Vacation Bible School

For all of you who think I fell off the face of the earth, I apologize. This entry is actually from the beginning of July, but I am just getting around to posting it.

This last week we had Vacation Bible School for all of the younger missionary kids who stayed around for the summer. Our theme was Avalanche Ranch and everything was "ranch style." I was a crew leader for a group of three and four year olds. Our team was the Cattle Dogs. A few of our Bible stories were Rahab and the spies (which scared some of my little ones), the Israelites crossing the Jordan river and Joshua and the Battle of Jericho.

My group was bit of a challenge, since they hadn't been to school yet. They didn't know how to walk in line, that in a group setting you can't just yell out whatever crosses your mind, etc. However they did come up with some funny things that made me laugh. At one point we were about to watch a little video and one little boy had to use the bathroom. As I was walking him out of the room, he turned around and announced to everybody, "I have to go potty, but it's ok. I'll be right back, so don't start without me!"

At three and four years of age, I always wonder how much they remember, so it was neat for me to see all of the kids learning their verses and remembering the Bible points for the different days.

Coffee Factory and Goroka Museum

The highlight of last week was a tour of a coffee processing plant and a trip to the Goroka museum. The coffee processing plant is pretty amazing! They process tons (literally) of coffee every day. The place is very noisy and there are pieces of coffee hull (husk, whatever you call it) falling on you all the time. At the plant they dry the coffee, take the hull off and sort it according to quality or grade. The dryers alone hold six tons of coffee each. After all that, they sell it to exporters who then have it roasted and sent overseas.

The museum was also very interesting to me, despite its size. It was very small, but it was clean and had a nice display of PNG artifacts, history, etc. I just finished reading a book on the history of PNG, so seeing so much stuff in the museum that the book had talked about was fascinating. I would have liked to spend some more time there, but the rest of the group was getting hungry.

Graduation

Last Wednesday we had the opportunity of going to and helping with the Numanohi Christian Academy high school graduation. Many of the kids' family members showed up from around the world and of course the kids were so excited to graduate. Matt was the official photographer and I coordinated the coffee at the reception. Needless to say we have no end of pictures of the graduation, which was very nice. Serving coffee, on the other hand, provided a bit more excitement than I was hoping for... The outlet next to the coffee serving table quit working at some point during the graduation. Fortunately the coffee stayed fairly hot on its own. Also, the other coffee pots that we traded the original one out with were plugged into outlets that worked. All in all, I think everything turned out fairly well.