Tuesday, December 24

I awoke around 1 a.m. hearing shouts that were ending with “-oh!”.  People were moving around, and I saw lots of flashlights bobbing toward the shore.  I thought it might be Kosco, so I woke up Aaron.  He walked down the hill to check, but it was just the young men of the village going fishing for the Christmas feast.
Around 2:00, the Kosco arrived, and Aaron again went down the hill to find Belza so the two of them could go out in a motor canoe to pick up our things from the Kosco.  We were expecting some food for our family's Christmas feast:  a watermelon, some green beans, and eggs.  And one of the grandparents' Christmas boxes had arrived in Honiara, so we were also looking forward to those.  And maybe most importantly, the boxes have a new radio sent by our SITAG friends.  Neither our radio nor our e-mail has worked for the last week.  Sometimes we can get in touch with our colleagues by cell phone, but the signal is weak and using the phone is expensive. 
Aaron returned without any boxes.  One of our colleagues had given our boxes to a friend who was returning to Marulaon for Christmas.  Unfortunately, he arrived at the ship after it was so full that they began to turn away people and cargo.  This time of year, everybody returns to their home village to celebrate Christmas with their families, and the ships are always packed.  So our boxes are still in Honiara, but the Kosco plans to come back our way on December 29. 
Since tomorrow is Christmas, we harvested some more uvikola (cassava) to make lelenga. A cute little spider decided that Benjamin's head was the perfect place to build a new house! Our family is a great team!  The young people of the village also gathered flowers and branches to decorate the church for Christmas.  Our kids all went over to the church to help.  I'd never seen the pillars decorated with coconut branches before.  The spine of the coconut branch went up the pillar on one side, and the fronds were braided together on the other side.

The village is supposed to gather after Evening Prayer and supper for each group to perform Christmas carols.  We think the village has been hearing us sing Christmas carols with our evening devotionals, so now they think we've been preparing an “item” to sing tonight.  We decided to join in the fun and sing “Joy to the World”, “Silent Night” with a beautiful descant the kids learned last year in their children's choir, and “Angels We Have Heard on High”.  Just to add a little lightheartedness, we plan to break into clapping and a little rhythm as we repeat the chorus, “Glo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ria” and march off.