My Wife the Brewess

Okay, so I arrived in PNG with certain presuppositions. Among them was the idea that I might find a local soft drink to adopt as my new favorite. Sure, it's silly, but as a kid in Bolivia my favorite drink was an apple flavoured drink called Brahma, and in Peru of course my favorite drink was el Sabor Nacional, Inca Kola. So I just assumed that in PNG I would find something similar. But alas, it was not to be. I tried the local Fanta varieties, lemon and pineapple, but neither one really impressed me. Eventually I resigned myself to the fact that all there was to be had here were the usual hum-drum things that can be found anywhere on the planet, namely Coke, Sprite, and Fanta. There are a few other things, like Scweppe's Orange-mango, which is pretty nice, but there is nothing that is uniquely Papua New Guinean.

So not long after I got to Ukarumpa, I started seeing some of the high schoolers advertising home-made ginger beer or rhubarb beer for sale. Naturally, I was interested; perhaps if I couldn't find something uniquely PNG, I could find something uniquely Ukarumpian.

What I found was a wide variety of flavour and quality. Some people made their ginger beer really spicy, others made it so that you could hardly tell there was any ginger in it at all. The rhubarb brew was the same way.

So thus began my own experiments with rhubarb beer. I eventually got to where I could make a pretty good batch of the stuff, it was popular at friendly get togethers, etc. (I feel I should clarify at this point that although we refer to this stuff as "beer" in truth the alcohol content is immeasurably small), but it was a lot of work, and the recipe I was using took 3 or 4 weeks to make.

Okay, so a little over a year ago, Clare decided that she wanted a hobby, so she decided to get into brewing ginger beer on a regular basis. She got a recipe from another family and changed it slightly, using me as her guinea pig. Eventually she settled on a recipe that used a lot more ginger than the recipe she started with, giving her ginger beer a reputation for spiciness.

And so I finally got my uniquely Ukarumpian soft drink. Ginger grows very well here and is always available, so Clare is able to make a batch of the stuff every week. She bottles it in washed out plastic Coke bottles and old glass root beer bottles that we got from a family that left some time ago. The glass bottles we got came with a home-made bottle capper and about 1,000 new bottle caps. The photo shows the batch that she just bottled today. We don't really drink 12 liters of ginger beer a week, Clare has started selling several liters a week to people in the community, mainly so that she will have a little bit of spending money when we go to Australia later this year on holiday with her parents.

Koens Ginger Beer, (KGB). Especially popular with one of our Finnish co-workers.

Levi Loves Dogs And Tractors

So today, (Saturday) I was down at the shop working on my own stuff when Clare and Levi showed up to see the puppies. They are all huge now, it's amazing how fast puppies grow. Their eyes are finally open now and they are all gradually learning how to walk. This photo was actually taken last week, before their eyes were open:


Here you see Levi giggling at a puppy while mama dog looks on in bemused interest. Levi likes coming down to the shop, there are lots of interesting things to see there. For some reason he is especially fond of the shop tractor:


On Friday we had a big good-bye party for Dan Hudson, who is leaving PNG after serving here for several years as the Auto Shop manager. It was a huge barbeque, I think the most impressive one I have ever seen Auto Shop put on, with huge amounts of pork, lamb, beef, chicken, goat (?), 3 kinds of sausages, and umm, oh yeah, some kind of vegatables, I seem to remember potatoes and rice and sliced tomatoes, too. One thing is for sure about an Auto Shop barbeque--no matter how much food you cook, there are NEVER any leftovers. I tell you, NOBODY can put food away like a Papua New Guinean can. I once tried to out-eat a PNGian, and I had to quit after 3 huge plates of food while he just kept going. I honestly don't understand where they put it all. On Friday I took a pretty good big plate of food, but Jane, the smallest, lightest person in our shop sat down a couple seats away from me with a plate that had twice as much food on it as mine did, all of which she ate. I must weigh three times as much as she does, and yet...

Friday night was also Banquet. Banquet corresponds roughly with the Prom at a US high school. It's for the high school kids and takes place in the Teen Centre, (which I have mentioned here before). It's a more or less formal meal that everybody dresses up for and each year the Teen Centre is redecorated according to the theme of that year's Banquet. Each year there is also a play put on by adult members of the community, most of whom are parents or other people who have had something to do with the kids.

This year I decided not to be involved in Banquet. Last year was the first year since arriving in PNG that I was not in the Banquet play, but that's only because Clare was asked to be in it instead that year and I stayed home with Levi during all of her rehearsals and performances.

But as I say, this year I decided not to be involved. I haven't had as much to do with the kids this past year, (been busy with my own now!), and I just felt like I had enough other stuff going on that I couldn't spare the time for it.

Ah, but I guess we were involved after all--Clare did make 24 litres of ginger beer, (not really alcoholic) for Banquet this year, and I did help her with that. Mmmmm, ginger beer. I'll talk more about that in a future posting.

Of Tuk Tuks and Zongers

So when Clare and I got back from furlough last time, I discovered that the manager of the Auto Shop had bought 15 chinese motorcycles at an auction. He had gotten them cheap because they were new old stock items that had been imported by a company in Lae and they had been sitting outdoors for some time. Many of them were missing bits and pieces, but the whole lot came with several boxes of spare parts.

To be more specific, only 2 of the 15 were really motorcycles; the rest were these half motorcycle/half pick-up truck things: About half of the ones we got were water-cooled and have simple roofs over the driver's area. These went to various departments here in Ukarumpa. 3 went to the Industrial department, 2 to the Construction department, others I can't remember right now. The others we offered for sale to the community and they are slowly being sold.

The ones we have were all made by a Chinese company called "Zongshen". The engines are based on a Honda engine that I don't think was ever sold in the US, although I have seen them in South America. It is a well-proven design and should hold up fairly well unless they are made out of poor materials. They are simple, 200cc, 2 valve engines with pushrod valve actuation(!). Not terribly high performance, but unless they are abused, they should hold up alright. The ones currently in use by Industrial and Construction seem to be giving good service overall.

Although these vehicles are often mistaken for Tuk Tuks, they are really something different. It's true that they have three wheels like a Tuk Tuk, but that's about where the similarity ends. We have a couple of real Thai Tuk Tuks running around here as well, and they are much heavier duty machines. Where the Zongshens use a 200cc, single cylinder motorcycle engine and super lightweight drive shaft and rear axle, the Tuk Tuks actually use a small 2 cylinder (550cc) Diahatsu car engine, transmission and rear axle. They are also made out of much heavier materials everywhere else. There are many other areas where Tuk Tuks, although a much older design, are better machines.

So now you are one of the cognoscenti; next time you hear somebody refer to a Zonger as a Tuk Tuk, you can smile knowingly to yourself because you know the truth--it's not a Tuk Tuk, it's a Zonger.

I've still got three like the one pictured above for sale, but I really don't know if I'll be able to make them go; there have been just too many parts stripped off of them over the years that I don't have more of, like starter motors, for example. I suppose I could make one or two of them up as "kick-start only" propositions, but the kick starter on these things is more of an emergency back-up, and not really meant for full time use.

Puppies!

Who doesn't love puppies? Okay, so I suppose there's a handful of dyed-in-the-wool dog haters out there who don't, but then, I have no use for cats and yet I still find kittens cute.

Down at the workshop we have a borrowed watch dog. Her name is Destiny and she belongs to a family that is in the US right now but will be returning in June. After the last time that the shop got broken into, we decided to get a dog to replace the one we had which had died some time before. Anyway, Destiny was pregnant when she moved in to Auto Shop, but we didn't know that until she suddenly started "getting all huge and stuff". And so, about a week ago, she spent ALL DAY giving birth to 9 cute little puppies. I think that they were only a day old or so when I took this photo.

So like most dogs here in Ukarumpa, Destiny and her brood are no particular breed. We're thinking that we would like to keep a couple of the puppies for the shop as future watch dogs. Destiny's owners have been gone for nearly a year and have told us that we can do what we like with the puppies. The ones we don't keep we will likely offer for sale, first to our employees at the shop, then to the community. I'm looking forward to the idea of having 2 watch dogs at the shop. Been thinking about names; Smith & Wesson come to mind, Zeus and Apollo, (like Higgns's dogs from Magnum P.I.), I'll keep working on it.

Dogs are a big part of life in Ukarumpa. Many people here keeps dogs for security reasons. I know that in our house we sleep better at night knowing that our dog, Guinny, (who is an inside dog), will bark like mad if anybody attempts to come into the house. He's got a good, loud bark that sounds like it belongs to a dog bigger than he is. I only wish that I had paid more attention to him one night a few months ago. It was late in the evening and I was watching a DVD in the living room when I saw Guinny prowling around restlessly with his hackles raised and growling quietly. I looked out the windows and checked the yard but couldn't see what was making him uneasy. The next day I found out that our next door neighbour's house had been broken into right at the time when Guinny was pacing and growling. If it happens again, I'll know what's going on.

As I say, dogs are a big part of life here. Many people keep them, some do it better than others. We keep our dog inside a fence or on a leash/lead when he is outside, some others don't, which from time to time leads to conflict among the people living here. I remember once answering the emergency phone in the wee hours of the morning to hear a poor, distraught man complaining about his neighbor's unrestrained dog who was wandering around the neighborhood and causing his own dog to bark incessantly. Apparently this poor man hadn't slept in several days because of it. (That story does have a happy ending--the people taking care of the wandering dog eventually figured out how to effectively restrain her and nocturnal peace returned to that neighborhood.)

There are no veterinarians in the area, so we have to take care of our dogs ourselves. When puppies get their shots, we have to get the vaccines from elsewhere and it is often one of the nurses from the clinic here who administers them. For bigger veterinary needs, like neutering or other surgery, we have to take the dog on a road trip to the city of Lae, which is 2.5-3 hours drive from here. There is a vet there who can handle that sort of thing. From time to time a traveling vet will come into our area for a day or two and will take care of whatever animal care needs we may have at that time.

Of course, in a community like this one, where every few years a family will go back home for several months to a year, there are special challenges concerning what to do with the family dog. It's not unusual for home owners to make special deals for renters willing to look after a dog, or for somebody's dog to go on loan to another family while the owners are away. At Auto Shop we borrowed Destiny from a single lady who had agreed to look after her for the family who owned her, but who was finding the job too demanding. When Destiny goes back to her owners in June, we have a plan in place to borrow another dog from another family who is leaving for a few months. Of course, I made this plan back before we knew that Destiny was pregnant, but it's okay, by the time Budge's owners get back, the puppies will be just old enough to start being watch dogs. It's like an intricate ballet of planning, a chess game of strategic watchdog movement, or maybe just Musical Dogs.

Ukarumpa Auto Shop: Your one stop shop for all of your Auto, Motorcycle, Small Engine Maintenance and Repair, Fabrication and Long Term Dog Storage/Kennel needs.

Oh yeah, I built a pretty nice kennel for whatever dog happens to be in residence at Auto Shop. Forgot to mention that. We used to just keep the dog tied up all day, but having a kennel is really a much better solution.

The Downside and Coping With It

So believe it or not, there is a downside to this lifestyle. Like any other place where people live, or any other job that people have, it has got its drawbacks. Sure, there are lots of things about living here that could be pointed to as drawbacks; a general lack of movie theaters (cinemas), good restaurants, big junkyards full of relatively cheap parts, good auto and motorcycle parts sources, excellent availability of just about anything you could ever need to fix just about anything you ever wanted to, properly trained and funded police forces, excellent roads and infrastructure, these are all things that I miss from life in the US or the UK. But all of them pale in comparison to what I consider to be the biggest drawback of all in living here.

Living in a close community like we do here, you tend to develop close friendships. I dunno if they are any closer than relationships anywhere else, I mean how do you quantify the closeness of a relationship? Anyway, one of the great things about living here is the friendships that you make with your co-workers, and one of the worst things is that fact that every few years either your friends go away or you do for 6 months to a year, and sometimes they don't come back.

This year is a tough one for me. My 2 closest friends are leaving in June. One of them is planning to be back in 6 months, and the other is leaving here for good after 10 years of service here. Generally I don't have more than 2 or 3 close friendships at a time, so when these guys leave, I'm going to be sort of drifting for a while until I develop a couple of my other friendships into closer ones. So you see, it's sort of a triple, or even quadruple edged sword--the community here is fairly close, you tend to make close friendships here, but then people leave. People leaving cause you to develop other friendships into close ones, because most of us need a close friend or two.

Of course, my being an MK may be throwing a curve ball into the equation, too. Especially as it was so hard to keep in touch with people who had left when I was a kid, (yes, I predate e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Why, sonny, I remember when we used to write letters on this super thin paper called "onion skin" just to save on postage between the US and Peru!).

Anywhooo, my best friends are leaving. One of them will be back, the other plans to keep in touch and also to be a shipping/storage address for me in the US, which will be very helpful to me when planning for furloughs. So even this sad drawback of life here has its good side.

There are various ways to cope with the pain of friends leaving, (boy, that sounds grim! It's really not as bleak as I am making it sound, honest!). With communications as good as they are most of the time these days, it's not nearly as bad as it used to be when people go, so that's good. One of the ways I cope is to take the time that I would have spent with them and throw myself into one of my projects for a while. It's almost a relief to have the time to devote to some of the things I really want to do outside of my normal job here. In that vein, I got some more work done on my sanity maintenance project yesterday. The frame is tacked together now and the lower motor mounts are tacked into place. The next big project will be the front suspension and steering:


In other news, Happy Mother's Day, Mom and Clare!

The Last Great Accumulators and The Pause That Refreshes

Early on in the history of this blog I decided not to post on Sundays. I hereby change my mind. These days it seems that Sunday afternoons, while The Boy is taking his nap and nothing else is demanding my time is the ideal time to jump on the interweb and post something to my blog. So there.

Yesterday Clare went to the Everything Sale. Every year the teens go around collecting whatever garage sale/flea market type junk they can from the community, put it all together in one big room, organise it, and then hold a huge garage sale. They do it to raise money for the Ukarumpa Teen Centre, which is a cool place dedicated solely to the teens of Ukarumpa. It had an indoor basketball court, a stage, a big room for Sunday morning Soul Purpose meetings, (like church, but infinitely cooler if you are between 14 and 19). Also for most Friday nights of the school term they put on a Hamburger Night for the local community, so it's also like the only restaurant in town.

So anyway, yesterday was the Everything Sale. I suppose it would be logical to ask how in the world it is possible that a group of missionaries would have anything to sell at a garage sale, but consider these facts: 1.) Ukarumpa has been here as a translation support centre since the late 1950's. In that time, thousands of people have passed through here, each of them bringing things with them that they left behind when they went back home. 2.) missionaries are terrific accumlators. We live a lot like people in the US did who survived the Depression; that is to say, most of us never throw away anything that might possibly one day be of slight use to somebody, and generally it doesn't cost us anything to keep junk. 3.) MK's are super at finding interesting stuff and dragging it home.

At the everything sale Clare picked up some toys, books, and videos for Levi, some old Dr. Who videos for me, and three old Coke bottles. She spent a grand total of 3 Kina, I think it was, which is just over 1 US dollar. Today I was looking over these Coke bottles. I had seen them on Friday when I happened to be at the Teen Centre for another reason and had noticed that they were in a box with a handful of WWII junk, (some aircraft part data plates and US army canteen dated 1943 with a big hole in it), but didn't realise until thinking about it later that they had probably all been recovered from the same place. Most likely they were all pulled out of a WWII US military base garbage dump by some MK. WWII garbage dumps are great--I could spend all day pulling interesting bits of junk out of one, and actually have done so, in fact. My favorite things to collect are bits and pieces of fighter planes.

So anyway, I started researching these Coke bottles and found that they are all dated 1944 and were originally shipped to US servicemen serving overseas in places like here. How cool is that?

Some may wonder about my interest in WWII objects. What can I say? Finding some little bit of junk that was actually used during that conflict somehow makes history become more alive for me. Finding WWII junk to look at is one of the perks of living here.

OOPS! But good timing!

So today was Saturday. I did a bunch of work around the house in the morning because we had friends coming over for dinner and lots of dishes to wash. After that, I picked up my friend Chad and we ran out to visit some of our neighbors here in the valley who have a coffee plantation. They are building a new house after a fire they had a couple of months ago and we wanted to see how the work was coming along and also if they needed any help with getting their satellite communications set up, as Chad has some experience along those lines, plus he is blessed with an uncanny ability to accurately guess his way around a lot of that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the coffee plantation is a few miles away and we drove the Ancient Land Rover out there. We spent a few hours with our friends there and headed back home. After I dropped off Chad at his place, I drove up to our house. Just a hundred yards from home I shifted gears and suddenly lost forward pulling power! I've been through a few broken axles before, so I groaned inwardly, put the truck in 4 wheel drive and just kept going on the front wheel drive alone. As I turned the last corner near our house, I started hearing a squeak-squeak squeak sound and lost all my brakes. I also passed a couple of women who looked at me as if I were doing something really strange. I shifted the transfer case into low range, (which is geared so low that you can almost live without brakes), and limped to the front of our house. I elected not to turn into the driveway, (which slopes towards the front of the house and is not the ideal place to park a car without brakes) and instead parked by the hedge on the level road in front of the house. When I got out to take a look, I discovered this:

Yes, Virginia, that IS the left rear wheel sitting out about 2 feet from where it is supposed to be! And that is the inner wheel bearing hanging there in the breeze on the axle shaft. The squeaking I was hearing was the axle slowly sliding out of the axle housing whith each rotation of the wheel. I'm really surprised that the axle didn't break! If I had turned into our driveway, the axle would almost certainly have come all the way out.

So it turns out that the big nut(s?) that hold the wheel hub on to the stub axle must have come loose--I jacked up the car and pushed the wheel back in as far as I could--I didn't have time today to get into the wheel hub--tomorrow afternoon I should have the time to open it up and find out why it came loose. I was not the last one to tighten this nut, so it's possible that it was just assembled wrong. Thankfully there doesn't seem to be any damage, and even if I find that there is, I have a good collection of parts for these trucks, so it probably won't cost me anything to fix it.

So this happened just minutes after a several mile drive on a very rough dirt road! Thank the Lord it didn't happen halfway between here and the coffee plantation. If nothing else it would have been a hassle to fix on the side of the road.

Happy Easter! And Sanity Maintenance

Happy Easter to one and all! We had a 4 day weekend here, which was nice. Funny thing though, today I went down to the shop to work on one of my own projects and found all of the volunteer guys I work with all down there working on various projects of their own, except John, who is a welder and who is here for only a few weeks. He was bored and so came into the shop to work on stuff he would normally work on during normal work hours.

Anyway. I've been working on an electric fence to keep the dog from escaping. We picked up a really old Guardian electric fencer a while back that I had intended to hook up to our window bars as an added deterrent to anyone who might try to pry the bars apart to get into the house, but now we've decided that we really need to contain the dog more than we need to electrify the security bars. Right now I'm thinking that there's really no reason why one fencer unit couldn't do both the dog fence and the window bars, but for now I'll jut concentrate on the dog fence.

But that's NOT what I worked on this weekend. Well, okay, I did a little bit of work on it, making up some brackets to weld to our steel fenceposts to mount the insulators on, but that was all I did on it. I spent a little time on Friday and a little on Saturday and a little today, (Monday) working on building a motorcycle frame for my latest sanity-maintenance project.

"Sanity maintenance?" you ask. Yes, even I sometimes feel the stress of working on the same kinds of things all the time. I love my job, and there really is LOTS of variety in it, but sometimes I just get the urge to do something really different. Something that is probably really impractical for use here, but nevertheless is fun to build and causes me to have to use my mind to solve unusual problems. This time I am building a motorcycle frame from scratch around a 1978 Kawasaki KZ750 twin engine. For those who understand the lingo, it's a hardtailed bobber frame made out of i-beams that I am building up myself. This is a great chance for me to continue to improve my welding and fabrication skills, which is sort of what this kind of project is all about. Just sharpening skills that I don't have to use that often.

So yeah, it's completely impractical for use here in PNG, but that doesn't mean that I won't use it, oh no, I plan to ride the wheels off of it, learning how my design holds up, what should have been done differently, what works well, etc. It's all part of my professional development, further developing my skills and adding to my abilities and experience.

Here's what it looks like so far, and I warn you that it doesn't look like much yet:

Don't be fooled by those short exhaust pipes--I only put those on there so that I could see if the engine would run (it does).

Most of this bike is going to be made up of used parts that I have accumulated over the years, parts that are currently laying around the shop looking for homes. Parts that are no longer useful for most of the stuff I normally work on. Take the wheels for instance--I'm going with 23" rims front and back just because I have a couple of 23" front rims off of early '80's Hondas that I converted to 21" rims because the 21's are so much easier to get tires for. I also just happen to have a couple of old stock 23" tires that I got for free from somebody who was cleaning out his shed. They should be just fine on this bike, although they would be virtually useless on a bike that got used on trails or in mud, (like most of the stuff I work on).

So! Sanity Maintenance. I do it by stretching my mind.

my foray in furniture fabrication

I'm not normally a "wood" guy. I usually work with metals like steel, alumin(i)um, stainless steel, copper, steel, brass, steel and often steel. More than once I have welded up some contraption out of steel that any other person might have hammered together out of wood and nails.

Anyway, a couple months ago one of the high school shop teachers decided to do a woodworking course for anyone in the community who might be interested, so several members of the local community took him up on the offer.

Our projects were many and varied. One guy built a nice shoe rack to put near his front door, (when you go to someone's house here you usually remove your shoes at the door--this is because it is hard to get to anybody's house without getting your shoes muddy, especially now, during rainy season), another guy built a recipe box for his wife, another a hat and coat rack, that kind of thing.

Well, I had been giving this some thought for some time as the arrangement of our living room has always bothered me a little bit. The problem with our living room was that we had lots of space, but because of the furniture we had, it wasn't being used very well, and in spite of it's size, it was hard to put more than 4 or 5 people in it comfortably. So in my mind I designed a piece of furniture that was 1 part entertainment center and 2 parts book and storage shelves. Not having any idea how much time it would take to build something like this, I presented my idea to the shop teacher. He was kind enough to refrain from telling me that I needed to come up with a smaller project.

Well, this being one of the few places where rosewood is cheaper than plywood, and because there was a ready supply of nicely dried rosewood available, I built the whole thing out of mostly rosewood! Here's how it turned out:


Our more astute viewers will notice three things: 1.) there are no bookshelves, 2.) there is a huge empty space on the left, and 3.) MST3K is on the TV, (the beginning of Jack Frost, specifically). The reason why there are no book shelves is because I'm not quite finished with it yet--this is only the bottom half of my plan, although I admit that the bottom half is by far the bigger half. The upper shelves will be much easier to build and I can build them in pieces over the next few months. The reason for the big empty space is that I am planning to build a secure storage area there--basically, I'll be building a heavy steel box, (a safe of sorts) that will go in that area and will be a place where we can store things that we'd rather not have stolen in case our house ever gets broken into. Although our own house has not yet been broken into, over the past couple of years many other houses in the community have, so I feel that building a safe is a fairly sensible precaution, especially as I have a source of free scrap steel to build it out of. Rebuild, reuse, recycle, yeah whatever, I just can't afford to spend $200-$500 for the steel I need if I were to build it out of new steel.

And as for MST3K, I mean c'mon. That's high entertainment, there. Thanks to my brother and his wife for sending it to me!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! (belated by time zones!)

Okay, so maybe my Happy New Year's wishes haven't really been delayed by time zones--I mean, if the Earth were a million miles in diameter or if it were turning REALLY slowly, then maybe people might be able to live 3 months' worth of time zones apart. Instead of just 15 hours ahead of US Eastern Standard Time, which is the last time zone I lived in before coming here.

So every New Year's Eve at around midnight, all the kids who have bikes, (and a lot of the adults) go for a 45 minute ride around Ukarumpa. we try to hit all the roads that aren't dead ends, and we try to spread a little holiday cheer in the process. We do have a few rules--we have a tech inspection before the ride to make sure that everybody has some sort of headlight and tail light and also to make sure that nobody has removed their mufflers. We're not hooligans, we don't tear around at top speed. We get approval from the administration beforehand and we make sure that people are aware of what is going to happen so that nobody is surprised by it. It's usually a lot of fun. This past New Year's Eve it rained for the whole time, which means that we all ended up really muddy, but a good time was had by all nonetheless. The photo here was actually taken a few years ago when I was more active in the Ukarumpa Motorcycle Club, (in fact I was Vice President, as my temporarily tatooed knuckles proudly show). I'm not sure what that light running across my helmet is--maybe photographic proof of tiny UFO's?

Way too busy at work these days. I'm really glad that help appears to be on the way in the form of my friend Evan. Evan was here before as a short term guy with WA helping out at our training and orientation course in Madang. He was the mechanic and general handyman. He's also an ace welder. Anyway, we just got word that he has been accepted in the organisation, so tjhat's really good news. Looks like he'll be working at AutoShop, (YAY!), doing whatever we need doing, like motorcycle/small engine stuff, (double, nay, quadruple YAY!), and some welding. I imagine we'll find some training for him to do as well.

Finally! Relief appears to be on the horizon! For 8 years I've been the only motorcycle/small engine guy we have and over that time the work load has increased steadily as more and more people are riding bikes. Evan's not scheduled to get here before 2012, (BOO!), but there's always a chance that his support could come in sooner than expected and he could get here before that.

WOW, it's been a long time!

Okay, so it's been nearly 5 months since I added anything to my blog! I am filled with shame and self-loathing, but will probably soon recover.

So what have I been up to for 5 months? Quite a bit, actually--our 6x6, 5 ton, ex-marine truck finally arrived and we have had lots of fun figuring out what its capabilities are. In fact, here's a photo of me "stuck" in a river crossing during one of our first test drives. I say "stuck" because I wasn't really stuck, I only thought I was. Guess you could say that I was stuck in my mind. To be fair to myself, I did attempt to back out of the hole I was in, (actually I had managed to get the front axle grounded on a huge rock), and I couldn't. Later, however, after we had gotten a friend of ours with another big truck to come hook up to our truck with a chain to pull us out, I managed to simply back out without difficulty. I'm not exactly sure why it backed out so easily in the end, but at first I just had all 4 rear wheels churning up sand from the river bottom. (And yes, because this is an ex-USMC truck, it DOES have differential locks in the rear diffs, so all 4 wheels can actually be spinning at once. Apparently the Army trucks don't have this feature and are therefore puny and inferior.) In the background of the photo you can see the wooden bridge that I was trying to avoid driving our 12 ton truck over. After we got back out of the river, I drove over the wooden bridge without difficulty. On the way home, I drove over it again. Doesn't look the strongest, but apparently there is a truck bigger and heavier than ours that drives over it on a regular basis. In the background you can also see our neighbor's russian army truck that he was about to try pulling us out with.

Other things that have been keeping me busy: I put new tires (light truck mud tires!) on Clare's '81 Mitsubishi Galant then picked up another car like it to use for parts, (the previous owner was practically giving it away and it's actually quite a bit nicer than Clare's) and then picked up another car like mine to use for parts, (once again, the previous owner was practically giving it away), I sold one of my bike projects, (the NX250 engine in the XR250 chassis), finished and sold another bike project on behalf of one of the departments here, finally got started on a huge quasi-restoration job for a commercial customer who has patiently waited 5 years for me to get started on it (!), agreed to play the part of Lazar Wolf in the Ukarumpa Community Theatre's production of Fiddler on the Roof, agreed to become the "pointman" of the Quick Response Team, wrote a few newsletters, helped my friend Tim get his Volkswagen Kubel (Thing) running enough to get it to his house from where it had been sitting for a few years, (the throttle linkage needs some work so at one point I was steering and working the gearbox while Tim rode on the back bumper and moved the throttle by hand) and of course, the day to day business of keeping things running in support of the translation work going on here. I'm sure I've left a lot of stuff out, but I think you get the idea. Some of this stuff will be showing up in the blog over the next few weeks (I hope).

Children Take Time

Yup. No doubt about it. Kids take up a lot of time. Not to say that we aren't happy to spend that time in that way. But I don't have quite as much "free" time as I used to.

Another good thing about living in Ukarumpa: you can save a ton of money on baby toys and paraphanalia. Levi's walker is borrowed, (I know, I know, "walkers are dangerous!" you protest. Get over it. Somehow we all survived. Don't buy into the media hype. Be free!), most of his toys were given to us, his crib was given to us, and so on. People in this community pass around stuff like that almost as soon as the word gets out that somebody is pregnant.

Ukarumpa. A cheap place to raise kids.

In other news, I am at it again--this time squeezing a BMW F650 engine into a Husaberg FE400 frame. So far it's coming along very nicely. Photos to come another time.

Why My Blog Has Slowed Down Considerably

By now you've all noticed that I haven't posted anything on this blog since January. There's a reason for that. It was in January that I learned that one of the people who follows this blog is a reporter for a newspaper here in PNG. Now I feel like I have to be really careful about what I write!

Experiment in Sino-Japanese Transportational Solutions and Financial Yikes!

First, a Levi update: Levi is doing well. He often sleeps for 6 hours at a stretch at night. He is growing fast and is actually bigger than I was when I was his age. He generally seems to be a happy baby--he smiles a lot and is beginning to figure out how to laugh, which is fun. Clare took him to the clinic the other day to get his 2 month vaccinations and being jabbed with needles made him grumpy for the rest of that day and sleepy for the next couple of days. Overall, we are very happy with him.

So when we got back from Australia after Levi was born, I found that my department had bought 12 Chinese made 3 wheeled trucks and 2 Chinese motorcycles at an auction in Lae. Apparently we were the only bidders, so we got the whole lot for a song. The idea is to use them for department run-abouts on centre--certainly a cheaper solution than the Toyota Hilux and Hiace diesels that are currently being used. Anyway, they've all been sitting for some time in the salt air around Lae, so they all need some attention to get them running. Most of them are new with only 2 or 3 km showing on the odometers. They are all powered by 200cc engines, (the motorcycles are 125's), that are based on an old Honda design. I've known about the existence of these Chinese-made Honda derivatives for several years, but had never had a chance to see one up close. Among all the spare parts that we got with the lot of bikes and trikes were 2 engines that had come to bad ends, so I was thrilled to finally have the chance to pull them apart and see what there was to see inside of them. These particular engines were made by Zongshen, (affectionately known as "Zongers"), but as far as I can tell the ones made by Lifan, Jialing, Loncin, etc. are all very similar.

Other than a very unusual valve train that uses only one camshaft lobe to operate both valves, and a weird circular shift pattern, they were quite normal inside. I put one good engine together out of the parts and decided, (for the sake of scientific research) to put one into a 1975 Honda XL 125 chassis that I had laying around the shop. The idea here is to ride one around in a motorcycle chassis for a while and see if these Chinese engines would be a viable option for people who want to resurrect dead Hondas. 125-200cc Chinese Honda clones are almost always available on eBay, and I have often wondered if they were worth the USD$350 or so that they usually go for.

So far I'd have to say that they seem pretty good. The one in the bike pictured above had at least 3,500 km on it when it was taken apart, (I'm not sure why it was taken apart when we got it), and the rings still look new, nor is there any discernable wear on the cylinder walls. I really like the clutch in this motor--it's far better than the original Honda unit and has 6 springs instead of just four. I've only just started to ride this thing, but my initial impressions are better than I was expecting. Some research on the internet has shown that most of the troubles people have with Chinese bikes seem to be with the chassis and not with the engines. One thing I will say though, is that some parts are REALLY hard to find. For example, I have no trouble finding cylinder heads, carburetors, stators, flywheels and other parts that I will probably never have to replace, but trying to find a piston and rings for the 200cc engine has proven to be nearly impossible. Many of the parts in the engine can be replaced with original Honda parts, but the piston (a part that will have to be replaced every now and then), is an oddball--not like any Honda that I know of. So! That's my new challenge--to find a source of pistons to be able to keep these things going for a few years.

In other news, my wife sat me down tonight and told me that our trip to Australia for Levi's birth and the World Financial Crisis (which has effectively reduced the value of our income from the UK by about 25%) has knocked something of a hole in the boat of our finances and we need to start bailing in order to stay afloat. (Aren't metaphors grand?) I told her that I am planning to sell off a couple of my motorcycle projects this year, namely The World's Fastest (and only) NXR 250 and the Bush Bomber 280. Later she told me that she had made a mistake on her spreadsheet and that things weren't quite as dire as the had at first thought. But still a long way from rosy.

Ah, it's good to be back at work again.

Loooooooong time, no see

Wow, it has been a while, hasn't it? I think things are finally starting to settle down a bit for us. When I last posted, we were getting ready to leave Melbourne, where we had been living for 10 weeks around the birth of our son, Levi. There were a number of things that we wanted/needed to do before we left there and so my poor blog got shuffled into an electronic corner and left to gather electric dust for a time.

When we left Melbourne, we still didn't have a PNG visa for Levi, (not for lack of effort on our part, but our timing wasn't so good--first we had to get Levi's official Australia birth certificate, then we had to take him to the Embassy to be sighted by a representative of the US government as part of the US passport application process, then we had to wait for a passport to arrive in the mail, then we had to send that off for a visa stamp, etc., etc. By the time we had a passport for him, many government offices were closing for Christmas & New Year's.

So, we sat around at our mission guesthouse in Cairns, (tropical north Queensland), and waited. Our planned return to PNG ont he 19th of December came and went and we had no word or hint concerning the status of Levi's visa. We changed our return date to the next available flight, (9th of January), and continued waiting. We knew that the visa office was closed until the 5th of January, and honestly I wasn't sure that there would be enough time to get the details sorted out by our 9 January flight, so reluctantly we started thinking about extending our stay in Cairns by another 10 days. This was especially "headacheful" as it meant that we were going to have to extend our Australian visas, (which were due to expire on the 9th) and that was going to cost us $240 each.

And then a strange thing happened. Suddenly, on the 2nd of January, we recieved Levi's completed PNG visa. This was really a mystery to us, as the postmark clearly indicated that the visa had been sent out after Christmas from a visa office that we knew was closed.

Never ones to look a gift visa in the mouth, we excitedly finished up the various things we wanted/needed to do in Cairns and finally flew back to Ukarumpa on yesterday, the 9th of January, (the day before my birthday, I might add!)

Now some of you clever ones are probably wondering why I didn't write to my blog while I was sitting around with all that extra time in Cairns. Good question! The reason is because we had to pay $2/hour for internet access there (regardless of the amount downloaded/uploaded). Sure, that's not the world's greatest excuse, but for some reason when I am on line and am aware of a clock slowly, inexorably ticking down the seconds in the background I find it hard to concentrate on my blog. Too much pressure.

Anyway, we're back home now! Phew!

And Now For Something Completely Different

This photo was taken at our house some time ago. Shortly after we moved in, I think it was. This is just inside or front door, and this is a happy photo. If you see this near your front door in Ukarumpa, it probably means that a bunch of your friends are over at your house. In this case, it looks like maybe 30 people at our house.

This is one of the greatest things about living in a close community where your friends are all within walking distance. Sure, living in Ukarumpa does have its drawbacks, and sure, sometimes living there can be a pain, but there are some really good things about it as well. I guess a lot of how people feel about living there depends on them. Like so many things in life, you get out of it what you put into it, and in Ukarumpa you'll usually get a pretty good return on any effort you put into living there.

Some are probably asking, "Why does everybody take their shoes off when they come in?" It's because the roads in Ukarumpa aren't paved--they are dirt roads and int he wet season they can be quite muddy, so when you go into somebody's home, many people feel that it's polite to remove their shoes so that they don't track mud or dirt all over the place.

I'm looking forward to getting back to Ukarumpa--we leave Melbourne on the 15th, fly to Cairns and then are in Cairns until the 19th, when we fly back to Ukarumpa. Naturally, all of these plans could change if we don't get Levi's PNG visa paperwork all sorted out in time!

Blog Policy Change, Thanksgiving Down Unda

Well, it's that time of year again in the USA--Thanksgiving Day! This year Clare decided to tackle a full Thanksgiving Dinner all by herself while I watched over Levi. We managed to find a turkey at a nearby store and Clare downloaded a number of traditional Thanksgiving recipes, like green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, cornbread, gravy, and of, course, the turkey. We celebrated with our hosts the Knuckeys, and Clare's parents. A good time was had by all.

Recently an old friend of mine wrote and asked me why he couldn't comment on my blog--this blog isn't totally my own; it's part of a small project on the part of some of my bosses at Wycliffe who are interested in putting more information about daily life with Wycliffe in PNG on the internet. At first we had decided not to allow comments, as we can't control what people write, but now we've decided to give it a go and see what happens.

As we say in the old country, "Em tasol"! (That's it!)

Clare's folks, New American Passport Holder

I may have forgotten to mention this, but Clare's parents are here for 3 weeks to see us and to get to know their first grandchild.

Incidentally, it's because Levi is the first grandchild on both sides of our family that he has 2 middle names. Because he is the first one, we chose to honour our dads by using both of their first names as his middle names. Hence, Levi, (his own name), Robert, (Clare's dad) Willem, (my dad) Koens. Levi Willem Robert was another option, but then there was the risk of him being nicknamed "Billy Bob" and I just couldn't handle that. Here's Levi with Clare's Mum. We haven't settled on whether she is to be called "Granny" or "Nana", but it'll be a while before Levi can speak, so I reckon we have time to think about it.

On a related subject, we took Levi into Melbourne today to the American Consulate. We were all ready with as much proof as we could find that I had spent over 4 years in the US over the age of 14, but in the end all I had to do was sign an affidavit that I had previously written describing where I was born, how many years I spent in the US before going to South America, where I lived in South America and how long I was there, where I lived in the US when I returned from South America, etc., etc. I was very glad that they accepted my affidavit, as I had a difficult time proving that I had actually lived in the US, even though I spent 10 years there before going to PNG.

Anyway, bottom line is that Levi was approved for his US passport and Social Security number. I have to admit that a part of me hated plugging my son into a government system at such a young age, but there you have it. It's certainly much easier to travel with passports and visa stamps and all that jazz. We finally gave up on trying to do the passport photo ourselves and had it done in a pharmacy not far from the US Consulate--naturally Levi was asleep when it was photo time, so we had to figure out how to wake him up, get him to open his eyes and look at the camera. I'm not sure how many photos the camera man ended up taking, but it was probably over 20. Wonder of wonders, we finally did get a pretty good one, if maybe a little bit grumpy looking. I'm glad that the cameraman had such a patient attitude about it all.

We also plan to get him his UK passport. I figure it's a good idea to get them both and thus try to give him as many options as possible for the future. Who knows what the future may hold for him?

So that was OUR day! The folks at the US Consulate were really nice, even though I had my usual trouble with the metal detector which resulted in me having to go through over and over again before I finally found a small pocket knife in my change pocket that I had completely forgotten about. (Unfortunately the net effect was that it looked as though I had tried repeatedly to sneak it in!) Thankfully the guard was very understanding and didn't give me a hard time. I refrained from telling her a story about my trip to the US consulate in Lima, Peru when I was 16 which resulted in me having to shed 6 knives (nothing illegal) at the metal detector....

Long Time No See!

Well! It's been an awful long time since I posted anything here. Having a baby around takes up a lot of time and effort. Now that Clare and Levi have been home for a while, we've been establishing new routines and getting a handle on all the new things in our lives, like nappies (or "diapers" depending on where you're from), prams, (or "strollers" or "pushers", take your pick), car seats, (or "baby capsules"), etc., etc. We love our little boy! Especially as he seems to be so easy at this point--mostly he just eats, sleeps, and makes dirty nappies. If he's fussy, it usually means that he is hungry. Anyway, all that to say that we've been busy learning all about our baby and how to take care of him and that has been taking up a lot of time, sometimes at odd hours of the night.

Tomorrow we take a trip down to the US Consulate to see about getting a US passport for Levi. By US law he has to be sighted by somebody at the embassy before they will let him have a passport. Hopefully one of the 50-100 attempts at passport photos that we have taken will be acceptable. It's just difficult to get a 2 week old baby to look straight ahead, (or look straight up if you have him lying on the floor), with his eyes open, both ears visible, no parents' hands in sight, on a flat, white background with no shadows.

In the near future we will also be applying for a UK passport for Levi, but it sounds like that one will be much easier to get.

Once we have one of the passports, we will be applying for a PNG visa--this is the part that might be the most difficult, as the PNG visa office is often overworked and sometimes visa applications take an unavoidably long time to process.

And by the way, who turned off the heat here in Melbourne? I'm freezing!

Finally Home from the Hospital!

YAAAAY! My wife and son are finally home from the hospital! I thought we would never get out of there--apparently there were several other women and babies being discharged at the same time, so it took us over an hour to get permission to leave. This photo is of Clare lying on the sofa with Levi watching TV. It looks like Levi has already figured out that there is nothing on worth watching.

It's so good to have them back! By the end of their time in hospital, I was starting to really miss them, even though I was spending much of every day at the hospital with them.

I installed a baby seat in The Mighty Holden pick-up. That was a trick! I had to remove the whole back seat to find a place to mount one of the straps. I was warned that some hospitals here won't let you take your baby until they see receipts from a professional workshop for having your baby's car seat installed, but thankfully the Mercy Hospital wasn't that way. Many thanks to the folks who loaned us the car seat!

Levi is cute, I think I'll tell Clare that we can keep him.