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Wantok Bilong Mi

Amazing! I met a man from PNG today. For those who don't know, I'm an MK from Papua New Guinea, having lived there for fifteen years in the '60s and '70s. He came to the 'net cafe with others from his organization, as they wanted to send an e-mail back to their office in Medan. I tried to talk to him for a while, and he told me that he went to seminary in Medan, and is now living and working there. He came over to Meulaboh to see how he could help out. At the same time, there was an Aussie in the 'café, and he grew up in Bouganville. So the two of them were talking in 'tok pisin', the PNG trade language. I can follow along just fine in that, but when it comes to speaking it, I'm so, so rusty. Plus, after working on my Spanish for the past four years, every time I want to use 'tok pisin', all that comes out is Spanish. I used a few phrases here and there, but that was all. So I helped the guy from PNG and his colleague to send an e-mail with an attachment. I would speak in him to English, and he'd tell the other person what to do in Indonesian. Plenty of different languages going on around here. Every day I hear Swedish, English, French, and Indonesian. Oh, and there's also the local Aceh dialect that the people here use. Of course, the one common language is English.

I went on a fact finding trip this afternoon. There are two GSM phone systems that people from the NGOs have been using. The problem is that they haven't worked so well for the past ten days or so. You can send an SMS text message, but they don't go through until between midnight and about 3 AM. You can also make phone calls then if you feel like staying up that late. Then, the last two days, I've heard people talk about using a CDMA service that is now available in Meulaboh. It sounds intriguing to me, because I'd like some reliable communication between our 'net café and the MAF 'office' at the airport. One of the goals is to set up a long-range wireless connection between the two locations. It would be useful to be able to communicate between the two locations as we work on that. So I wanted to find out if any of the MAF guys or the Samaritans Purse guys were using the CDMA service. Turns out they aren't. After looking at possibilities for a tower, and at the tall palm trees in front of the building, Hajar and I left, headed back to Meulaboh. It was so hot, and I was so tired, I kept dozing off. I felt bad, as I didn't want to be rude to Hajar. There's not much we can say to each other, as he only speaks a few words of English, and I speak about five words of Indonesian. We ende up at the Samaritans Purse house, dropping off some mail for them, and then on to the UNICEF office. They are using the new CDMA phones, and I wanted to know if they had used them out at the airport. They hadn't, and didn't know if there was coverage out there. I really need to know if they will work out there before I go and buy two phones at $120 each. In the end I feel like I don't know a lot more than I did when I started. I did find out that the CDMA phones are capable of sending and receiving e-mail at a decent rate of speed, but I don't know if that part of the service is available here in Meulaboh.

I've been listening to K-LOVE on the web, and that's been wonderful. I used to listen to this radio station when I was working in the US. I had a long commute, and I spent many hours in the car listening to great Christian music.

At about five o'clock, several MKs showed up at our tents. They are friends of Jonathan, and they are working with the aviation program of MAF and Samaritans Purse. Each day they come in to town to play soccer. Of course, they also enjoyed checking their e-mail. Jonathan went back to the airport with them, and he's spending the night out there. Tomorrow he'll work on the Beaver, helping to deliver food and supplies to hard-to-reach villages up the coast to the north. He'll be an invaluable part of the crew because of his ability to speak Indonesian.