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Published: September 5th 2005
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PNG- News # 12 (April 7, 2004)
Have you ever woken up in a beautiful lodge in the mountains in a foreign tropical rainforest, with large cinnamon trees and found that you were surrounded by people half your age? And you wonder to yourself, why do I feel so culturally maladjusted?
That was Saturday. By dinnertime I felt myself up until I ate the turtle egg. Soft boiled the eggshell felt like a soft ping pong ball and tasted like it had dry specs of shell already formed!
I do not recommend the diet here of kaukau mixed with a can of corned beef over rice with sweet potatoes.
Sunday the eight of us descended this cultivated land in the middle of nowhere.
The 27 kilometre road into the mountains through rivers and small passageways made this truck voyage a roller coaster ride. We had to walk about 6 kilometres and get out and push twice.
Mayou our host cleared the land. He has no phone, his radio isn’t working and it is almost impossible to get to the place. One year he had no visitors. This is eco-tourism in PNG! We were able to get here because Sam
Group of volunteers
Guess which one is the oldest? (the fellow in the middle of the picture in the soccer jersey) works with an ecological NGO. On the way back, Mayou asked how old I was. Yes, this 32 year old’s mother was my age. Why was I with all these young people from Britain and PNG? Good question.
Returning back to campus- the pathway from the administration building past my house to the chapel was decorated with palm branches. Palm Sunday - real palms. Pretty impressive- they were dead and brown by Monday morning. Back to the heat.
Oh yes, some news in, I’ve lost CNN, some sort of disk changeover. I did so like to see the world’s weather each day!
Off to a coffee plantation in the cool Goroka highlands tomorrow.. more adventures next week.
PNG- News # 23 (April 12, 2004)
Okay, have you ever woken up in a colonial home (in PNG) to the smell of freshly baked scones in a wood burning stove (from England), wooden floors and wooden boxes amongst PNG artefacts modern and old? This is the home of the Taylor’s PNG coffee plantation (outside of Goroka) in the Eastern Highlands. The temperature is cool here
and Valia and I are in the mountains sharing Meg Taylor’s home with Cathy who is cooking and entertaining us with stories of the family.
Our first day in Goroka, Sandy (who is a CUSO volunteer with Save the Children) and Doug (her partner also a CUSO volunteer working for the province’s governor) took us second hand shopping and to the Goroka museum. Bales of second hand clothes come from Australia. And the museum had pictures of first contact with Australian whites; including pictures of Meg’s dad, Jim Taylor who was one of the first patrols through the Highlands to Jaya. Cathy’s father, a 10 year old boy at the time carried Jim’s pack and served as a translator.
We met Meg’s mom- Manamb Yerema from Waigi who married Jim at age 15 or 16 (people often don’t know how old they are). The Highlands people’s ancestors are more than 50,000 years old. Meg is Jim’s second child- his first daughter Daisy was born to another national woman.
Cathy took us for a walk through her garden. Gardens here are wide expanses of black earth bearing bananas, passion fruit, citrus, even more superb pineapples, kumu or greens, unusual deep red
purple beans, peppers, sweet potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, onions, corn, fresh peanuts and of course coffee beans. The herbs included thyme, mint, basil, dill. The flowers were often of botanical proportions- patience, marigolds, chrysanthemums, roses, calla lilies and carnations. They filled the house. Eve’s garden couldn’t have been this lush. This property has three houses and the horses are currently being boarded elsewhere. What wealth, what generosity, almost royalty and what a responsibility for wantoks.
If DWU could have the books in the Taylor’s place, we would have a true library. Many early books on PNG are signed by the authors. (And Carol, there is a book Hard Scrabble- Observations on a Patch of Land by John Graves which explains the name of Hard Scrabble Farm on Mayne Island.)
I was hiking for two days in the cool bush- everyone wanted photos of themselves. I don’t think many of them believed what they saw. It is never a waste of time to be outdoors.
It doesn’t get much better than this.
Back to the heat, back to work. Until next week.
PNG- News # 24 April 22, 2004
Shame. Saving face. Relationships. The Melanesian way is different.
I am still reeling from my experience with Kay my tour guide last weekend in the mountains near Goroka.
The experience provides me with new insights into the Highlanders. They are tough, persistent people who don’t mind exerting pressure.
I greeted my guide, when he found me outside the local supermarket, with a present sent from Owen, a colleague of mine at DWU. Kay’s wife had put Owen and his friend up in his guesthouse in the mountains. Owen had told him to look for me, since he has no phone or radio.
Kay wants to set himself up as a tour operator. He is tired of the local operator getting all the money for the tour and giving him a minimal amount. Luckily Kay’s sense of direction is better than his business sense. He took me out one half day, that’s where I took the picture of the Mudman, the leprechaunish man and the man sleeping with a pig. (By the way, I have learned that in the villages many women breastfeed piglets..now I want to get a picture of that!) He ended up charging me money everywhere we went- for the driver, beetlenut for the group,
for the village bigman for sugarcane, money for the roads until I spent my whole K100. ($50) I don’t know why he wanted to pay the driver as we hitched hiked in the dark to get home. We talked about hiking the next day- then he wasn’t home at 7 am when we came to his house. His wife took us for a walk. I had my own security, John and my own driver that day. I paid his wife (k50) and the road people(k20) and he got into the back of our truck with his wife and one of his kids and came back to the house with us. He was not going to leave. He wanted more money. I took a shower and got ready to negotiate his leaving. I shouldn’t have paid him any more money- however I very much wanted to teach him about customer service. It didn’t work. I paid him my last 50 kina (kina are actually oyster shells) saying that if he took it I would be very unhappy, I would tell everyone not to use him and I certainly would not return to hike from Goroka to Madang with him. He chose
that option. Unhappily I claimed that we were finished and suggested it was now time to leave the premises. He told me that it was his country and he would leave when he chose.
This is the way things happen in the Highlands. Highlands operate by being in your face. I felt that I was out there hanging without the cultural cues and known patterns with which I am familiar. All the nuances and shades of meaning that I understand instinctively and use to make my life comprehensible were taken from me. Because the university is multicultural with a Western emphasis (Communist Poland/ Catholic Australia) I haven’t had the opportunity to experience this culture shock.
Perhaps what I needed to do was get change for my K50 note and give him K30 and me K20. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given that day’s K50 to his wife. For sure, next time I will negotiate the full price beforehand, although I am told that too can change.
I am now planning my next cool escape-a hike up Mount Wilhelm further up in the Highlands. Stay tune to the misadventures.
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