Things we've experienced  
 

Six months in…three years to go! Seems like a long time until we realize how quickly these past six months have gone. We are still having a blast here in PNG and are finally feeling like we have made a home! Yippee!! Here are some…uh…different things we have experienced since arriving in Ukarumpa.

-          Powdered milk. Every other day we mix up a pitcher of powdered milk. Sound disgusting…well my friend…it is! Piper and Paul don’t mind it but I rebel against it. I think it brings back memories of having to chug the stuff as an MK in Colombia.

-          Sifting the bugs out of our rice. That’s right folks, little black bugs and their little white wormy babies! We discovered this in the village but didn’t realize it transferred over to Ukarumpa as well. If the sifter doesn’t get them then the boiling sure will. Hey, a little protein never hurt anyone right!

-          Bleaching fruit and vegetables. We are blessed to have a market three days a week on center that provides the most gorgeous fruits and vegetables for a very inexpensive price. Avocados for 8 cents! Hard to beat. However, before they can be eaten, everything needs to be soaked for about 15 minutes in diluted bleach. That kills all the harmful bacteria and then we can eat them! Yum!

-          Drinking rain water. Almost everyone on center has a pipe that catches rain water from our tin roofs and then deposits it into a big water tank beside the house. That water is then used for almost everything inside the house, toilet, shower, washing machine and drinking. We filter our drinking water with a Brita before we drink it though. Ahh, but hearing a heavy rain, knowing your tank is filling up! There is just no better sound!

-          Creative cooking. In the U.S. we are almost guaranteed of finding the ingredients that we need for a recipe at the store. Then if one store doesn’t have it we go to another one. Here in Ukarumpa we only have one store. It is a wonderful store! The people there work hard to import things that we need and things that just make life a little easier. (I noticed peanut M&Ms in the store the other day and almost cried!) Sometimes though, they just simply run out of something. The other day I needed cream cheese for a recipe (can you believe it! We get cream cheese here! Lucky missionaries!) but the store was out. So, I improvised. I used home made sour cream instead. Paul actually thought it tasted better that way!

These are just a couple of things to give you a glimpse into our daily life here. We are into a routine now and it is fun to actually be in the same place for a while.