It Was A Relief To Drive A Car That Didn’t Complain About My Driving
We return from Papua New Guinea and begin our furlough.
Backstory
My name is Josh. My wife, Janice, and I moved our family 7,000 miles to a tropical island just north of Australia, a country called Papua New Guinea. We’re living in a town named Wewak on the northern coast where I work with an organization called Samaritan Aviation as an airplane mechanic supporting free medivac flights to the remote villages along the Sepik River. Janice homeschools the kids, helps with financial stuff in the office, and manages the guest house.
In our previous post, we had traveled back to the U.S. to go on furlough and to have a baby. This is our story, as told from my point of view, the grumpy dad.
Welcome To The USA
We flew into Seattle from Malaysia, got off the plane, and walked down the sky bridge. The kids noticed something was different right away.
“Aaah!” They wrapped their arms around themselves and gasped in unison. The temperature was in the forties. They shivered and laughed as fog rolled from their mouth with each breath.
I was less concerned about the cold and more concerned about the next step of traveling; going through customs. I had about 100 pounds of various homemade souvenirs containing wood, bones, soil, and plant products from a South Pacific island. I was hoping some of it would make it through.
First, we picked up five suitcases and my seven foot PVC pipe filled with airplane parts at the luggage carousel. Then we loaded up two luggage carts, and followed the throngs of people winding through the airport, trying to keep our kids from licking handrails or walking backwards up the escalator, or doing anything else strange that would indicate we were smuggling questionable souvenirs into our home country.
We soon reached the customs counter. I had rehearsed some phrases in my head, trying to maintain some sort of honesty without divulging any incriminating information, a skill I learned from my run-ins with authority during my skateboarding days. The agent nodded to us and we walked up to a little iPad mounted on a stick.
“Got any fresh produce?” He asked.
“We have some vanilla beans,” Janice said.
He acknowledged her statement with a slight nod, directing each family member to look into the screen while the automated software took a snap of each of our faces. After we were done, he reached down, swung the little gate open, and motioned us through. We all tried to go through at once and found that five people wouldn’t fit and so we began falling over each other, shoving, and sighing. It worked flawlessly and we found ourselves in a long hallway that led out into the hubbub of the airport.
“Was that it?” I asked Janice, afraid we missed a sign and we’d be tackled as suspected drug traffickers or something.
“I think so!” Janice said.
“It can’t be,” I said, turning around to see if a SWAT team was headed our way.
Janice muttered something about worrying too much and we’d better hurry or we’d miss our connecting flight to Anchorage.
She was right. We missed our connecting flight and then also missed our rescheduled connecting flight, although that was the airline’s fault because the employee they hired stood behind the counter and drooled on themselves for two hours until it was too late. No worries because first thing next morning, fresh from our naps on the cement floor, we boarded the plane to Anchorage.
Alaska
In Anchorage we rented a car for a few days; a brand new hybrid Toyota Sienna. It was a bewildering experience. Janice often tells me that I’m becoming a grumpy old man and sometimes it’s hard to argue with her, though it doesn’t stop me from trying. I hate cars with buttons and screens and sensors and a computer that’s smarter than I am and is eager to complain about my driving. I want a car that will blindly do anything I tell it to without questioning my judgment. I bought it after all. I own it. If I want to drive it into something, that’s my business and the car should just shut up and take it.
Thankfully we soon returned the stupid van. My brother Matt, along with his wife Marlene, drove to Anchorage and picked us up. After finding some espressos for the trip, we drove south around the Turnagain arm (Captain Cook named this inlet this way because it has many turns) for about three hours until we reached the Soldotna area where Matt’s family lives.
We met Brooklyn, our newest niece, a couple months after she was born. I guess it’s better late than never, as they say. She wasn’t too talkative yet but Hannah, her three year old sister, seems to love talking. That’s what happens when you’re the ninth child; you learn to speak up.
One of our supporters let us stay in their log cabin AirBnB and so now we had some beds and somewhere to stack our suitcases, we just needed wheels.
Fortunately we didn’t have to rent any new fangled automobiles. Instead, we borrowed a SUV from a missionary family we knew in the area. If you borrow a car from a missionary, you can safely assume it’s not going to be a brand new Toyota Sienna. This was a Tahoe and a retired police car, so it was used to ramming things without questioning the driver’s decision to do so. I didn’t need to ram anything, but it was a relief to drive a car that didn’t complain about my driving. Janice already does that, especially that time I forgot (only temporarily) that we weren’t supposed to drive in the left lane like they do in Papua New Guinea and we found ourselves careening down the road towards oncoming traffic.
The “Furlough Fifteen” Begins
In missionary circles, there is a phrase thrown around that describes the fifteen pound weight increase a missionary typically experiences when he goes home for a short amount of time and doesn't see any good reason not to eat all the food he has missed for so long. This is referred to as the “furlough fifteen.” Frankly, fifteen pounds is optimistic. It didn’t take long to encounter this phenomenon as Matt excitedly told me about a new bakery in town that made the best baked goods and, coincidentally, he was a part owner of it.
They did have delicious baked goods. And since one of his daughters worked there, there was a pipeline from the bakery to his house.
The Buzz
If you ever find yourself in Ninilchik, Alaska you need to go buy coffee at the Buzz. It’s a little, insignificant looking coffee shack operated by two brothers who seem weirdly happy - a byproduct of making the world’s best coffee, I suppose. While I don’t consider myself a coffee snob (I can enjoy lukewarm Folgers if the occasion calls for it) I’ve been to a lot of places and have tried a lot of coffee. I even drank a cup of coffee while sitting and staring at the plantation it came from, and yet nothing measures up to The Buzz. I don’t know what they do, but they’re doing it right. My admiration of their coffee grew to such an extent that Janice seemed to be getting jealous.
“Why don’t we swing by the Buzz and pick up a cup of coffee?” I casually suggested while pulling out of the Soldotna WalMart parking lot, still sore from the amount of money that I spent on groceries and concentrating far too much on which side of the road I was driving on.
She seemed offended. “Josh! Stop! It’s a forty five minute drive!”
I guess she thought we needed a better reason to drive that far. It was hard to argue with her but I tried my best anyway.
We went fishing, ate baked goods, and generally had a fantastic time in Alaska but after a few weeks, it was time to move on.
Michigan
We packed all our suitcases again and flew from Alaska to Detroit. My brother-in-law, Leroy, picked us up and dropped us off at my mother-in-law’s little farmette in Michigan. Food was everywhere. I couldn’t get it out of my peripherals. I had to go jogging again.
I mentioned before that I have taken up jogging with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner of war digging trenches in a work camp. I took a break from jogging in Alaska, mostly because there were moose everywhere and jogging with a .454 revolver strapped to you is uncomfortable. Getting trampled by moose is more so. Shooting yourself in the foot isn’t as bad but is still inconvenient. Medical care is expensive in Alaska and so for my own health, I decided to skip jogging.
There are no dangerous game in Michigan, so I started jogging around the local roads.
This is when a cultural difference between Papua New Guinea and the United States presented itself.
In Papua New Guinea I typically jog with a small rock in my hand. This way when all the neighborhood dogs start getting mouthy with me, I raise my hand and whip a rock at them. They yelp and run away with their tails between their legs because they understand that when the hand goes up, a rock is coming out. This is the expected way to treat barking dogs. Now, I’m not particularly good at aiming or throwing rocks, but the dogs don’t know that. They don’t intend on sticking around to find out. The owner of the dog isn’t offended that you threw a rock at their dog. They may even throw a few themselves because my rocks probably missed. Bystanders will smile and even applaud for the white man who is adopting PNG customs.
In America, if you throw a rock at a dog, you might as well be throwing rocks at someone’s child. In America you could jog half a mile with a Chihuahua clamped to your ankle and when the paramedics finally arrive to pry it off, the owner, arriving upon the scene, will say something like, “Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s friendly.” And then they’ll take up their little snarling dog in their arms and nuzzle its twitching forehead while saying something like, “Oh moopsy poo, was that man mean to you?” Then they’ll sue you because the dog broke a tooth.
Besides jogging, I also fixed Grandma Detweiler’s zero turn mower. I was test driving it around the yard when Janice ran out of the door and practically drug me off the machine.
“I haven’t mowed a yard in two years, let me mow!” Janice jumped on the zero turn mower, grabbed the two control arms, and pumped them like canoe paddles, performing a joyful two-wheeled ballet around some pine trees and then roared over the horizon. Now I know why the mower never works.
It is weird, the things you miss. Mowing grass. The smell of charcoal and sizzling beef. Mexican food. Driving down an interstate. Owning our own personal minivan.
When we left for PNG in April of 2023, I gave our van, a 2008 Honda Odyssey, to a fellow missionary family who was doing training in the states. I forgot about it. Two years later we were planning on coming back to the States and I was worrying about what van to buy. Then my missionary friend contacted me and told me they were moving to Zambia a month before we came back. He was going to park the van at my parent’s house and we could have it back if we wanted it. We were excited! We had driven all over the States in that van and had a lot of good memories in it. Plus, it was free.
Janice’s brother, who lives close to my parent’s in Pennsylvania, drove it out to Michigan for us. Now we had our own van (which we didn’t have to share), a network of paved roads that stretched thousands of miles from coast to coast (with plenty of bridges that worked just fine), gas stations (which had fuel), and, as far as we were aware, there wasn’t any tribal fighting shutting ro worry about it. We were delirious with freedom!
We hung out with Grandma Detweiler for several weeks and had a great time holding baby chicks, picking potato bugs in the garden, and eating popcorn around the campfire. But it was time to move on to Pennsylvania. We hopped on the 80/90 toll road and headed east.
Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania we stayed at my parent’s AirBnB. We visited people. Grandma and Grandpa Snader spoiled the kids with train rides, baked goods, and toys. I watched the kids play in the creek at my parent’s house, the same one I played in, and thought about the circle of life and how life does go in circles more than we realize, and sometimes going in circles isn’t a bad thing.
It was a good time, but soon it was time to head back west again, to Ohio.
Ohio
MMS Aviation
We kept going southwest until we got to Coshocton, Ohio where MMS Aviation is located. MMS Aviation is a mission organization that fixes missionary airplanes from all over the world. They offer a two and a half year apprenticeship program with the intention of training and supplying airplane mechanics to the mission field. It was through this program that I got my aviation maintenance training. I managed to complete the program on good terms with everyone there and, at the risk of sounding sentimental, I actually missed the folks there pretty badly - especially whenever I found myself in the middle of nowhere, sweating, knee deep in a pile of airplane parts. I often found myself wishing there was someone who was smarter than me telling me, in great detail, what to do.
Many of the supervisors at MMS Aviation served in various mission aviation organizations themselves, and so they know what it’s like.
In that sense, walking back into the hangars after two years on the field was like walking into heaven and being greeted by the cloud of witnesses who went before you. They’ve been there and know what it’s like and so they understand more than most. They all high five you, congratulate you, and laugh with you as war stories are swapped. I think entering heaven will be a similar reunion and I’m looking forward to that.
However, we’re still here on earth so I’ll be volunteering for the next six months in the hangars at MMS Aviation so I keep learning (hopefully) and supporting missions during the process. Over the last two years I’ve realized how little I know. All my bravado left my body when I was sucker punched by workload and culture shock. Like Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Rental House
Another reason we’re staying in Ohio is that MMS Aviation has a guest house available to rent. It’s hard to find short-term rentals and so this was a lifesaver. Our relatives were more than happy to let us use their Airbnb’s but it gets awkward when we stay in them so long that they lose the house because they can’t make the payments.
Baby Blues
Another reason we came to “live” in Ohio is that we’re planning on having our fourth child at the same hospital we had our last. We liked them and they were as affordable as having a child can be.
We still don’t know if we’re having a boy or a girl. Our DIY ultrasound iPod app we used in Papua New Guinea didn’t reveal anything. The nurse at the Papua New Guinea hospital didn’t want to tell us because she was afraid we’d abort the child. The ultrasound tech at the clinic in Port Moresby claimed they couldn’t tell what the gender was before the third trimester. We even tried one of those mail-in genetic tests that claim they can detect the gender as soon as six weeks. It came back inconclusive.
Now originally Janice’s due date was August 7th. However, a few days ago Janice had her first pre-natal appointment here in Ohio and we found out her pregnancy is likely further along than we had thought and the baby could come anytime.
“If you go into labor, we’re not going to stop it,” the midwife said.
An ultrasound is scheduled for next week but if the baby comes before that, we’ll be just as surprised by its gender as anyone else. I guess we’ll finally have to pick a name at that point.
Help make these stories possible. Our family’s mission service in Papua New Guinea is funded entirely by donations. Donations help us fix missionary airplanes, feed our family, and make the Grumpy Missionary Dad less grumpy.
Love your stories!… And your humor! Oh what adventures us missionaries get to go through. Thanks for your updates and ongoing creativity. Love you guys and hugs to you all! Excited to meet the newest Snader Baby❣️🙏🏼👍🏼👍🏼