Sunday, Jan 15
Coolest church service ever – just some shade, a wooden table, and a circle of a hundred Papua New Guineans. Awesome worship in Pigen, a testimony, & a message about love, but best of all was prayer afterward. So many people came up for us to pray with them! I had the privilege of speaking their value & our love for those around us (society of constant abuse) and pray for them & their families. This included Sarah, who had gotten surgery on her eyes (11 years blind, now can see!) the day before and an 18 year old in 8th grade (totally normal here). After we played Simon Says (a local favorite) & sang songs until our faces turned red and we boarded the ship to set sail!
Monday, Jan 16

Crazy clinic day in Moim featuring hundred more babies & a giant spider giving birth to thousands more in the middle of our station – not cool. Today I got to not only give the typical vaccines, but learn how to give the not-so-fun TB shots, child well checks, and malaria tests. Although sad to find cases of malaria, it’s even more exciting being able to treat them! Unfortunately our day got cut a liiitle short because of an unfriendly group of canoe-ers our ship might have bumped into causing trouble. A quick evacuation and village meeting to sort things out demonstrated the sound safety of our ship!
Tuesday, Jan 17

Another day, another round of babies and mommies and needles 🙂 Some heartbreak came when we ran out of TB vaccines, which shows how flawed the medical services are considering we bought out the entire supply for the province, plus, at the end of the day still hadn’t finished the lineup of babies before leaving. A little disappointing goodbye, but we can’t forget the amazing memories, smiles (rare after we poke them 4 times), and lives we did protect from those deadly diseases. 
Wednesday, Jan 18

I swear the villages just kept getting cooler! Our first village, Timbunke was “modern”ish (some of the houses had wood siding), Kanduanum had nice grass woven walls, Moim was almost all on stilts, and now Kambaramba huts are basically logs and some grass, with half the village on stilts over the river!! Best feeling ever is when we finished all the babies in the town! We still had a few hours, so they left me to watch the immunizations. Naturally this turned into hours of Simon Says, singing, and duck-duck-goose-extreme-like-game, which gathered practically the whole village to watch the pikaniki (“children”) laugh their heads off! Definitely an unforgettable afternoon!
Thursday, Jan 19

I wanted to try something new today, since it’s our last clinic day, by going to the optometry station. But right off the bat I started crying when I had to tell a girl & her family that “we didn’t have time” to remove a mass/tumor/cyst on her eye (super simple & quick procedure). My heart broke realizing the very curable issues these people live with and questioning why I was born so fortunate with easy access to any procedure or medicine I need. 
Throughout this time on the river, I have seen the awe-inspiring beauty of the Sepik, sometimes feeling like this place is out of a movie, with the hundreds of wide smiled, laughing kids, stories of godly parents, & their crazy remote lifestyle. But then it hits hard when you see their lifestyle of abuse – mothers throwing down kids, fathers smacking mothers (one case of a machete wound from her husband), kids hitting kids – the hopelessness, lack of spiritual joy, and sickness. We all try to celebrate the good parents and the sense of interwoven community these villages have. I can’t even imagine leaving the ship, but am excited for what comes next 🙂 The crew & my team have become inseparable and we are all praying to stay on board a little longer! Answer to prayer: last night we found out we are at least staying till Monday (supposed to leave this morning) and then finding out!

One of the favorite sayings here is “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good!” Even though I still think this saying just repeats itself & isn’t very clever hahaha it’s so true! Love seeing God work in our hearts and theirs!