The Land of the Unexpected

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PNG News #9: Papua New Guinea- The Land of the Unexpected
(January 26, 2004)

For the same reason that Sheryl (a church volunteer and the president’s secretary) was advised not to give strands of her hair to a fellow soccer player, new students to the university don’t want to give you their names. If you don’t know my name, it means you don’t know me, and therefore you could cause harm to me. If someone has Sheryl’s hair, they could put a spell on her and again cause her harm. Imagine me a foreigner walking around with a bold name tag: HELLO MY NAME IS: at the same time as nationals not wanting to share their names. This is how it feels to me out of step with my environment.
The land of the unexpected, Air Niugini’s most recent motto, sums up my experience in this exotic natural environment where life teams.

The white western
Because of my New Years’ scraped foot on coral, the next Saturday morning at 8:30 am I went to see Greg at ChemCare. Infections thrive in the tropics. Gregory is a young Australian pharmacist. How did I know he was Australian? It could have been his white knee high socks and skin, his goatee, or was it his confidence? I was in line with a half dozen other whites with infection concerns. Greg had me double my doxycycline that I take to prevent malaria.
Unfortunately that did not kill the infection, my ankles were so swollen I was walking PNG style, barefoot in the Australian airports. I am now on another regime of antibiotics and finally I am healed.
Expect the unexpected. Anything is possible here…and most times this means something breaking down. My TV has stopped working, the classrooms are not ready for school to start tomorrow morning, and power was off all yesterday. The president’s brother brought a tractor from Poland that was immediately broken by mishandling. The truck helping to deliver the evicted settlers hit a river and broke down.
Oddly to me, people don’t typically know what year they were born, nor do they care. And if you are looking to buy a car, no one ever mentions the year of the car, only its colour, which is usually white. The word on the street is to buy your vehicle from an ex-pat as they would have taken care of it.


The spiritual quest
The land is where spirits live and some spirits determine the fate of clan members. Land is not a commodity, it is where your umbilical cord is buried and where you will return.
Land is owned by the clan. Individual clan members have rights to use the land. Land is never to be traded as a commodity. People identify themselves through land. It is from the land that people obtain most of their resources including cultural, religious symbols and aesthetic values.
The Constitution of PNG recognizes both the state and customary owned land. In the mining act 1977 the right of ownership of copper, gold and minerals are vested in the state. This means the landowners (the clans) own only the top soil which I think includes the ancestral spirits. The government owns all the mineral rights.
Now common sense is not always the way to think about things, sometimes we must think bigger in order to come up with solutions using the wider expanse of human wisdom. I may be falling prey to my arrogant human bias for common sense. In my pursuit to see the ‘here and now’ and search for the right short term solutions, I may be short-sighted failing to the wider picture. Perhaps I need a wide angle lens?

Land issues account for much political jockeying.

PNG - News - Keeping the status quo?
(February 2, 2004)

At the swimming resort a couple of days ago I was telling Christine, you remember the young beautiful Austrian volunteer, that my life was a lot like the tree kangaroo that we were watching pacing back and forth in a cage. For every step forward there is one step back. I spent many hours searching for the arm of my glasses that broke in the dark the other night. Then I needed to get a friend to take the glasses to Port Moresby to get them fixed. No one wears glasses in Madang except ex-pats.

Christine said she knew just how I felt. She slept over at her boyfriend’s house a couple of weeks ago and put her contact lens in a glass of water before falling asleep. Kevin, an Australia builder, woke up thirsty and drank the glass of water dry and went off to work. Christine couldn’t drive herself home, because she couldn’t see and had only one phone number memorized. That colleague was already at work. Finally she found her lover’s business card and managed to decipher the numbers. She phoned his work requesting that he phone home. This week she lost her reading glasses at the beach.

Keeping the status quo is an important theme in understanding what we are doing here. Development suggests a linear progression. Towards what? There is an amazing amount of money, time and effort put into PNG and guess what, it is worse off now that it was fifteen years ago. And maybe the west is partly to blame.

“Imagine a society where there is no hunger, homelessness or unemployment, and where in times of need, individuals can rest assured that the community will make available to them every resource at its disposal. Imagine a society where decision makers rule only when the need arises, and then only by consultation, consensus and the consent of the community. Imagine a society where women have control over their production and reproduction, where housework is minimal and child care is available 24 hours a day on demand. Imagine a society where there is little or no crime and where community conflicts are settled by sophisticated resolution procedures based on compensation to aggrieved parties for damages, with no recourse to concepts of guilt or punishment. Imagine a society in which the mere fact that a person exists is a cause for celebration and a deep sense of responsibility to maintain and share that existence.”

“First colonizers found over 1,000 distinct societies; the majority approximated the above in their own particular way. With development real gains eroded, all the original problems got worse and now we have new imported problems.”

Nick Faradas, 1997 Critical Literacy Control in the New World Order, UPNG From a book entitled The Hubris of Global Economics.

I just couldn’t bring myself to bore you to death about Cabinet Meetings, Academic Board Meetings, Resumption of Duties Week, Orientation, University Council, the University relationship with the SVD order, and the Catholic Higher Education Association. The work of the colonizers. The cool thing is that each meeting has such interesting people from all over the planet. One really wonders if we are actually understanding each other’s use of the language.

You, my dear readers, are the only people with whom I can complain about the heat, and the excess of bananas.

PNG - News - Not so common sense
(February 9, 2004)

Please keep in mind that the reason that I am writing these emails is to help me to unpack my experiences and thoughts. My hesitancy in sending you, dear reader, what follows, stems from a concern I have that I will negatively influence your current support to foreign aid. Foreign aid is more than building bridges.

Today began with a meeting at the Lutheran School of Nursing. You may wonder about a Catholic University’s affiliation with Lutheran College. It’s government direction. The nursing school was to start its Bachelor of Nursing in Midwifery this week however the Council of Nursing is pulling a power play and is saying that it won’t register the graduates. The school must modify the curriculum in order to follow the national framework that doesn’t exist! The phone bills have not been paid so we can’t even send them a fax.
On our return to campus, Brother Andrew, VP Academic - not an academic and not Polish but Australian dropped into Modilon Campus, a newly amalgamated college consisting of two paramedical programs. The campus has an amazing location at the ocean’s edge. There is swimming access however like most of Madang it is rocky shoreline, rather than sand.

The buildings go on and on. Like most PNG schools there are “boys’ and “girls” dormitories, even though most of the students are over 20 years old. There are squatters in the dormitories, as in non-paying and non-students. The university is attempting to enforce the rule that this year only paying students can board. One of the six computers was stolen last night and the staff believe it to be an inside job- a disgruntled non-paying student.

The administration building, with gaping holes in the walls from white ants, should be condemned. Ironically they teach health inspectors at this campus. Most of the buildings are positively scary. They don’t dismantle the old building- just leave them for the ants. However there are some more recently constructed concrete buildings- World Health 2000 and AusAid 2001. The AusAid 2001 building has a wonderful view of the ocean, unfortunately the key was lost just after completion and it has never been opened! And then there is the library with no books.
The university is also waiting to take over other oceanfront land. Father Jan, the Polish priest president for the last 6 years is actually a trained architect, and development to him is buildings.
To top off Wacky Wednesday, we had a brief meeting with two US and two PNG volunteers from a Lutheran NGO called Kristus. The New Yorker wants his State University of New York to affiliate with DWU, providing all their online courses. This, after having no power at the Lutheran School meeting so that we could not photocopy crucial documents.
Dinner tonight a friend who works for the European Union told us about the project he is working on. They built boats, and are teaching individuals to take care of them. Midstream in the project they are switching focus to fish farms!

Now common sense is not always the way to think about things, sometimes we must think bigger in order to come up with solutions using the wider expanse of human wisdom. I may be falling prey to my arrogant human bias for common sense. In my pursuit to see the ‘here and now’ and search for the right short term solutions, I may be short-sighted failing to the wider picture. Perhaps I do need that wide angle lens.

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Photos

Children lined up
Outside of missionary school

Leader on mountain top
Top of Mount Wilhelm