Fresh Perspective

  Anticipation of this Christmas is not running high in our home this year, as we won't even be home.  Today our family is stepping into another world, the interior of Papua, where Christmas trees and Christmas cookies are unknown.  Our goal is to join Darron and his team of 9 young adults from America, 5 guys from the seminary, and 2 Indonesian girls, to help finish a jungle chapel.   This is a project that we have been preparing for over 3 months for.  Darron in all the preparations of designing a new build, ordering material, getting it cut to size, going ahead several times to work out all the logistics, sending a crew on ahead to prepare the foundation, going with Pastor Rob (camp director from America) to help with that foundation and more logistics, and more details that I am completely unaware of.  I, had to wrap my mind around how to feed a team of 16+ in the tribe.  The grocery trip alone took 6 hours.  Which then all had to be boxe...

The longer I live in Papua, the more I realize that this is how the local people view their local hospital.  Not as a place of hope and healing, but as a death sentence.  They would rather stay at home, and die there, than risk going somewhere where they know so many die. Honestly, I don’t blame them.  I have stood in their emergency room for hours.  Recently it was for a boy, age 11, who had fallen out of a tree and fractured his leg.  Well, the x-ray department was closed because it was Sunday, so that was not confirmed.  However, his intense pain level upon any movement and the swelling were quite strong indications.   It took 3 hours to get his perfectly fine wooden splint taken off and a cardboard cast made instead, a mild sedative given that didn’t touch his pain and for me to arrange a taxi to another hospital where they could help him.  Meanwhile I witnessed so much suffering and crude medical care, I am still overwhelmed and without wo...