It was rainy season, the sky was a slate of swollen, black clouds just waiting to spew forth their rain and make our four-wheel drive trek impassable. We had been driving for the last few hours down the Ramu Highway, a saturated mixture of clay, gravel, pavement, potholes, and the occasional landslide through the mountains. We did not relish the thought of turning back toward town when we were so close to home.
“Lord, hold the rain back just a little while longer.” We inched up the 23% (this is not a typo) grade of the last mountain before turning onto our trek into Uria Village. All four tires were gripping the trek as we slogged over the first hill and began to skirt Somau. A few places along the way we had to power out of pig-wallow enhanced ruts. The final bog was a joyous mudfest, slogging mud from the hood to the rear of our Patrol as we finally pulled onto the soccer field that serves as sometimes helicopter pad and soccer field and our front yard.
Friends gathered around and I climbed on top of the car to begin handing cargo down from the cargo basket mounted on top. After the last box was carried up the stairs of our house, the sky opened and dumped six inches of rain in about forty minutes or so. “Thank you, Jesus, for your kindness.”
This was one of scores of trips just like it, necessary to keep our mission station supplied with goods, enabling us to live away from the urban center.
You might find what happens at the other end of the food chain equally interesting, though. Here in Florida I can go to Wal-Mart or Costco or Sam’s Club and get pretty much everything I need under one roof–from socks to steaks to stereos. Shopping in Madang is different. It is more . . . diversified. There is the butcher for meat, the grocery stores for other foods and sundries, the hardware stores for hardware type stuff, the auto stores for spare parts (if you can get them), the department store for anything from guitars to refrigerators to generators. There is the province’s largest organic outdoor vegetable market where people from Madang and neighboring provinces come to sell produce. There are what we just called the Chinese shops which sell a combination of a lot of things. There are also a few stationary shops. We have to visit virtually all of these places when we shop for supplies. I’m sure I’ve left many out.
Madang Produce Market
Having purchased all this stuff, we head back to the Pioneer Bible Translators office where there is a room dedicated to buying and shipping stuff. Here we repackage all of it, including boxing, taping, labeling, sizing, sometimes weighing (if we are using an aircraft) the cargo for transport. All meat has to be frozen solid and flat so that it will stack into the small freezers that LP Gas refrigerators have. If we are driving our 4 x 4 we have to decide how to pack it in or even if we will have enough room. Are you exhausted yet? This kind of buying and packing can take a week or two to accomplish . . .
Shopping in Madang
On the village side, everything is then repackaged again to protect against humidity, rats, and six-legged pests.
Who is in charge of all the buying and preparing? Let’s just say that a certain energetic woman of noble character considers this one of her spiritual gifts (as do many others whom she has helped). What do I say about her?
“She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. . . Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.’ ” Proverbs 31:25;28-29
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