MICHEALS’ MEMOIRS May 2014 Update
Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea
Our Return to Papua New Guinea We Are Leading A Short Term Mission Trip for Wycliffe Bible Translators As most of you know, we spent 15 years serving with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It’s where we raised our family and where a big part of our heart still is. It is also the country where Chuck, in his recruiting work for Wycliffe, has sent new missionary staff to serve in as our need for workers there is very large. There are still over 300 language groups in PNG with NO Scripture as their language has never been reduced to writing and no one has gone to translate the Bible for them. As you probably also know, Barb’s work with Wycliffe involves planning GET Global (Go Experience Translation) short term mission trips to various countries around the world. The trips are usually three to four weeks long. This year she is planning trips to Mexico, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. While most of the trip planning involves approving the applications for high school and college students who want to go on the trips, handling the logistics of scheduling, purchasing airline tickets and helping prepare students and trip leaders, sometimes like this year it involves us leading a trip. That trip will take us back this summer to PNG and Ukarumpa where we lived and worked before. The last time we were there was when we led a GET Global trip for Wycliffe back in 2009. This year we plan to lead the trip in June and July with seven teens and young adults. One young man attends the youth group at our home church in Kalamazoo, Michigan and one young woman attends a Bible
college in Florida that Chuck recruits at and also leads a semimonthly mission prayer meeting. Other participants are coming from around the country. All are coming to learn about our Bible translation work and to see if this is the work God is calling them to. The Lord willing in mid-June, we plan on spending four days in Dallas, Texas at our linguistic and Bible translation headquarters where the GET Global participants will go through classes on Bible translation, grammar, language learning, literacy, phonetics and phonology. We will also do our cross cultural training and trip orientation there. After that training and orientation we head out on a 16 hour non-stop flight to Brisbane, Australia and then up to Port Moresby where we will overnight at a missionary guest house called MAPANG, before heading up to Ukarumpa the next day. After spending a few days at Ukarumpa we will head out to a village where there is Bible translation work going on. We hope to spend at least a week there learning and seeing the work up close. Then we will travel back to Ukarumpa to learn more about the support services that assist the work of Bible translation.
PNG GET Global Trip - June 16 – July 14, 2014
We plan to leave PNG on July 9 and head for a couple of days of debrief at our Tree Tops Lodge, which is a small hotel that Wycliffe and Missionary Aviation Fellowship purchased to assist mission staff moving in and out of PNG. Then it is back to the USA. Please pray for our safety, good health and for additional financial support we will need to take this trip. Pray also that God will show the participants what their role in Bible translation might be. On this trip we will have two other adult leaders, Doug and Nancy Dillingham. They have been serving with Wycliffe for a number of years, but have not yet been overseas to see the work first hand. They are also coming along to see if being a trip leader is something they might do in the future.