We went to a different church today, about a 45 minute walk away. Yes it was a long walk, but an interesting one. Through the muddy paths we walked through many tea fields. Have we mentioned the tea here is good? It’s great and the fields it comes from are right next to us. In fact, this area is a major producer of tea and coffee, some coffee that is even sold to Starbucks. Impressive, right?
And we saw a few pigs hanging out too. A very precious commodity around here. They are often used in bride prices and killed during large festivals. These were just wandering around eating whatever they could find.
And then we got to the church itself. Kusla Nazarene Church. In the first picture I’m sitting on the ground outside the church talking to one of the young girls who attends the church with her family. In the next picture you can see the church building itself. Inside the church was very simple. There was a pulpit and a whole arrangement of flowers and fruits and vegetables decorating the front of the church. The rest of the room was empty with hay spread on the ground for us to sit on. The service was simple. We sang, had an offering, a short sermon, and prayed. But it was beautiful to be there was people so different from us worshiping Jesus. The service was done in a combination of Pidgin and Tok Place. Tok place refers to a specific village’s language. Each village speaks a different language, but then many learn pidgin as well as a second language in order to communicate with people from other villages and to do business with them. Because each village still has it’s own language, there are over 800 languages spoken in PNG today, and most Papua new guineans are fluent in multiple languages.
After church we headed out for the second part of our adventure – the rock slides. We went to down a muddy jungle path to an area of waterfalls and many smooth rocks that served as slides. Climbing over slippery rocks, we all made it to the top of the slides and down we went, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Unfortunately we didn’t grab any pictures of the slides we spent the most time at (mostly because we were in the water the whole time) but the next picture shows and area close to where we were sliding and you get the general concept. By the time we made it home we were very tired and very muddy. It was a good day. : )