NCLA.........?

This week, starting Monday morning we will begin our official NCLA (national culture and language acquisition). It is a program set up by those who have gone before us that will help us to acquire pidgin and understand the culture here. This first week will be mostly reading, then starting the 2nd week we will begin going out into the surrounding area to find people willing to help us learn pidgin and answer a lot of questions about their culture. We feel like we have a good jump start since we have been here almost a month now and have already picked up some basics about the language. The man in charge of NCLA has been on furlough the last year and just arrived back here a week ago, that is why we had to wait and extra week before starting.
We have been helping out in the administration building this last week, Matt helped in construction building bins and work benches for tribal supply, and Christine helped move the library to it's new location along with cleaning and organizing some things. It was nice to get out and do some physical activity and we got to work along side some of the national workers. Some of these workers will end up being language helpers for us.

Here is a picture of our first meal at the neighboring village of Tagog.





















































We enjoyed our meal and hopefully have made some new friends to help us learn this new language.