One Last Post…

Thank you so much to each and every person who has been walking through each step of this process with us from afar, even when our internet went out and you didn’t hear from us. Your support and prayers are very greatly appreciated. Here’s one more update on our last week in Papua, and prayer requests for us as we re-enter American culture.

~The Story~

Last weekend, we led worship for Newman Chapel with Matt, who often leads worship there. Matt played guitar and sang, Ben played drums, Andrew danced with his bass, Michaela sang and played trumpet, and Jordan sang as well. It was quite an honor to lead a congregation of so many deeply committed Christians in worship.

This last week, we did not have language school in the mornings; we were at the office working all day instead. Learning all about Papuan culture and language with Jimmy (who we missed greatly) was instead replaced by hurried data processing and a general scramble to write up reports.

Pak Hengky was sick this week, and he normally helps us translate between English and Indonesian if we need it, so that made for some interesting times around the office, because Josiah, the technician, does not speak English. He was in charge of installing meters for Michaela’s project, but also helped the different Indonesian toko (corner store) owners she needed to talk to understand her broken bahasa Indonesia questions and give the correct answers. How he understood what she was trying to ask she never found out, because the toko owners certainly didn’t.

Jordan and Josiah also got the Endaga box installed on top of one of the solar panels (a good 20 feet in the air) in order to run some tests on it. If there were any moments on the trip that any of us seriously wished we knew more bahasa Indonesia, this was it. Yet it all managed to come together anyhow.

Explaining why Jordan was wearing a motorcycle helmet to solder a broken piece back together proved a little more difficult. Maybe Josiah understood it was for eye protection in lieu of goggles, maybe he thought we were crazy. Either way we all got a good laugh out of it. And good pictures.

Our last full day, Friday, we did some debriefing with both Matt and Jacinda. Each of us presented out projects to Matt and each other, which were as follows.

Michaela gathered data regarding the use of electronics in the village of Abar (on Lake Sentani), where Matt has solar panels set up. Her task was to find out how to make an ice-selling business profitable for someone in the village. This involved surveying 13 tokos (corner stores) that sold ice to see what the norm in Sentani was as far as both the production and sale of ice, then survey households in Abar to see how that was playing out there. Using electricity to start small businesses among villagers is one of the goals of Advancing Engineering (AE), so this information proved very useful to Matt.

Andrew had probably the most important project of all. He ran simulations over and over again to see how micro-grids dependent on solar panels might be able to fit into the picture on one of Indonesia’s smaller (and currently grid-less) islands. Engineers who work for Matt in Jakarta will now take the framework for the simulations that he has created, and tweak them just a little bit over and over again to obtain data to put into a report for government officials.

Jordan explored the black box known as Endaga (which is actually white) and wrote up a report about it for Matt. He was in communication with its creators as he tried to unravel exactly how to use this box to set up a personal mobile network, how to get phones to send messages on it, and how far the range of this network is. This will eventually help the each different set of solar panels communicate with one another and with home base in a much easier fashion than before. Despite the amount of work that this is (especially with the internet out) he still managed to help Ben out with his project some.

Ben’s project was to create a website that would be able to display both data about the consumption of electricity by each household, and the production of energy from each solar vine (set of solar panels). Luckily, he could do most of the coding without the internet, he just couldn’t debug it and check for errors until the last few days or so. This website, once it is fully up and running, will be incredibly useful to all AE staff members, as it will have all of the information they need in one area in an easy-to-read format.

We debriefed in the afternoon with Jacinda, Matt’s wife, who used to be in charge of SPRINT and grew up in Papua. She talked with us about culture shock and processing our trip and all those other things that you have to worry about when you’re returning home from a long time abroad. We discussed how our trip went – humorous things we remember, what we learned about ourselves, and what we learned about God. We all saw the glory of God in the world around us in Papua – some parts of it are breathtaking. We all also learned to see his glory in the eyes and lives of others throughout these past six weeks. In the end though, we kept coming back to Pak Hengky’s reason for loving Jesus:

“Nothing. Without Him, I have nothing.”

We flew home over the course of the next several days.

~Prayer Requests~

While our trip might be finished, its impact on us will surely stretch beyond that, but we could use a little help getting through the process…

Please pray that we do not try to process it all at once and then be done with it, but that we have the patience to wait in the midst of ambiguity until it works its way through our entire lives and we can see how it has changed us.

Please pray that we do not forget these lessons that we have learned about ourselves, other people, our world, and most importantly our God throughout this time of being stretched. Pray that we would instead integrate them into our daily lives here, and let them inform our actions.

Pray that we do not deafen our friends and relatives with our endless stories, but also that we are able to find people to share these experiences with.

Love,

Michaela, Andrew, Ben and Jordan

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