Papua New Guinea: Second day of work

Today was Wednesday, our second full day of work. It started out raining cats and dogs during the wee hours of the morning and continued drizzling into our work day. We all got more sleep and woke up refreshed. Since we had some wet areas to work in, we spent time this morning in a devotional led by Mike B. There was a lot of good discussion. Karen and Linda worked together with NTM back in the 1980's and beyond in this very compound and there has been much reminiscing going on. They are planning a float plane trip into the May River area where they worked in the tribe and are very hopeful that this trip can become a reality. Much has changed here in PNG since their tenure here and as Kelly joined us for a time, he explained a lot of what the NTM people are doing in this area. This was new information to some of the team who are not real familiar with NTM. I am sure that as our time here continues, we will all become very familiar with how the Lord has been working in this island that has 800 distinct people groups each with their own language. There are many unreached areas of this island and there is room for more pioneers who are willing to serve the Lord full time here.

After this devotional time, the contractor, Sas, arrived for the drawings I had been working on yesterday afternoon. I gave these to him and then we began our work. One of the issues that quickly surfaced was a lack of tools needed to cut holes and knockouts in our panels. We quickly wore out a 2-1/2" hole saw on one hole in one of the Automatic Transfer Switches. We tried various methods to remove knockouts only to be resigned to the fact that we were severely handicapped not having the proper tools. Nathan, from the compound here, picked up a hole saw from Mike at Friends In Action, but this was not a very sharp one either. Finally around lunch time he returned to us with two brand new 2-1/2" Bi-Metal hole saws. This was an answer to prayers and we were able to cut most of the remaining holes in the ATS's using only one of the new hole saws. God certainly knows our needs before we do as these were the only two hole saws available here in Wewak, so He held them in store for this project.

Sas came back to the site two more times to go over just what we are planning to do. We will still need some more materials, since we did not send enough PVC fittings in the shipping container. Fortunately, as we began to investigate how we might overcome this new giant obstacle, we discovered that the 50mm pipe available here is somewhat close to our US 2" PVC. Nathan will be buying us fittings for this size as well as the 25mm pipe which corresponds to our 1" PVC.

We were able to mount the Automatic Transfer Switches and an electrical panel, and complete the conduit running to the generator building. Following this we pulled wires into this conduit and began making connections at the generator. Tomorrow we will hopefully complete this conduit and wiring at the other end. Then it may be possible that the new generator could be started and run during power outages. This could be an immediate solution to the need here until we are able to finish the wiring completely and have the generator in full standby mode. Power was off yesterday for over 5 hours and since the old generator had been removed in the Upper Compound, that part of the campus was totally out of power, while an older, failing generator ran the Lower Compound.

Meeting with Sas the contractor and Soma the inspector to go over our plans.

Below is a photo of our fine cooks who are taking good care of us. We have been eating very well thanks to them!