MICHEALS’ MEMOIRS November 2017 Update
What Were You Doing During November 1988? We know that for a number of you reading this newsletter, 1988 was before you were born! For others, that year might have seen the birth of a child, the death of a family member or the change of a job. For our family, we had just come back to the USA after spending 2 ½ years in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and were living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Chuck had taken on a job at a local lumber company that his cousins owned and Barb was working part time at a local downtown bakery. All of our four children were going to a Christian school and we were praying about returning to PNG again, but this time long term. By the summer of 1989 we had made the decision to return to PNG and had begun to raise funds to return there.
By January 1990 the decision was reached about where to serve and they arrived in PNG with their baby Rachol. Shortly after arriving and going through PNG orientation training, they made it out to the village of Musula where the people speaking the Kasua language lived. The Kasua language was spoken by 600 people and until that time, no one had thought enough of them or esteemed them enough to want to live with them, learn their language and translate God’s Word into it. That was about to change!
Tommy and Konnie Logan and baby Rachol during their first village visit to the Kasua language community
Our children in Papua New Guinea
Little did we know that in November 1988, another family was also considering if they were headed to PNG. Tommy and Konnie Logan had just joined Wycliffe, but were first going to spend the following year getting the needed linguistic and Bible translation training needed to begin work as Bible translators.
Arriving back at Ukarumpa, the Logans prayed and then decided this was where they would begin their Bible translation work with the help of the local people. Over the next 27 years, the village of Masula would be their home. Eventually another daughter Laura would be born and between those years there were furloughs back to their home in the USA and many, many visits to Ukarumpa where we worked to provide support services to keep them going. At Ukarumpa they attended