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Published: September 4th 2005
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Soccer team
One young man from this group told us how the missionaries taught them to wash their hands. PNG - News #10 - Melting ice cubes (February 17, 2004)
How long does it take for my ice cubes to melt?
Less time than it takes to play two hands of bridge. And that is after the sun has set.
Yes, I have finally found four other whites to play bridge:
A New Zealander who has us each take back our card and position it as a winning trick= vertical or losing= horizontal
A cautious Australian who once startled out of her conservatism can really play the game.
A Polish woman who was playing within 20 minutes of being shown.
An English man who has a hard time showing up because he lives off campus and must ride his bike to the university. Recently he has been threatened, someone wants his bike.
Next week we plan to keep score!
Each day I take a shower from warmed rainwater. I then proceed to cover most of my body in 45+ spf sunscreen followed by a light coating of insect repellent. I make my expresso coffee (PNG has fair trade good coffee) and attempt to foam my UTH milk. Some brands seem to foam while others make a few bubbles and
then nothing. Then it becomes a café au lait.
I walk my 700 steps to get to my office with air conditioning and hopefully some emails from home. Only Diver Dan and Helen send me real mail that comes to my pigeonhole in the staff room down the hall. At 10:00 am I walk to the staff mess for coffee break, it is the one time of the day when I can actually be sure to see teaching staff. Sometimes there are homemade cookies or doughnuts, which granted are nothing to write home about, however most times it is bought biscuits. By 10:30 am the walk back to the administration building is oppressively hot. Lunch is either at my house or at the staff mess depending on my sociability and my digestive tract.
I spend my time forging progress into this organization therefore into this culture. If this were a game of soccer, it would begin with “
Culture”
taking the field and scoring some early points. ‘
Progress'
has yet to take the field and offer stiff competition. As halftime in this imaginary game approaches we witness ‘‘
Progress’ ”
making serious in-roads into Culture’s defence! The second half of this contest follows a
Fr. Jan and Meg Taylor
President and Guest Speaker at DWU graduation. predictable course with Progress equalising, taking the lead and ultimately winning handsomely. Culture takes a battering but claims pride in its defeat, perhaps even boasting that the score would have been even more disastrous if a good fight had not been put up against the domination achieved by ‘Progress’. This idea is taken from Charles Benjamin Minister for Lands & Physical Planning, Open Member of Parliament for Manus, PNG.
After playing this game all day, at 5pm I have a juice Popsicle, reapply the insect repellent and bike down Coronation Drive ocean on my right and golf course on my left. If I leave early enough I go for a swim at the pool and then bike home. It is dark by 7:00pm. Oddly our longest day should have been December 21st, however the sun sets a half hour later these days. I am assuming it rises earlier however I have not woken up to check this out.
PNG - News -Single parent? (February 25, 2004)
In a reader of national poetry, one young author used the metaphor that Papua New Guinea is like a single parent.
If PNG is a single parent she has been
on her own since 1975. Her institutional supports of government, NGO’s and church overlap in roles, words and deeds.
Colonialism brought English and neo-colonialism brought only English. CUSO (Canadian University Students Overseas) recently hired a PNG national who had to be sent to pidgin classes as her parent forbade her to ‘tok pisin.’
Meg Taylor, the woman sitting beside the president in the pink lay, the guest speaker at Sunday’s graduation was inspiring. Gifted lawyer, was formerly PNG’s ambassador to the US, and now reports to the president of World Bank Group as the Director, Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman of World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. I spent time with Meg who living in Washington DC, still runs a coffee plantation near Goroka.
Her father was an almost mythical PNG explorer from Australia, and her national mother visited the campus. She calls her mom her advisor on PNG protocols which are truly complex- they are currently negotiating the bride price for her brother’s new wife.
Meg’s speech to the graduates acknowledged the parents’ contribution. The parents were forced to sit near the doors in the heat outside the auditorium. This is PNG -there was not enough
space for them. She also spoke about her generation letting the graduates down. They have not provided them with a vision for the country and now they must create one for themselves.
When Meg Taylor was working with Sir Michael Somare, the first Prime Minister who took the country to independence, (also the current Prime Minister) the schools were using Australian curriculum and teaching girls how to use electric fry pans and make “
toad in a hole.”
This was an ambitious task, as there were only 5 fry pans in the whole country. Twenty-nine years later 85%!o(MISSING)f the population still lives in villages and there are still no fry pans as there is still no power.
If PNG is a single parent she has been on her own since 1975 and is currently struggling. She is having more and more children in a steadily declining environment. PNG has been rated 133 out of 173 of the worst developed countries according to a report on human development by the United Nations. PNG is rich in natural resources but is still rated at 133.
Aid and Dependency Tricky issue this and there has been plenty of angry words spoken about it
in the local press. Australia basically keeps the economy afloat in PNG and part of this aid is spent on education. The problem continues and was something I thought we had gotten past in developing countries. Last year Madang Teachers College got an all singing, all- dancing computer suite provided by AusAid. Very nice you might think. But what it really needs (apart from some more useful basics like new dormitories, a working phtotcopier, and books for a half empty library) is a decent working farm so it could be self sufficient and feed the students properly. These are not glamorous items. AusAid provided the college.
Betty, a national who runs a trout farm near Mount Wilhelm, just returned from visiting her daughter in Mongolia. With a million and a half people and little resources, everyone is getting university education. She didn’t want to return!
This weekend instead of my boat dive tour I will work again, attending a meeting with the Catholic Higher Education Association.
PNG - News -Spelunking (March 4, 2004)
The cave that we were able to walk right through to the end was filled with small birds and hundreds of bats.
The water was cool and the experience totally refreshing.
On the way people were washing their pots, their clothes and themselves.
What better day to end the PNG news out? Travis turns twenty today. I think he is in Florida on Spring Break.
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