Tembagapura... (April 2013)

I like this video.  It's only a little over 3 minutes long (took me like 4 hours and 3 attempts to upload), but it pretty well captures a good flavor of how strange our lives are here:  traveling in and out on helicopters, incredible green rain/cloud forests,  spectacular mountains,  a constant stream of ridiculously large unidentifiable heavy industrial equipment,  groups of Papuans chatting exchanging secrets,  children wandering 'n playing around,  firefighters walking around like they're Rebel X-wing fighter pilots,  my new boss scratching his head...  it's all mixed up and chaotic,  everything is happening simultaneously, overlapping, interacting, disorganized, changing, often sparking conflict.

I wish I could write a poem as good as this video.

I welcome your comments.

Exploring the rainforest

We've been doing some jungle exploration on our days off...

On Wednesday, after the Independence Day celebrations, we tried to find a big waterfall we'd heard about. Instead, we found a weekend getaway camp established by local middle-schoolers.

We followed a little trail up, up, up for about an hour and then gave up. The jungle became too thick and the trail fizzled out. Leslie is standing in the middle of the trail. That's the trail behind her. I would've called it bushwhacking except for the occasional machete cuts and chopped branches we found along the way.