Hello again! Selamat Hari Natal as they say here. It means something like happy Christmas day. We had a very slow week because of the holidays. We had a nice dinner with the Koens family on the 24th. Otherwise we had some very quiet days. It rained a lot here this week which was great for the temperature, but not so great for the kids. Thankfully we were able to borrow someone's laptop and let the kids watch some videos.
It is interesting to observe the local perception of Christmas. We wrote last week about the music booths everywhere. Well, after looking at a lot of them one realizes that there is no distinction made between Christmas as the birth of Christ and Christmas and Santa. Many booths will have a religious term written on them such as Maranatha and beside that there will be a Santa.
Here in Sentani it is the time of year for fire crackers. They are for sale everywhere and people are setting them off at all times of the day. We purchased some to set off on New Years. From what we understand, not much is done locally for New Year's Eve. We plan to show them how the Dutch do it with their fireworks.
On Saturday we got the neighbour girls to babysit and went to Jayapura and Abe with Marc. Now that Erica had already been the Saturday before, she knew where to go. Again we had a lot of people commenting on the fact that we had a baby in a selendang. They find it very interesting to see westerners using them. A selendang is a large piece of fabric that you fashion over your shoulder and in front of your body in such a way as to carry a baby or even a toddler. Very handy and simple to use. We had a productive visit and acquired some of those last minute things that we wanted to take back home. That evening we went to Mickey's, the local restaurant, for supper with the Koen's and the Dehaans from Boma. The DeHaan's are on their way through Sentani to go to Singapore and then on to Holland. We should mention that Mickey's has recently completed a renovation and they now have a very nice new ceiling and the tables are sporting new Mickey Mouse table clothes, a vast improvement over the old Teletubby ones.... Another example of Western influence...
We are pleased to report that everyone is feeling much better now. The males of the family still have lingering colds, but are otherwise much improved over last week. We are now preparing to return home and have begun packing our totes and deciding what to leave behind and what to bring back.
We would like to wish you all God's blessings in 2004!
Selamat Hari Minggu!
In His Service,
Hugo and Erica Feunekes