Top 10 Things to Do In (and Around) Ukarumpa

In no particular order…

1. Hamburger Night—head on down to the Teen Centre on certain Friday nights during the school term for a tasty egg burger and chips (fries) or a taco salad and milkshake!

The yellow team pulling on last year's Primary School
Sports Day

2. Any and all school functions—band/choir concerts, plays, sports tournaments, Sports Day, Carnival…some of these events even have food/snacks for sale! What a deal! J

A Tropical Winter

Winter in the tropics…sounds pretty unthreatening, right? Typically it just means cool at night, hot during the day, and some random rain showers. But every now and then there is an anomaly—such as last week. One morning last week I woke up less because my alarm clock went off and more because I couldn’t feel my face. No joke.

To Town, You Say?

Kainantu-see the little bit of pavement on the right side
of the picture?

About a week and a half ago, I had the opportunity to go to Kainantu with several other ladies to do some shopping. We piled into the old firetruck and headed out bright and early (okay, so 7:30 isn’t really that early…but it was school break!). The roads here in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are very interesting (read: full of potholes), and the dirt road right out the front gate of Ukarumpa is among the worst (at least on the way to Kainantu). You can’t really dodge the potholes because they are EVERYWHERE, so you just look for the part of the road that has the least, or the potholes that look the least likely to eat your vehicle.

Washing Laundry...in a Bucket?!

What does the phrase “do laundry” bring to your mind? The washer and dryer in the basement laundry room? Folding clothes still warm from the dryer? Well, in the village that’s not quite how it goes…

The laundry bucket

First you collect your dirty laundry, which isn’t usually very much, because you typically do some every day. The dirty laundry, laundry soap, a bar of Klina soap (good for getting stains out), and the laundry scrub brush all go in the laundry bucket, which you take down to the river; and since you’ll be down at the river anyways, you may as well waswas (bathe), too. (See my post about waswas here.) After you’ve gathered up what seems to be everything but the kitchen sink, you head down to the river.