Summer School Memories

Well, summer school has come to an end and we have a bunch of pictures and videos to share with you. So come along while I give you the tour...

First of all, welcome to our abode...


We live in 'B' lodge with two other families...

You know the Jones family - (L-R) Piper, Amber, Zoe, and Brad
they are our teammates from Michigan

and

meet Brad & Elyse...

they are from Sydney and are lots of fun.
This is a picture of them with Josh on his birthday (plus Zoe).

Our little pad doesn't have a kitchen so we share the kitchen and lounge area with Brad & Elyse.

This is where we do our laundry...

The picture is a little fuzzy but you get the idea. Grace is hanging laundry out on the line. we've never done laundry on the line before but I actually like it. I find it quite relaxing, and truthfully, it gets done a lot faster when you don't have to wait for the dryer.
I hope when it comes time to settle in Vanuatu Jim will set up an area like this one for us. There is plenty of line space, but the best part is that it is covered. I cant tell you how many times in Vanuatu we had to race out to rescue the laundry from getting soaked in the rain. It was not uncommon to hang the same load three times before it was dry! We don't have to worry about that any more =).

Okay, moving on...

From where we live, we walk maybe 500 meters to the offices/classes/dinning room.

Here is Jim and Houghton on their way to dinner, or 'Tea' which is what Aussie's call the evening meal...

Speaking of Aussie names for meals, here is a little bit of culture for you...

Breakfast
Morning Tea
Lunch
Afternoon Tea
Tea (evening meal)
Supper (cookies before bed)
hmm....

Here is Laura and our friend Sophia at morning tea. Sophia was able to join us for the summer course but is now back in Vanuatu continuing work on a commentary for the Bislama Bible.

During summer school, all of our meals were prepared by these fine men John and Chris (plus Anita, but she wasn't around for the picture)...

These guys were wonderful.
They also hooked up school lunches for Grace and Josh - and spoiled them!
I don't know how we would have survived without them. We barely were able to fit in time to sleep, I don't know what we would have done if we would have had to cook.
Now that summer school is over, we are on our own. Supposedly (depending on who we talk to) the rest of the year isn't supposed to be quite as intense - still intense, just not as bad.

Meet a couple of the lovely ladies at the EQUIP office...

Robin & Lyn

(there are more but unfortunately I didn't catch them for pictures)

And this is Mary from the Wycliffe office (pronounced 'Meery' like a real Aussie.)

All the ladies have done an awesome job at helping us settle in and making us feel welcome.

This is where we spent most of our time, in class...

Here we are in 'Phonetics' class...

and Anthro...


Language Learning - As part of the course Peter taught a bunch of us some of his local language 'Whitesands' from the island of Tanna. Some of the other groups learned 'Indonesian', 'Urdu', or 'Karen'

We made a couple of field trips. One was to an Islamic Mosque to observe their formal prayers. Us girls were required to wear the customary dress for women...


As the course wrapped up there were a lot of tests.
Here we are waiting for our turn at production assessments...


If you have been keeping your eye on the blog, you know we have had some serious fires around here. It got really smoky, and scary at times.

It was also VERY hot...

Grace and Josh's school had a family picnic to raise funds for some of those that were affected by the fires. I took the chance to get a few pictures.

This is what the kids see as they ride their bikes to school every morning...

looks sort of like Eastern Montana...

until you see a kangaroo...


Josh's uniform -

the hat is part of it, but the stick is not =)

we got to meet the kids' teachers

and eat some traditional Aussie food - grilled sausages and onions on a slice of bread with BBQ sauce or tomato sauce (aka ketchup)

More pictures from around campus...

Brad P. & Brad J.

Jim with Peter
He was here just for the summer course, and is now back home in Vanuatu and will be working on a Whitesands Bible translation project.

It wasn't all work...

One the last night before 'graduation' we got a chance to let our hair down, so to speak, and just have some fun. Here area couple of videos we thought you would like...

This is an Australian Bush Dance - sort of like square dancing with out the funny clothes

Here is a video one of our phonetics tutors made for us. After an intense six weeks of learning, we thought this was just hilarious. It could be that we could finally just take a break and laugh, or more that we actually understood what the video was all about - I don't know what it was, but it made us laugh so hard we cried...

Well, that is it. Hope you enjoyed the 'tour' =)

Love,
Tania for the crew


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