Trip to Borroloola

As many of you may have known, Nelita's father passed away just before Christmas. We took Nelita to be with her family at this time. She stayed there for Christmas and the New Year. We left home to pick her up on the 8th January.

We stayed in Borroloola until the 18th. This was a time to renew relationships with the people there, and enjoy their friendship and company.

While we were there, we shared about our new work. We showed many people the 5fish app and helped many download the app. We were even fortunate enough to test Dennis' recording skills, and tested some of the scripts Glenys had written.

The language groups there are Garrawa, Yanyuwa, Mara and Gudunji. There is a fair amount of material recorded in Yanyuwa, but the recorded material in Garrawa has been lost over the years. This is a language we would like to start with. Along with Garrawa, we would like to do a lot of work in what is called Aboriginal English.

This is not Kriol, which is a language spoken in many places in the Territory and Western Australia. Aboriginal English is a bit like pidgin. It contains many English words, but sentence structure and the way it is spoken is different to main stream Australia.

Many younger people would speak Aboriginal English. As GRN seeks to have recorded material in the heart language of the people, we would like to start here.

A lot of the teenagers are ashamed to speak to Christians, so having the gospel on the phone means they can listen without embarrassment.

Dennis was able to spend some time recording some of the scripts we prepared. It was a great chance to put the training to the test. As most of the training was studio, it was good to see what we needed to do on field. Naturally, we are going back to the office with lots of questions.

 This is Vincent Charlie. He is the church leader at the AIM church in Borroloola. Vincent has a lot of respect in the town as a very strong Christian.

Vincent has a great reading voice, so we would like to use him for the scripture reading recordings.

Other people we will use to help with writing, translating and checking.

When a person cannot read well, we say the words out loud and they repeat the words. Our voices are then cut out of the recording. This is a lengthy process, but it works!

While we were recording, we had cicadas in the
trees, cockies squawking and kids yelling in the background.

This was a useful test, as we now can go back to the studio and work out how to either remove the noises or ideas on how to record reducing the noise in the recordings.

This may sound a bit slow, but we were recording as a trial for ourselves, and for the people, so they could experiment and see if they wanted to help in this area.

When we were recording in a community called Wandangula, we encountered other problems. Have you noticed that when you are doing something, kids come from everywhere, and are underfoot. They were having a lot of fun running through the shed we were using, then the dogs followed the kids.

It was all good, as we were just experimenting. Notice Dennis is sitting on the chair. There are not many in the communities, but because Dennis is an old man, he is given the chair!
The lady sitting in front of the recorder is Nelita's mother, Fiona. The other person is Nelita's sister, Lowana

Some of the fun things we did, was take the kids swimming. This is a great way to spend the day. The weather is hot, and sitting in the water with people is a great way to talk and share about different things.

This young girl is Lashara Rory. She is a cousin of Nelita's. They were almost inseparable while Nelita was there.

On this day, we took about 5 kids swimming. While we were there, Dennis went into town.  While he was there, it started to rain.

We all ran for the Mc Arthur bridge. It was very interesting sitting on a great pile of rocks, trying to shelter from rain and lightning. This did seem a bit futile as the water was blown under the bridge with every gust of wind.

One thing about wet season rain storms, it is not that cold, and while wet we were quite comfortable.

While we were at Borroloola, we stayed at an outstation called Sandridge. The traditional owners of this outstation are Nelita's grandparents - Stewart and Nancy.








Cooking was done on a wood fire. One thing you learn quickly when living out bush, is to use a small amount of wood to cook. Our food was well cooked, the billy can provided a great cuppa, and the grill did our toast beautifully!













 As we flew to Darwin, we needed a car. Our youngest son, Benjamin lives in Darwin, so he lent us his car.

We were very grateful for this. While it was a 4WD, it did not like a lot of the roads we had to travel, especially after a big rain.

Dennis had to spend a lot of time at the car wash in Darwin to restore it to its pre-Borroloola condition

Borroloola

As many of you may know, Nelita's father passed away a week before Christmas.
It was very hard trying to organize a trip to Borroloola that close to Christmas. Plane flights were ridiculously expensive and time was not an easy commodity to work around at this time.

Fun photo before leaving

The only way we were able to get Nelita to the funeral was to take her up and leave her there over Christmas. We wanted to be there for the funeral, but dates were not set, and the wet season made it very hard to plan a date. The Friday before Christmas was the last of the fairly cheap flights.

Dennis flew up with Nelita on the Monday. Drove to Borroloola on Tuesday (1000km), Left on the Wednesday and flew home that night.

Nelita has been in Borroloola over the Christmas break.

We leave on the 8th to pick her up. Our flight will take us to Darwin. We will drive to Borroloola and spend a couple of days there.

While there we will spend some time with the people and talk about how they feel we can best meet their needs with the recordings from GRN.

We will also be talking about getting some people down to Newcastle to do recording work and script work here.

As we do not work with AIM any more, we do not have accommodation at the church house now. Please pray that we can find a suitable  place to stay that does not cost the earth. The cheapest place there is the Savannah Way Inn.  This is around $130 per night.

Housing is hard to find as each house is very crowded, and more in the wet season as people from out bush come in before they are stranded in flood water.

Vanuatu Trip with the Dillons

GRN has a number of people working in different parts of the world, and varied jobs within the ministry.

One family in GRN, the Dillons worked with distributing GRN materials. Their ministry was to deliver phones, SD cards, Sabres, and what ever else was needed.


Clayton, Margaret, Laura and Faith Dillon





The one big difference was that the Dillons lived on a catamaran, Shining Light and sailed from Australia, to different Islands in the Pacific. 

When the Dillons need to travel to across the Coral Sea, they need extra crew members to help with the night watch. Glenys was privileged to be one of the crew members to help with this job. She was able to fly to Vanuatu and help with the trip back to Australia.

This meant Glenys had to fly to Vanuatu and meet with the Dillons at the airport. As Glenys' only sea voyage was  a ferry to Magnetic Island and Stradbroke Island, this was rather daunting to do travel alone to another country.

She arrived in one piece, with no hassles

A couple of days were spend in Vanuatu before embarking on a voyage across the Coral Sea.

The Sunday in Vanuata was spent at a Presbyterian boarding School on the graduation day.. This school was badly damaged by Cyclone Pam earlier in the year.  It was mentioned during the service how the school had been damaged but because of the support from the Presbyterian Church, they only missed out on 2 weeks of school

It was while Glenys was there, she was able to talk to some of the board members of the school. This was very interesting learning about the sacrifice the parents make so their children can get an education.

She also learned that there were around 100 denominations on Vanuatu. Every 10 minutes you drove past another church.

There is so much opportunity to hear about God in this country. This is a great contrast to remote parts of Australia, where Christians have to travel many miles, even hours to get to the closest church.

Sailing back to Australia was an unforgettable experience. Margaret and Clayton were very patient with the land-lubber who had never done any sailing before. They explained how and why things worked and how to read the sea, the wind and the navigational tools.

There was another crew member on board. She was a young lady from Magnetic Island. Chiara lived on a yacht, so was well informed on sailing and what to do.

We had a great time together. We cooked meals together, spent time with the 2 daughters, talked a lot, took lots of photos, and enjoyed the time.

No one on board was very sea sick. Glenys was so grateful for this, as she was worried she would be in bed for the duration.  There were times we all felt a bit queasy, but endured it well.

Glenys saw her first flying fish. That was exciting. As she spend a lot of her childhood reading, and a number of those books covered stories of pirates, being marooned on coral islands, it was great to see the pacific where a lot of these stories were based. No pirates though!













We stopped on a coral reef called Chesterfield Reef. This was the highlight of the trip. The reef was filled with nesting sea birds, hermit crabs, and a wonderful smell of birds. We were able to spend some time snorkeling in the ocean. This was amazing. A lot of the reef had been damaged by the cyclone, but it was still beautiful.

Anybody interesting in spending a month sailing the Coral Sea, snorkeling and taking photos?

After about 10 days sailing, we arrived in Bundaberg.

Glenys's thoughts:

I did not mention that we could not shower on the voyage as there was limited water. The shower at Bundy was the best shower ever!

While this journey was to help other workers get back to Oz, I felt it was a great trip to experience something I had never done before. Just on the side, my sons thought I was too old for the trip, and would not survive..still life in the old girl yet!

Clayton and Margaret and the girls were great hosts and very gracious, and Chiara was a fun and enjoyable companion to sail the Coral Sea with.