Blessed Christmas and New Year from PNG!

Love from our family to yours!

Gavin made the kids special individualized boxes.

Some of our holiday adventures:

Gavin took the kids on a hike starting over this bridge near us!

Exploring a broken down excavator down the road.

Helicopter adventures, starting with fueling up. There was space when taking Bible translators out to their language allocations!

A roughly made shelter on a recent hike

They make friends wherever they go! This is the security guard and an unknown woman taking a smoke break at our favorite restaurant on the coast, where we spent four days a couple of weeks ago. 

Keeping Up With The Joneses - November 2022

The hard and the good

 Many of you know that we had a 7.8 earthquake several weeks ago. It threw me for a loop, even though we didn't lose anything of tremendous importance and were all fine. It was just such an emotional and mental shakeup, as well as a spiritual one - in the best way. It took a couple of weeks to get feeling more normal, although even now I think, "Do we really want to bother putting that decoration up or repainting the house (which so desperately needs it) when it could all be gone tomorrow?" It really felt like the world was ending for about 30 seconds. This broken, evil earth is not our home; one day everything will be shaken, destroyed and made new! 

Our friends Zach and Cassidy Cann lost their whole house. Gavin and his colleague helped fly them out of their incredibly remote village location on a rugged peak.

Zach Cann

For us, the biggest adjustment was to the lack of reliable Internet. The 2 submarine fiber cables were severely damaged in 3 areas each. Large ships are working on repairing them but it may be at least another month before they're fixed! So Internet (including email) has been spotty. 

Gavin loves helping with projects when he's overnighting in villages.

A local store. Our kitchen was pretty bad but nowhere near like this!

Recent violence between clans has also touched us deeply. Our oldest PNG man friend and yard man was hacked to death. Our house help, his wife, who's like a grandmother to our kids, hasn't been able to come back for weeks due to the violence threatened against her clan by the other clan. PLEASE PRAY for peace and for justice. We realize it won't ever be complete, and what these people (and all of us!) need is truly the Gospel. They have no hope apart from the Good News of a Savior for their sin. Their hopelessness and lack of true joy is blatantly obvious, and the outworking of the despair and rage is tragic beyond words. Please especially pray for the true Christians here to be courageous, stand up to evil, be protected and most of all be LIGHT in the darkness. We love these precious people. 

The kids have had fun exploring our beautiful land.

David scaling the river bank

Seth's turn scaling the steep bank.

Gracie with a fish a PNG boy caught, I fried and Marcie ate.

Will and our new kitten, Binni

Marcie with moth friend

Various photos and a Clinic video

In case you're curious what our Clinic here is like (filmed during an afternoon when I wasn't at work by our lead nurse extraordinaire):  https://youtu.be/pxj0OuZEL9U

When Gracie still had her walking boot. She's boot-free and doing great now!

GIANT fig tree on a rainy day - speaking of which, please pray for rain still.
We haven't had any appreciable rain since March. The gardens are suffering.

The view from a recent motorbike ride with Seth, our explorer who loves a road trip!

Gavin is gifted very interesting things! These (a headdress and two bags) were all made of cassowary feathers. The people ate the cassowaries, and Gavin got sideburns and tall hair. 😁

First Day of School

 How can I have a SENIOR in high school!? We’re so proud of our young man, Isaac, and our big kids who are now third- and fourth-graders and will turn 10 next week(!!!). [Seth is a year behind because of being in and out of the hospital and on tubes so much the first 18 months of his life. He’s a smart little guy who couldn’t start learning as soon as the others could. And he LOVES having his own teacher and class and friends!]

Gavin and I are unapologetically thrilled school is back in session, and the kids couldn’t be happier either! We had a wonderful long break, though, and lots of special time as a family. Thank you, Lord!

Foot update; pray for rain!; snakes and other animals

 Trigger warning: If you hate snakes, you'll hate some of these photos taken recently at a small "petting" zoo.

First, Gracie's foot: We were able to get her an MRI, praise God! They found four broken bones (three metatarsals and a cuneiform bone) and some residual swelling in the cuneiform bone. It was nice to confirm that there was a very good reason she was still having trouble walking, and also great to know that it's NOT a Lisfranc fracture. None of the fractures was displaced and all are healing nicely. Thanks for all your prayers! (Especially yours, Mikayla, granddaughter of Julie! It's so precious and touching that all these kids were praying for Gracie and for Cheetah Speed. 😀) We appreciate prayers that all the residual pain will resolve and that she'll be able to walk well again before school starts two weeks from today.

Speaking of prayer, our valley and surrounding areas desperately need rain. The ground has huge cracks in it and the crops are failing. Some of our friends, colleagues and neighbors have no more water in their tanks (we drink filtered rainwater from the roof), although that's less devastating than ruined crops in a society so dependent on subsistence farming. We appreciate your prayers that it will RAIN soon!

Now for photos (I'll stick the snake ones lower so you can avoid them if you wish):

You can see the crutches were still in operation. She's discarded them now and is hobbling around.

I've always adored parrots. I've had/cared for them throughout my life.

This snake actually bit Marcie twice, but as it was non-venomous and had tiny fangs we all thought it was pretty cool! Her grandkids will be very impressed when they hear she was bitten twice by a snake. The puncture wounds were tiny and hardly hurt at all.

This was a sweet snake who did NOT bite Seth.

Bonus pics: 

Off to dive and snorkel!

Wish this rain was in our area . . . 

A giant geode!

Will makes a darling and dashing co-pilot

This is how Will frequently reads! He's a big percher and voracious reader. His favorites are history and fact books. 

Formal Banquet for Isaac

 This is a month late, but here are a few photos from the fun formal dinner and activities the parents put on for their grade 11 and 12 kids! 

Isaac took his best friend since birth, Kassia (my best friend's daughter - Gavin and I grew up with Kassia's dad in Colombia, and now they are our neighbors and their son is one of our kids' best friends!)

Enjoying coffee and punch in the "Shawarma Palace." I was one of the servers.

The group of close friends

Gavin's costume even threw Isaac - he didn't recognize him at first! He did custom laser engraving of keychains for the kids, and it was a hit!

Kori is like family, "our brother from another mother," as Marcie likes to call him. :)

Update on Gracie and Mom

 Hi friends,

It has been way, way, way too long since I updated. First off, huge praise that my sleep issues have resolved! I only had a few minor episodes of breathlessness/apnea during sleep after returning from Australia, and it's been over a week since my last one. I am SO grateful! What a huge difference sleeping vs. not sleeping during most of the night is. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PRAYERS.

And Gracie . . . well, I'm not sure what to say. Her bones are healing great, pain-free, but her soft tissue near the ball of her foot is still really painful and somewhat swollen. We've been told it will take weeks for that to heal. She continues to wear the protective boot, and she's a very brave, uncomplaining girl! Cheetah Speed goes everywhere tucked under her arm to help her thrive in life on crutches. 

The kids are off for summer break, and we'll all take a week-and-a-half off in late June/early July. Looking forward to it!! They'll go into 4th grade (Seth into 3rd) in late July.

I can't believe Isaac is a SENIOR in High School! We are so proud of him and grateful for who God is making him. 

Love to all, with gratitude again for your prayers and concern,

Carrie

Getting ice cream at our store. (It's hard to get good pictures when you have goofy kids. Will's facial expression got him cropped out of the photo!)

Gracie Update

So the story over the weekend has changed a bit. We've gotten some opinions from orthopedic surgeons both in the US and Australia and there is less concern than there was initially. While they do see two fractures in the bones, they don't see displacement or separation in the soft tissue. They want to keep Gracie in the boot that she's currently wearing and monitor the pain. If things don't improve by the end of this week, then we may move on to the next plan.

In exciting news for her, Cheetah-Speed was returned!  A PNG kid who found the stuffed animal brought her by as soon as he saw the missing signs that Carrie had put up. He didn't want the reward either, but said we should use the money to help Gracie! She is so encouraged! Thank you as always for your prayers!

Pray for Gracie, please!

We are celebrating the fact that Carrie returned from Australia on Thursday last week. It's been great to have the family back together.

Unfortunately, the day Carrie left (May 13), Gracie had an accident on the playground. A heavy wooden seesaw with several kids on it fell onto the top of her left foot when the kids on the other end of the seesaw quickly got off. It was pinned under there for a while before the kids realized what happened and got off. Initially, the X rays didn't seem to show any problem and we expected the pain to reduce, but over a week later she is still on crutches and the pain is not subsiding. 

She’s in agony anytime her foot gets bumped or she falls. She put weight on it accidentally this morning when her crutches tripped on something, and she said it felt like a needle was coming up through the bottom of her foot. She has excruciating pain top and bottom, all the way through the thickness of her foot. Repeat x-rays comparing both feet were sent to a specialist radiologist friend of our doctor here, and he’s the one who saw the issue.

She's smiling, but that's Gracie! She's in a lot of pain.

He has determined that she has a Lisfranc fracture and it needs to be addressed immediately with surgery and likely pins/screws into the bones (the procedure is called an anatomical reduction). If it is not taken care of, she would likely be lame for the rest of her life. Even afterwards, it sounds like the recovery is long (six months to a year) and sometimes is even then never completely healed.

We hope to get an appointment set up ASAP in Australia and then Carrie will turn around again and go back to Australia with Gracie. We don't know at all at this point how long she will be there or really any other details with the timeline, so please pray that all falls into place quickly.

A secondary prayer request is about Cheetah-Speed, Gracie's beloved stuffed cheetah, to be with her. In the chaos when she was injured, the stuffed animal was left behind and then stolen. We've tried hard to find her and have her returned, but to no avail and Gracie is pretty heartbroken. We know the Lord is always with her, but a tangible and familiar comfort would be hugely appreciated - a replacement identical cheetah won’t be as loved and worn and known as Cheetah-Speed. As silly as it might sound, Cheetah Speed being returned would be a huge blessing to help Gracie through this. She gets quite nervous, although she’s a real trooper!

Marcie and Gracie together. Gracie with her ever-present Cheeta-Speed.

Thanks for praying for the rest of us kids left behind again. We are really sad to lose our wife/mom again so soon, and we are all are concerned for Gracie. I just can’t get away from work and with Carrie being the more "medical one” in our family it makes more sense for her to go. Plus, she will get to sleep at sea level! (her sleeping issue started again a few nights ago, but it wasn't an issue when at sea level in Cairns.)

Thanks for all the love and prayers and tangible help for our family!

Update from Carrie

 Thank you all so much for praying! My sleep study on Saturday showed terrible sleep (90 minutes total in lab conditions - those wires are awful!) but I have no apnea or heart, lung, brain, airway issues or anxiety during sleep. I mentioned today to the doctor that my “air hunger” awakening and resulting agitation has only been an issue at 5,000 feet altitude (where we live). He suspects this is a post COVID syndrome/symptom and should get better in 2-3 months from now (4-5 months from having COVID). He assures me it WILL go away. I just hope and pray that it happens SOON, and in fact, that it doesn’t come back at all. I’m relieved that I don’t need a machine for the rest of my life, although I was a bit disappointed that I can't go back with a “sure” fix. We really appreciate your prayers for grace and strength and sleep. I’m looking forward to getting home to my family!

Again, thank you all so much for your thoughts and prayers. I should be back in PNG with my family on Thursday night.

In Christ,

Carrie

Time-sensitive prayer request for Carrie

Hi friends and family, 

 Ever since Carrie had COVID a couple of months ago she's had increasingly debilitating sleep issues, specifically not breathing during sleep and waking up desperately air hungry. It fits a number of different possible diagnoses, but after a couple of appointments and various unsuccessful treatments/medications, our missionary doctors here say the next step is to get a sleep study. We tried to book weeks ago through one hospital in Australia, but they were really backed up. Just this week, after a particularly scary night for Carrie, the Lord provided an alternate sleep clinic and specialist to see her in Cairns THIS COMING WEEKEND. Please pray for all of this to come together if it's the Lord's will. Traveling during COVID is complicated! Even though the borders have opened there are so many more boxes to tick and ducks to get in a row. We deeply appreciate prayer that the sleep study and follow up appointment with the sleep specialist doctor will yield answers and solutions. We also appreciate prayer for Gavin as he stays with the kids and is in one of the busiest seasons of heli flying he's ever had. Life is already fairly overwhelming (though we both LOVE our jobs/ministry/community here!) as the end of the school year approaches. Please pray for peace and joy for the kids, and patience with each other and their dad. :)

Isaac MC'ing the high school talent show. How is our baby now the Master of Ceremonies?!

Seth in real Civil War reenactment uniform thanks to "Uncle" Daniel

Sunrise service on Easter

Doing a line dance at school just to embarrass the kids!

Michael Harrar, a friend from way back in Colombia days and now again in PNG, drawing for the crowds while using the heli skids or a canoe as his bench. Gavin and he had a whirlwind trip all last week visiting many ongoing language, translation and Scripture use projects!

Traditional outrigger canoe at sunset

The only thing Gavin likes less than coffee: hot clam juice!

And just for fun - Isaac photo-bombing poor Marcie and Mom with a goofy face.