– Elna

Most of you probably know that I believe that Papua New Guinea is the most beautiful place on earth. Our break in Madang strengthened this belief! Here are some of the highlights:

• Rest – We were all in need of a break after six months of village living and working. It was such a blessing to slow down, play more, think less, read more, bake less…
• The season – We lived in Madang during rainy season, from November 2018 to March 2019. It was H-O-T! Returning for break now, during dry season, we found it much cooler. I doubt the average temperature is really very different, but the humidity was much lower and we felt less drained and hot than in rainy season.
• Snorkelling – There is nothing quite like exploring coral reef – we saw parrot fish, clown fish, needle fish, big schools of fish, a teeny octopus, bright blue fish, almost transparent fish… So so many things live in the water. We serve a very creative Creator!

Restaurants – Usually, having pizza involves a lot of cleaning and chopping veggies, grating cheese, making the pizza base and then cleaning up the mess I make in the process… During break, I could simply place an order and enjoy my meal! Nobody even had to do the dishes. Bliss! 

• Fellowship – We got to spend time with Finisterre Vision’s ‘Team Two’. Up till now all our interaction with them has been via messages, video chats and e-mail. We loved getting to know them, and worshiping with them each Sunday. We were also privileged to be there during a very exciting time – their first survey! The men spent a few days in the Pano language region. (We skipped this process since we only joined ‘Team Do’ later in the process. You can read about the process the Canns and Dodds went through to select Do as language group and Mawerero village here.)

• Shopping – I know, it seems silly. But it really was fun being able to walk through stores and look at different options ourselves. Even though we had to wear masks while browsing… (For the rest of the world wearing a mask is pretty normal but it was a first for us.) 

• Transport – Unless something unexpected happens and we end up leaving the village later in the year, these are the only three weeks the Mitchells will have spent outside of the village in 2020. So it is also the only three weeks during which we used anything except our own feet to get around… We enjoyed ‘normal’ things like car rides (I even let the kids sit in front with Ryan!), ‘normal-for-here-but-really-not-normal’ things like heli flights, and ‘new-to-us-things’ like taking off from a bush runway in a teeny Kodiak. Our return flight from Madang was my favourite heli flight yet! Our pilot stayed low to avoid stronger winds and we got to see vast stretches of uninhabited jungle from closer up than before. 

You can thank God with us for providing the opportunity for us to rest, and for bringing us home safely.