and survey trips.
Heaven’s Glory
As fall colors sweep in waves across northern forests, we rejoice in the sacred rhythm of seasons, Creator-sanctified by an eternal God. When chill chills, we think fondly of PNG, where the changing of seasons is subtle, and green persists year-round.
Enjoy PNG’s splendor below, and see the full album at https://carter-pathways.com/?page_id=120. We are 85 days from return!
Heaven’s glory, expressed on earth
Tree stone flower, divine mirth
Ballet of temporal splendor
Timed tune, eternal metaphor
“Let there be light” – the first command
Climax creation – woman, man
Dare we dance to heaven’s voice?
Maestro plays, joyfully noise!
Psalm 19 and others speak more on this topic. How does God use creation to speak to you? What is he saying to you? How are you responding?
God gives us everything. EVERYTHING, not least these precious and incredible bodies. How is your body his temple? How do you use your body to seek first God’s Kingdom?
Our generous Father is delighted when we praise him for his goodness, and when we worship him by revering him with the resources he has given us. As I reflect on this, I perceive we’re doing fairly well in the longer-term redeployment of the resources God’s given us stewardship of (see this recent post), but less well at being ready to be generous-without-notice: with cash, possessions, or time.
PNGans practice relational generosity regularly. We continue to learn from them.
Dream Pig
Fire-side story time! I wrote this story in 2015 imagining one PNGan’s life and his perspective on Bible translation. How different PNGans see and experience Bible translation varies widely across PNG.
Imagining life from another’s perspective can aid in relationship-building, especially across cultures. Of course, such imagining is inevitably imperfect; assumptions and conclusions should be checked and rechecked.
Dream Pig is also flawed, and there are things I’d change about it now, 6 years after I wrote it. If there weren’t things I’d change, I’d be concerned, as that would indicate I’ve stopped learning.