Some Setaman Pictures

The Setaman area survey was more difficult and more full of adventure than I expected. Here are a few pictures from the survey...

We flew in a small plane, a Cessna 206. I am so thankful for the incredible pilots and mechanics who made our trip possible! On the way out, we couldn't land where we wanted to because of cloudy weather, so we ended up at this beautiful airstrip. The pilot spent the night in the village with us, planning to fly us to our destination the next day. But the next morning we had a mechanical problem with the plane, so another plane flew a mechanic out to fix the plane and take us to our destination...

Selbang village! We landed in the afternoon and spent the evening doing our work - taking phonetic word lists and interviewing groups of people about their language and lifestyle.

Can you see me in the middle of this picture? Juliann and I are sitting on the ground, checking a phonetic word list that I transcribed the night before.

Then we hiked! And boy did we hike! The first day we hiked 11 hours, the last 2 hours being in the dark and pouring rain. It was the most difficult hike I've ever done - through mud, up and down mountains, slippery tree roots and logs and...

This vine bridge! I actually enjoyed making my way across this bridge over a tributary of the famous Fly River. The bottom of the bridge is about four vines running together, with a thick vine handhold running along each side.

We spent two nights in this fairly typical house. The area is cold enough that every home has a fire pit in the middle. It's used for cooking food over the fire and in the ashes, and the family sleeps around it to keep warm at night.

Women in the area make bilums (traditional string bags) out of natural fiber. This woman gave me a bilum she had made as a gift of friendship.

People provided us food everywhere we went - kaukau, yam, cassava and greens. Kaukau (pronounced cow-cow) is a kind of sweet potato. Eating the same food at every meal was difficult, but I was thankful that people freely shared their food with us.

When we were hiking, our guides heard trees rustling and were immediately hunting! They shot this big kapul (tree kangaroo?) and sent someone ahead on the trail to cook it for us. When we got to a certain place on the trail, we stopped and had kapul liver, kapul meat and kaukau. It tasted very gamey, but gave us protein to help us continue on our (second) 11 hour hike!

Juliann, Bonnie and I with some friends in Ngisogabip village. There was an airstrip about a 30 minute hike away. Since the weather was cloudy the first three days we were there, the plane wasn't able to come get us. We were supposed to go home on Friday, but didn't leave until the following Monday!

Thanks for all of your prayers for us during the survey!