Arrival - At Kudjip

We traveled on New Year’s Eve.

It was a very early rising and three flights, so a pretty long day. But, other than the normal discomforts of travel, we were excited! Well, Tom and I were excited. The kids were a bit scared. I had had a long talk with my independent thinkers about staying close while we are traveling, or bad things might happen to them. I may have been a wee bit dramatic, but some of my kids like to wander and a dose of healthy fear can be a good thing. 

One thing we learned before booking flights was that there are no roads that connect the capital of Port Moresby to the Highlands area, where we would spend a month.

So after landing in at POM we took a smaller plane to Mount Hagen.

There Don, from the Kudjip Mission station, met us in a Land Rover to drive the last bumpy 40 minutes. We piled in the front and back seats with our luggage. Lucy’s booster seat was cast aside. And, the kids learned the fine art of leaning forward so they wouldn’t knock the backs of their heads on the windows as we bounced over potholes.

Lucy giggled a lot. Jimmy asked lots of questions. Sammy was unusually quiet. 

We arrived at our mission house, which was bigger and much nicer than we were expecting, dropped off our bags and immediately got back in the car because Don told us we had dinner plans with a missionary family. Fun! 

The Stewardsons are another American family that lived on the other side of the mission station. We had been in touch with Joshua Stewardson during our planning to come here, but we had not met the rest of the family. 

When we pulled up to their house, their teenage sons came up to the car and warmly greeted us and began asking us (Tom, myself and the kids) so many curious and eager questions.

Did I mention that they were young teenage boys?!

This was a culture shock I wasn’t expecting. didn’t they know that teenage boys are supposed to hang back and be obviously uninterested? I would come to find that this eager and curious nature was a common trait among all the missionary kids on station. I looked around and saw Lucy being whisked off by the younger Stewardson girls to play. Joshua and Kendall welcomed us to dinner where we got to hear their story.

They had been in Kudjip just over two years and after a short home leave in the Spring would be returning for another term of at least two years. Joshua is the Mission Development Coordinator at Kudjip, and Kendall is an ER doctor at the hospital. Tom and I had so many questions and they were happy to share all the stories. Kendall sees some incredibly hard things at the ER. More on that later, but my first impression of meeting a Kudjip missionary doctor was one of great joy and compassion, but there was also pain there, especially when she talked about how many kids she sees die a week.

“So preventable, if they would just come sooner.” 

I once heard someone call missionary doctors the “walking wounded.” But, I think this holding of love and pain at the same time might be a bit closer to how Jesus looked. 

Another thing about Kendall is that she has a wicked sense of humor. Her one liners come at you sideways, and I’ve been in danger more than once of choking on my food from laughing with her around. Good thing she’s a doctor!

After dinner, we were invited to a missionary family New Year’s Eve party. Fun! We’d been up since 2 am, but there was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity of meeting so many of the families living at the station at once.

We walked about five minutes to the Myatt family’s house, where we were greeted with the joy-whoops of some 20 or so children at play, and the happy chatter of adults at ease with each other. I heard a kid say, “wanna play flashlight tag?” And from that moment I barely saw my children for the next few hours as they bounced from yard to food to fire pit to house again. I met every child there, not because I sought them out, but because every kid from toddler to teenager engaged me in conversation at some point. The kids initiated the conversations. The comfort level they had with a new adult was staggering. They treated Tom and our kids the same way. It was an instantaneous induction into this community. I was floored. The adults were the same, but this was less surprising to me. Welcome after welcome in a blur of introductions and background stories. There was no way I could remember all the names. But it seemed to be about 7 or 8 families, though it was hard to tell as everyone mixed about in one big missionary family, kids calling every adult “Aunty” or “Uncle.” 

Someone called out that they were starting the annual snowball fight next door. So I went over to see what was happening. I hardly recognized my kids as newcomers to the group with how integrated they already were with their new friends. 

The snowball fight commenced.

I'm thinking we are going to like it here.