Wayumi

We just returned home after a week in Jersey Shore, PA, at New Tribes Mission’s Wayumi campus with our entire senior class here at NTBI. 

Wayumi is a unique place…it is basically an overseas/tribal missions experience without actually having to go overseas. It introduces people of all ages to many different facets of tribal missions: culture, language learning, team-forming and building, and everyday life in the tribe. The staff people who work there were all overseas missionaries in the past, so they have real-life stories and experiences to share. 

We learned so much from them over the past week, and it made us more excited than ever to be a part of what God is doing in the world right now to bring people from every language group into the Bride of Christ.

It was also just a FUN week…really, a vacation of sorts! While we sat under 4-5 hours of teaching each morning, some awesome ladies played with and took care of our kids outside on the gorgeous mountain-side property. We also had all of our meals cooked for us, and the food was delicious. And we got to spend tons of quality time with the other students in our class from NTBI!

Here are some highlights from our week…

The drive was about eight hours long to get there, and our kids did awesome. We’re so thankful for their flexibility as travelers…they will need it as MK’s!

When we got there, we were assigned a room. All of the different “wings” had continent names.

We were in South America,

and our room was called Mexico! All week Ivy kept saying, “We live in Mexico!” :)

Aaron and I pulled two bunk beds together to make our bed,

and our three kids all slept in the same room for the very first time! They did awesome!! They slept just as good as they do here at home. 

Here’s the classroom where we were taught each morning,

and this is a building called the “Tab,” where we heard from some of the different missionaries each evening.

Two afternoons, we were led into Wayumi’s “village,” to try to learn some language from real tribal-language-speaking people. It looked, smelled, sounded, and felt like we were really in a jungle village. It was incredibly daunting but also pretty fun to try to learn some language in much the same way we will be doing in a few short years overseas.

We ate all of our meals in the dining hall,

and the kids played outside most of the day every day! 

We took some walks up the mountain to Wayumi’s jungle camp,

and Aaron and some of the other guys slept up there in hammocks one night.

The kids tried the hammocks out too one evening, but they were a little unsure about them.

One afternoon, most of the people in our class went on a hike about an hour away from Wayumi. I stayed back with my kids, but Aaron went and got some pictures along the hike.

On Thursday, we prepared a traditional Papua New Guinea Mumu. First we (I’m using “we” loosely here…I actually didn’t do any of it…but most of our classmates participated!) killed the pig. In PNG, it would normally be a wild boar. (I'm sparing you most of the pictures here...)

Then we skinned it and began cutting up the meat.

We then put it into the ground with cut vegetables all day long and let it cook on hot rocks.

Israel was hot and tired while we were watching the meat be put into the ground. Poor little boy!

Then we ate it for supper! It was delicious. And it was definitely a new cultural experience for us to see something alive in the morning, and be eating it that evening. That’s something that we are pretty removed from here in America.

Aaron played some interesting games outside with the other guys in our class…like this bizarre game called buck-buck.  Basically one team tries to hold together as the “horse.”

The members of the other team run and jump on the horse one at a time as the “riders.”

The horse tries to hold all the weight without breaking. It was quite humorous to watch!

We had bonfires a few of the evenings with our classmates…it was an awesome time to talk about what we were learning and just hang out together.

We were very blessed by all of our classmates’ love for our children. They all helped us out a lot throughout the week!

It was by far one of our favorite weeks ever.

We loved Wayumi and would highly recommend it to anyone. The weeks in the summer are reserved for high school groups (Aaron and Nathan are taking a group there in June!), but there are weeks and weekends in the spring and fall that are open to anyone—young people or adults. You could read more about it at www.wayumi.com.