Intermission (What We've Been Up To)

We interrupt our regular/not-so-regular broadcast to tell you what we've been up to since our last post. I WILL, BTW, finish out the last few days of our last survey. Sometime. Maybe after taxes are done ; )

It's been a busy time here. I've been in charge of writing the report for the Silisili Survey. It's one thing to write and edit your own work, but to coordinate the work of three others, edit it all together... and we're talking around 80 pages of prose, maps, tables, etc. Thankfully I'm not doing it alone by any means. I'm grateful, once again, for quality teammates.

We've sent the report off to the person who requested the survey. We plan to meet with him this coming week after he has read it to discuss our findings. The next to-do report-wise is to send it to a consultant for checking, and we're nearly to that point. In the meantime I've attended 2 of 6 days of a culture workshop designed to help you discover your own culture and figure out how to work with people from other cultures.

When I hear a course called 'Cultural Self-Discovery' my hocus-pocus warning flashes, but so far the course has been quite helpful. Being a culturally-confused individual (having grown up all over the world) thinking through some of these issues has been helpful personally. I anticipate that the increased cultural awareness I will hopefully develop will also increase my ability to work cross-culturally, which we do every day here.

My other major time commitment of late has been soccer. A noble endeavor, I assure you. In fact, some members of the community thought that hosting a soccer tournament on center could be a very positive thing for relations in the area, besides, of course, being fun. We formed a team several weeks ago and began practicing regularly and played some friendlies with local teams. Then this weekend we held the tournament - men's and women's teams. Katie played on the women's but it was a less involved undertaking than the men's, and consisted mostly of our high school girls' team. She enjoyed it though, and their team came in third place.

We men had a grueling schedule, with five games over the past three days. Thankfully most were not full length games. Today was the final, and I'm excited to say we came back from 0-2 down at half time to win 3-2! Our grand final opponents were the national high school team from five minutes down the road, and despite some very wet conditions, it was a pleasure to play them.

I really did enjoy the experience, both the soccer and getting to meet other players from the area. We hope to continue to play as a team in the coming months, both locally and perhaps in some of the Highlands towns.

Time to stop talking about soccer. Katie's been down a bit lately, partly no doubt because Tikvah has been up... at all hours of the night. She was such a great sleeper until about a month ago, and we're not really sure what's changed. Please remember them both. Katie has been very patient throughout; I am impressed by her abilities as a mother.

In just over two weeks we're off to East New Britain for our next survey. All three of us are going, which is exciting. We'll be out there for nearly four weeks, but will be staying at the regional center and driving to our survey locations. It'll be different, which can sometimes be a very good thing, right? No 49% grade hiking this time, but we'll probably encounter some 4-wheel drive fun.

He has risen!