By Nikki Wheeler, NZCMS Mission Partner in Papua New Guinea 

Kia Ora whanau

We have entered our final months and are able to count in weeks now before we leave this place. There is much we will miss. I sit here looking out at all the coconut trees and the sound of people scrap­ing coconuts and chop­ping fire­wood to cook their dinner. There are crick­ets prais­ing God for the night that is coming and the fruit bats are start­ing to swoop around. We will miss the peace and the vast­ness of the jungle. We will not miss the fruit bats. One snuck through a small gap in our window wires the other night to eat our bananas and it made such a racket! For­tu­nately, it was gone by the morning – not sure if it escaped or the cat got him.

We’ve had a lot going on in Kapuna in the last few months as usual and Scott and I have been focus­sing on our han­dover strategies. There are many pro­jects con­tinu­ing – sus­tain­able toilet designs for sur­round­ing vil­lages, house build­ing for new teach­ers, the “Days For Girls” project making san­it­ary packs. There was a dis­tri­bu­tion of these packs to the Kapuna School kids, the stu­dents train­ing in the Com­munity Health Worker train­ing school, and new mothers in the hospital.

An excit­ing project Scott has managed to get across the line — after 15+ months of plan­ning — for both Kapuna and Kikori hos­pital (Kikori Hos­pital is four hours upriver from us) is the drilling of a deep well. This will allow the patients and the staff at both hos­pit­als to have access to fresh clean drink­ing water all year round. There have been pre­dic­tions of droughts coming to these parts in the coming years.

Earlier in the year I shared photos of little toilet huts hanging over the water’s edge, the same river water people use to wash their clothes and use for cooking and drink­ing. This deep well will help avoid the use of the river water or ‘pek pek wada’ as we say here which means ‘poo water’.
The well digging was suc­cess­ful in Kikori and people are coming from sur­round­ing vil­lages to get fresh water that is repor­ted to taste amazing.

The excite­ment was palp­able here when the well was getting dug. The major­ity of the kids at the hos­pital have never seen a car before, let alone a tractor! There are no roads in our part of the jungle and canoes and dinghies are the only mode of trans­port other than your feet. This is the first wheeled vehicle ever in Kapuna!

There have been some chal­lenges and broken parts that have hindered the drilling process but the team are still here working to find water – down 45m at this stage.

Watch the arrival of the rig with the tractor on it here.

Scott was asked by Gulf Chris­tian Ser­vices (GCS) to be on their Exec­ut­ive Team about a year ago. They asked Scott and me a while ago to extend our stay here. There are many ways in which we could con­tinue to serve and so it has been a decision long chewed over. Our decision was always to be a ‘Family on Mission’ and although there have been many won­der­ful things our chil­dren have exper­i­enced and learnt here that we will always be grate­ful for, school­ing has always been a chal­lenge and we know it is now time to focus more on sup­port­ing their edu­ca­tional needs in pre­par­a­tion for High School.

We will return to NZ at the end of this year as planned but we are working with GCS and NZCMS on how Scott can con­tinue to support Kapuna and Kikori Hos­pit­als to help with their man­age­ment teams’ devel­op­ment and growth. We hope we will be able to engage with devel­op­ment part­ners to con­tinue to invest in this place and the people. The ulti­mate goal is for GCS to be self-sus­tain­able with local people running all entit­ies and func­tions, however, there is a gap cur­rently where more train­ing is needed. Scott will con­tinue to journey with them over the next year or two until they can release him with con­fid­ence in their self-management.

There is a Papua New Guinean national from the Sepik Province whom I have been train­ing to hand over the shop manager role, a shop that is the revenue-gen­er­at­ing centre of Kapuna, helping to support the school, hos­pital and min­istry activ­it­ies. This has been going well overall – he is a young guy with a big role to fill, so please pray for Daniel as he looks after this position.

A final high­light to share with you all is the Piggery! Some of you gave very gen­er­ously to the idea of buying and caring for Pigs to raise money to support the Kapuna Life School. Pigs are a form of cur­rency in PNG – used in Bride Price cere­mon­ies and bought and given as signs of respect and also a great source of meat protein at special events. They end up costing a lot to buy at the end of each year for Christ­mas cel­eb­ra­tions, so we came up with the idea of buying a few piglets to raise and sell to support the school. This small busi­ness idea will hope­fully teach the chil­dren a bit about invest­ing money, as well as caring for animals, cov­er­ing school fees for some chil­dren and could also con­trib­ute to teach­ers’ salaries.

Thank you to those who sup­por­ted this – it is the first project of its kind in Kapuna.

Thank you for all our support and prayers for us and Kapuna. This has been a more chal­len­ging season than the ones before but it is a bless­ing to be so deeply a part of the com­munity that we are involved at all levels, warts, warfare and all.
We will be back with our fam­il­ies in time for Christ­mas with a brief period of respite in Aus­tralia on our way through where we will process what has been and what is to come. We look forward to catch­ing up with you all again.

We’ll be at New Wine in January for those who will be there, oth­er­wise, we will be around your church to share more details and answer ques­tions once the kids have settled back into school in February.

Airu (peace)
Nikki and Scott, Isaac, Abby and Levi Wheeler