Let the Housebuilding Begin!
A complete 180
After a long season of waiting and preparation over the last 2 years, the last 2 months have been the opposite. We have finalized our church planting team, completed a comprehensive assessment of the Kuyu people, identified a helicopter shuttle location, signed land agreements, purchased all of our housebuilding materials, and are heading out next week to begin shuttling our office materials into Kuyu. Below is a snippet of each of those steps.
Kuyu Comprehensive Assessment
What’s worse than a world who’s never heard? Perhaps a world that’s heard it all wrong. The Kuyu people are some of the most remote in Papua New Guinea, yet even they have heard stories of God. However, it's via secondhand stories that are lost in oral tradition and distorted by their own worldview. The confusion has trapped them into rituals mixed with animism that couldn't be more opposite from the Gospel.
On our latest trip, we traveled to each of the 6 Kuyu villages and confirmed the open invitation to work amongst the Kuyu people. Here's our latest video from our week-long trip telling the Kuyu people that we are coming to be their missionaries.
SHUTTLE LOCATION IDENTIFIED
2 flight hours cost us about $940. 12 minutes cost us $94. I’ll let you do the math on the cost savings for 100 round-trip shuttles. This is the difference between flying our housebuilding materials from Goroka to Kuyu vs flying our materials from our shuttle point to Kuyu. We are so thankful to find a close location that we can shuttle all of our housebuilding materials out of…well, close as the crow flies.
LAND AGREEMENTS SIGNED!
We decided to hike into Kuyu for this trip and it was twice as long as we expected (16hrs)! We didn’t hike in because we like hiking, we hiked in because we want to better understand the pain our friends experience when they travel out to town. And we definitely have a better idea now! After a long, arduous day, we signed land agreements with representatives and witnesses from every Kuyu village. Praise God for the open door and a ripe harvest.
HOUSEBUILDING SUPPLIES PURCHASED
When we’re not in the bush, we’re running around town finding all of the supplies needed to build our bush houses. With the nearest Home Depot being 6,800 miles away, it makes it challenging to find everything in a third-world country with inconsistent stock and quality.
In the video below, we picked up 4000lbs of flooring for our bush houses, separated them into bundles, wrapped them in plastic, and weighed them in prep for heli shuttles next week!
HELI SHUTTLES BEGIN
Next week we head out once again to officially begin shuttling our building materials into Kuyu. We will drive the materials up the road to our shuttle location where our helicopter will make about 20 rounds in and out of the bush. We will begin building our team office July 11-22 before starting on our houses in August!
PRAYER REQUESTS
This will be the 4th trip in the last 6 weeks, so we would covet your prayers for the following items:
Endurance and strength both mentally and physically
Wisdom in planning and logistics throughout this allocation stage
Peace amidst all of the travel away from our families
Pray for more laborers. Or ask the Lord if he wants to send you.