Just a brief message to let you all know that we’re now back in the UK. We had a wonderful and much-needed break in the Pacific and Australia and arrived in London on the 3rd of November after nearly 24 hours in the air!

Our plans now are to continue working with Wycliffe Bible Translators but be based in the UK. We will be staying with Sheena’s mother just outside Cambridge.

We’re not 100% sure what we’ll be doing for the organisation yet. But, we have our Wycliffe debrief scheduled for the 21st of November and we’ll be discussing our options then.

Thanks for your support while we were in PNG. We could not have done it without you. We’re looking forward to continuing to partner with you now that we’re in the UK.

Here’s a list of our latest news:

• We’ve moved house. We’re now just across the road from our old place which was purchased by a family who had newly arrived to do translation work. We’re cat and house sitting until the end of July and we’ll then move again into the house of a British couple who are heading back to the UK for 6 months.
• We’ve got our final flights out booked. John will leave on the 19th of September and Sheena on the 28th. John’s leaving earlier as he’s running a multicultural workshop for the Solomons Islands branch in Honiara until the 28th. We’ll be travelling a little in Fiji and Vanuatu before heading to Australia and then home to the UK.
• We’re in the midst of selling up stuff and figuring how to get what we want to take back to the UK. We’ve been very blessed not only with some great air tickets with a huge baggage allowance through a mission travel agency but also some huge containers to take with us on the plane. That will make travelling back kind of cumbersome but we’re very thankful that we have the opportunity to keep hold of some precious things we’ve collected from Japan, Korea and PNG over the years.
• John’s final role in the survey office will be writing a complete training document for new surveyor internships. This is a lot of work and should take him another two months or so to complete. On top of that, he’s preparing for the upcoming Cultural Self-Discovery Workshop (which he has 22 participants for!) and Learning that LASTS which runs in August. So, lots of training in the short term!
• We will be continuing to look at opportunities with Wycliffe Bible Translators once we get back to the UK so we’d very much value your continued prayer and financial support. John is trying to put together a role in training although we’re not sure at this stage what that will look like.
• The GazPen post-survey checklist is all but complete! John’s written a paper on the unique approach the team took to survey vitality of the languages with a new research tool. Currently, we’re searching for avenues to get this published.
• Speaking of publishing, John forgot (!) to announce that the survey textbook he’s been working on for three years was published on his birthday, 31st of May. See a copy of Understanding Language Choices online. The book is only available electronically at present and is being used currently in summer training courses for survey across the US.

Well, we’ve finally made it back from East New Britain. What an amazing place Kokopo is. I’ll be putting more about our personal experiences on our blog over the next few weeks so subscribe by email/RSS/Whatever to that to stay updated.

It was a great trip in terms of work too. We managed to visit all five language communities and gather enough data to achieve our aims. Read more about the trip on our GazPen Survey: The Trip page.

We’ve just sent off the final proof of the Tonda Survey report to the publishers who release our reports online so that should appear any day now. It reminded me that back in January, we got a comment from one of the anonymous reviewers which I wanted to share with you. They said

Very nicely done. I enjoyed reading it…A nice community based survey with a well balanced analysis of the data. I liked the scope of the data gathered and their assessment of the results and how they put it all together.

This was a great boost for us because we took quite a risk in our approach to the research on this survey, trialling new tools to create a much more streamlined survey. This meant we covered a tremendous amount of ground on the survey and were able to present our data very quickly after we had got back. We weren’t sure what the wider community would think of this approach, so it’s very encouraging to hear the research being praised in this way.

And the Tonda Survey was a real watershed in how the PNG office approaches survey work. Since then we’ve basically done the same thing with the Silisili Survey and the upcoming GazPen Survey and have found things much more manageable!

Some news we received over Christmas but forgot to share with you all…

We are still in touch with many of our friends in Japan and we wanted to share news we had recently from one of them. Many of you who’ve supported us in prayer for years will remember Rumi. She lived with us for nearly 2 years because she wanted to become a Christian and learn more about following Jesus but her family was Buddhist and there was no church anywhere near where she lived. It was a joy to watch Rumi grow in her faith while we were in Japan. While we were living in Korea, Rumi shared with us that her sister had been baptised. Over Christmas, she wrote and told us that her mother has also now been baptised. Fruit bearing fruit: Matthew 13:23 springs to mind!

Yes, we’re back and although it’s been a few weeks since we returned, I haven’t really had the energy to write up what we experienced. Part of this was due to the fact that a bite I picked up on the survey got infected very badly. This almost required me to be medevaced to Cairns to have surgery. But thankfully the treatment worked in time to prevent the infection going into the muscle and I’m now almost fully recovered from that.

I’ve written more about the trip on our Silisili Survey>The Trip page and, there, you can follow a link to a very detailed write-up that John Carter, the other John on the team, has been producing.

16 days, 18 hours, 28 minutes until we embark on our next survey. Although we did have the Tikvah Survey at the planning stage, consultation with the Regional Director of Morobe Province revealed another survey there had more priority. So, we leave on the Silisili Survey on the 10th of February.

More details on the Silisili Survey Page.

You may remember that back in July, I helped to run a Learning that Lasts workshop to help people improve the ability to train adults. Well, I now have the opportunity to work on improving the course that we hope to teach next in mid-2012.

I’ll be travelling to the capital Port Moresby on January the 4th for 4 days of work with two other trainers on adapting the course to our context here in PNG.

It will be the first time that I’ve done anything in Moresby except be in transit so I’m looking forward to seeing more of the city.

We finally realised how useful it would be if we had a Facebook account and so we made one. Click on the link below to visit it:

www.facebook.com/pngsurvey

We realised though that if you want to get our status updates to show up in your news feed, you’ll have to become a fan of the page by clicking on the “like this” button in the left hand column.

We’re planning on simply adding little bits and pieces about our day to day work so you can get a feel for what we do in our work.

In addition though, and the initial motivation for creating the page, we want to be able to post links to one page people profiles that we write about the people we survey. These will help you understand what the needs of the people are and you’ll be able to pray for them. We currently have three with the checker awaiting approval and so we anticipate them being up on the site very soon.

In the meantime, visit the page and ‘like’ it and get our news.

For two weeks at work recently, Sheena and I spent every morning a Cultural Self-Discovery Workshop led by Sheryl Takagi Silzer. We weren’t initially going to go on this, but then someone persuaded Sheena to and then she persuaded me to and we’re both very glad we did.

Ukarumpa is large. We have something like 15-20 nationalities represented and around 800 people living here. Those figures would include people like myself who grew up overseas and really don’t identify with their passport culture or fit in anywhere. In the literature, we are known as TCKs or Third Culture Kids. That means we don’t have the culture of our parents, or the places we grew up in but something else.

As you can imagine, living in such a multicultural mix does create challenges. Quite how we get anything done is, for many visitors, a complete miracle. And that’s just it: it is a miracle as Christ works to bridge cultural divides and make us work together as one body with grace and forgiveness making up for the prejudice and bigotry that lives somewhere in all of us.

The aim of the course was to help us discover our own culture. This was a significant difference from previous cross-cultural materials that we’ve studied which have always focussed on other cultures. It does in fact make a huge difference to your attitude and approach, especially to cross-cultural conflict.

The idea is that each of us has a Culture-Based Judging System. The CBJS is what makes you Brits irritated when you see the word color. It tells you that color is, simply, wrong and provides a very strong urge to place a u in it or at the very least to make some kind of comment about the “awful spelling habits” of people from the US.

What Sheryl’s course does is to help us realise that this reaction makes this our problem, not someone else’s. We cannot change others. But we can work on changing ourselves. So, the idea is to first of all realise what your cultural values are and then reflect on how these influence the way you react to others. At that point, you have a choice in how to react and that’s where the Bible comes in with guidelines like the fruit of the Spirit or Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13.

We learned a tremendous amount about other cultures and we were able to communicate a lot about British culture. For me though, the most important thing was that I discovered that I really don’t have a culture I can define. Thankfully, there was one other woman in a similar position to me so that I felt I was understood to a certain extent.

Sheryl’s course has you spending a lot of time in your childhood, looking at the way your parents socialised you through routines such as eating together, resting, work, cleaning etc. I haven’t got a single memory of my family eating together at home because my parents divorced when I was 9 and I was sent overseas to boarding school at 11. So, if there was one weakness in this amazing course it was that it did not cater to the people like me who find themselves most confused by cultural descriptions.

There is something I can do about that though. Sheryl asked for volunteers to help out the next time she is in PNG to teach the course and I put my hand up. She later asked me to teach the last two days of it. So, along with a few others, including the woman who is in the same boat as me culturally, I’ll be helping a group of others get to know their CBJSs and hopefully improve the relationships between people here at Ukarumpa.

Sheryl’s book, on which the course is based, is Biblical Multicultural Teams: Apply Biblical Truth to Cultural Differences. If you want to buy it and support us at the same time, get it through our UK Amazon or US Amazon shops.