Laik Bilong God: Pre-Field Orientation

Our first week in Dallas went so well! After meeting on Facebook, our Papua New Guinea team has been praying for each other this semester, and we've felt God at work as we have quickly clicked in with each other. I feel so blessed to be working with my PNG team, even if I am the only male on the trip :-). I have been inspired by how much Lindy, Megan, Delaina, and Lindsey want to serve God and see his word touch lives, and I'm looking forward to seeing how God uses each of us this summer.

There are fifteen interns here this week, headed to Papua New Guinea, Guinea (West Africa), and Tanzania (East Africa). I must confess that I've grown used to a certain reaction when I tell people I want to translate the Bible: "Better you than me!" Well, it has been such a blessing—and a little surreal—to be surrounded by so many people who are seriously considering the work as a career. We're a strange breed, but we've had a blast together.

This week, we've been led by our internship coordinators through a series of training exercises and orientations. One of our first activities was called "Oomah Boomah," and it was a fun simulation of just how overwhelming it can be to try and tell the Bible story to a group of people with different customs and an entirely different worldview. As my team tried to tell the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, we could tell the missionaries were having fun pretending to be a foreign tribe: playing with our hair, clapping at us whenever we said taboo words ("God" and "water"), and asking us questions that don't usually come up during an American telling of the story ("So, if we raise our hands like Moses, will that bring the wind to us as well?").

Amidst a few other fun games, we've also had quite a few important sessions to educate us about the work of translation and how to be safe and smart this summer. Among other topics, we covered worldview differences, culture stress, the translation process, healthy teamwork, methods of language learning, conflict management, spiritual warfare, personality types, international security, missionary health, and child safety. In addition, we had a few sessions devoted to learning PNG language and culture.

We also took a lot of time to develop goals for ourselves and to build strong relationships among our team. We developed a team covenant (covering everything from "We will not date each other or nationals" to "We will place the needs of others before ourselves") and had a special time of sharing our life stories with each other (which, in our team of five people, stretched easily into five hours). It's amazing how quickly we've bonded together and learned to trust each other. Even this weekend, when I drove to Austin for my niece's birth, I found myself missing my teammates.

I feel like this week did a lot to grow me for the summer and beyond. I suffered an outbreak of chiggers (numbering, at its worst, no less than 32 itchy welts all over my ankles and thighs), which hopefully prepared me for any interesting insect bites this summer. I've been keeping a journal for myself (which was given to me by a friend), and it has been amazing to see the ways that God has already been answering specific prayers of mine during this week. I've been reading through Acts in the evenings and Psalms in the mornings, and the dedicated time in the word has been a source of nourishment and rest. One of my goals for the summer is to keep "buckets of grace" for myself and for others: to realize that we are all trying our hardest but that language learning is difficult and slow. I need to be especially forgiving this summer, understanding that it is stressful to live in a new culture and speak a new language.

Let me close with a few pictures from Wednesday. We spent the day outdoors on teambuilding exercises, so I broke out the camera to capture all of the fun: