One week down..

Nearly 2 weeks at BLA.
So much has changed since we lived here, but many things are still the same.

Corrugated, dirt roads are still so close to town.  The outstation we are staying on is about 10 km from town.  3/4 of that road is corrugation.

We wanted to spend a couple of weeks at Robinson River station, but the road is too bumpy to take the van. This means we are limited to day visits.

Glenys really wanted to take the van until she saw a caravan being brought into town on the back of  a truck minus a couple of wheels and an axle. This put a damper on her ambitions. 

We could probably make it if we had a camper trailer, but not our van, even though it is an off roader!

Dennis & Vincent recording by the McArthur River

Marlene playing and singing

John on electric guitar

We have done some recording, so not too bad for one week into the trip!


Vincent is one of the church leaders who has served God faithfully since his conversion in the early 90's.  We sat down by the river to record. It is close to town away from the noise, but the black cockatoos decided they would serenade us.

John and Marlene have been working with us doing some songs. Sadly John's mother passed away and he has to go back home to Wiepa  to arrange her funeral. We dont know if he will be back in time for us to do any more recording

We have rounded up a couple of people who are willing to record the Garrawa language.  A couple of young men have done some trial with the Aboriginal English, but we still do not have some one to help translate the scripts into Aboriginal English.

Our evenings have been busy at Wandangula. The families have been asking for Christian videos to watch at night time.  We brought the projector and a screen, so it has been a regular occasion but we are fast running out of christian  videos.

Regular  evening activity

Here at last!

Dramas, we had a few!
Just as we were leaving Woodberry, we had a slight mishap. Dennis was winding up the legs on the caravan, so we could leave, and one of the legs broke!  A quick trip off to Jayco for spare parts. While we were grateful that it happened before we left, it was rather frustrating to have to make a 40 minute trip just before pulling out the driveway.

Frustrated Dennis fixing the leg

The trip was uneventful. We stayed at Gympie with some friends and went to church with them. We ended up staying 24 hours there, so we had to keep moving fast to get to Borroloola on the Friday.

After many long hours in the car, we arrived on Thursday afternoon, half a day earlier than we planned. This was great as we had some time to be quiet and rest before setting up for the Rodeo on Saturday.

Every time we travel up and back with ministry, we lament we have to keep to a schedule. There are so many interesting places we have to pass by..... One day we will travel just for fun!

While we were traveling up here, our neighbour rang to tell us he stopped some young kids from breaking into our house. Needless this caused a bit of stress and feelings of helplessness. Jarrod, our 3rd son is home but he starts work at 3.00 pm and does not finish until around midnight. This means the house is empty when the kids are home from school.

The rodeo was a good time to catch up with people we have not seen for ages. We had a table there and shared about the 5 fish app, had phones and bibles and posters to sell. 

Stand at the Borroloola Rodeo

We have now begun the process of finding people to help with the script and recording. There are a few people we have begun to test with recording to see if they are suitable. Finding people to help with the translation work is a bit harder.

We are staying on an outstation called Wandangula.  Don't try to pronounce it as it does not sound as it is spelled.  This is where Nelita's family live.

This has been great for accommodation but not for internet.  We bought a prepaid internet, but it does not seem to work for us. It was fine at home, but does not let us do anything here. The internet at the library is $3.00 for 15 minutes. The net is so slow there that we dont use it.

I tried to upload more pictures but the net is so slow I have given up.

2 more sleeps!!

Well, we are on the final countdown. What a few weeks this has been!

Dennis has worked hard on getting the van and car ready. He spend weeks building and perfecting a drop down fridge slide for the back of the car.

Praise God for the internet and You Tube and sons to help! Dennis & Nathan built the slide for the fridge. Dennis built a frame to bolt it to and some drawers to sit beside it.

 While it was a lot of work, it was so much cheaper than buying a commercial drawer already built. It costs around $800 just for the drawer slide alone.  We paid $200 for the slides and built the frame for about $100.  The drawers are flower boxes we bought on Grumtree for $1.50 each. Not beautiful but certainly functional.

As food is so expensive the further north you travel, we found a way to cut costs. A co-worker from GRN, Helen Sadler, took Glenys to the Flemington Markets in Sydney. Together they braved the crowds and bought huge amounts of vegetables. These were taken home and dehydrated.  This will help with the food bill while away.

Helen also went the extra mile and came to our home a few days later and helped with preparing the vegies and also getting the garden ready for 9 weeks of neglect!

 Dennis does a lot of preaching at Singleton Presbyterian church. One of the parishioners gave him a 12 kg pumpkin. This was duly disected, grated, dried and then ground to make pumpkin flour. This can be made into soup, or into bread or stews as required.  The tomatoes will be used as sun dried tomatoes in oil, and added to stews, spaghetti and the like. We also dried zucchini chips, beetroot chips, grated cauliflower, capsicum and carrots. Time ran out before we were able to dry celery.

Helen's job at GRN is data entry for all the international centres of GRN. She maintains the data base and keeps everything up to date.

While she was with us, she sorted out all the data we needed to take up with us. This and a few other jobs she did while staying with us saved us a couple of days work, especially as she knows what she is doing; when we try these things, it take us much longer. By the way, all the mess on Dennis' desk is colouring in pages and pencil packs. Helen was printing them out and packing them while doing the data entry. So much work, so little time.

Thanks Helen.

Just on a lighter side, we went camping for a few days in the last school holidays. Our daughter in law, Shayna and her children came with us.
Xander was having fun with a campfire, but the smoke was getting to him. He came up with this idea!

Not sure that it worked to well, but 10 points for trying.

Dont forget to look at the prayer and praise section for current prayer points.