There are four SIL hostels in Ukarumpa, and each hostel has a name. Dorelo, Townsend, and Teen Manor share a common yard area. Rama (sp?) is about a quarter-mile away up the hill from the other three. There are also at least two other, non-SIL hostels which are operated by other mission organizations on the SIL facility. Dorelo, Amie and Charlie’s hostel, is the oldest of the hostels.
There is a large front porch with a door into an entrance foyer, where all shoes are removed and left. To the right from the foyer is the entry into a large recreation room, with a ping pong table, computers for the hostel kids, small desks to work on, a small library, and a piano. There are windows between the rec room into the living room.
The entrance to the rest of the house is to the left from the entrance foyer. The foyer leads into the dining room, which is open to the living room on the right. In the living room there is a fireplace, which is the only heat in the house. Straight ahead out of the entrance foyer, the dining room is separated from the fairly large kitchen by a counter. They have a double sink, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a gas stove (which is in need of repair or replacement.) A large water filter is mounted on the sink to provide potable water. A pantry with a second refrigerator is to the right of the kitchen. Past the pantry through a door is a hallway. To the left is the laundry area and a half-bath.
To the right past the pantry are the entrances to one of the hostel student’s bedroom hallways and to the family quarter. The family quarters consists of a small office with a bed where Krista sleeps during school term, a small family room with TV and desk. Off the family room is the small master bedroom with bath, and straight ahead is another bedroom where the four younger Brown children sleep. During our visit, Cindy and I stayed in this bedroom.
Off this hostel student hallway, there are two 2-person bedrooms and a bathroom, where the Brown children stayed during our visit. This hallway, parallel to the family quarters, is normally the “girls’ wing.” The bathroom has separate small rooms for the toilet and the tub/shower, with two sinks and a linen closet in the main room. This allows several people to use the bathroom at same time for those busy mornings as they get ready for school.
Off of the living room is another hallway with two 2-person bedrooms and a 1-person bedroom, plus a bathroom similarly laid out to the on in the other hostel student wing. This wing is normally the “boys’ wing.” In addition there is a 2-person bedroom in the hallway behind the pantry, which isn’t part of any of the other residential wings. Anyone staying in this room will use the bathroom in one of the other wings, depending on whether they’re male or female.
This provides a hostel capacity of 11 students plus the family quarters. The family quarters are really too small for the Browns, so if they stay in Dorelo, they expect to move their children in with students as they reach the normal age for hostel students, 13 or 14.
The large yard includes a garden with many banana trees, a ’haus wind’ – a PNG-design shed with a thatched roof – which has a platform in which the boys are planning on sleeping, a basketball court, sauna, and exercise building. These last three items are built in their yard, but have common by membership fee for Ukarumpa residents. There is also a “golf course” – an area with three small golf greens on it. The house, and all of Ukarumpa, is surrounded by many flowers as well.
Normally there are 6 to 9 students in the hostel during the school term, but during part of this past term one of the other hostels’ parents had to evacuate to Cairns for medical reasons, and their students were split between the other hostels. Dorelo isn’t the largest of the hostels, so during that period they had 10 students, plus the 7 Browns, for 17 people in the household.Water comes from two sources. There is “ram water” which comes from a river. There was a dispute over the pipeline carrying this water into Ukarumpa recently, but I’ll probably go into more detail on that in another post. This water apparently gets some filtration or chemical treatment, but is not considered drinkable without further purification. This is the water that goes into the hot-water system at the house.
There is also a cistern at each home in Ukarumpa, which collects rain water off of the roofs. This water is what goes into the cold-water system, and is considered more potable – the Browns will brush their teeth in it, but typically don’t drink it without running it through the filter first. An example Ukarumpa cistern system is shown here; this is not Dorelo.
Hot water seems to be a point of minor tension. Electricity is somewhat expensive, so there are solar water heaters on the roof each house, with reservoir tanks also on the roof. Where there are 17 people living in a hostel, and several of them take showers in the evening, there can be no solar hot water available in the morning until the sun has been out for a while. When it’s been cloudy or rainy, there is no solar hot water available. Each hostel has a budget to meet, and if they go over budget in food or utilities, the overage comes out of the personal account of the hostel parents. That makes turning on the “boosters” – the electric water heater – can be a stressful action for those responsible for the budget. During our visit, we had hot water most of the time, but there were only 9 of us in the house, and Cindy and I were particularly cautious about excess hot water usage. Cindy made a special sacrifice in that she’s only had one bath while here, using the shower at other times. That is especially noteworthy when you realize that neither Tree Tops nor Jais Aben had bathtubs in our rooms.
Trash is separated into food scraps, which are dumped into a compost pit near the garden, burnable trash, which is not supposed to be put into the rubbish, and non-burnable, non-decomposable trash which is picked up regularly (weekly, I think) and taken to a landfill outside the fence, south of the village. On trash day there is a crowd at the dump, and they descend on the refuse when a load is dropped off to see if there is anything salvageable from the Ukarumpa trash.There is not a “city” sewerage system; each house has a septic tank. It appears that the toilets empty into the septic tank, and grey-water from the kitchen sink, and possibly from the bathtub, is simply drained into a convenient spot. For Dorelo, that’s out onto the hillside just above the garden; I noticed others draining into the roadside ditches.
Electricity comes from the public grid, with backup generators for emergency use, although I suspect those generators are probably just for key official buildings, rather than for the entire SIL facility. Charlie reports that the electricity has been quite reliable, possibly due to the proximity to the hydro-electric facility at nearby Yonki Dam.
What an adventure you’re having! Isn’t it mind-opening to experience other cultures and to try to comprehend that we all belong to the same human family and same world?
Thank you for your post. It was SO informative. We are planning to go to Ukarumpa as SIL boarding home parents, hopefully in the next few months.
You are very welcome, Michael. Thanks for the kind comment. God bless you for your willingness to serve in that important part of the Bible translation effort for Papua New Guinea. Amie and Charlie are here in the States at the moment; you folks may be arriving there about the time they are returning.