Just Visiting

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PNG News: Just Visiting
April, 2005

This is the last PNG News! To anyone who read each and every one of these, congratulations welcome to my snakes and ladders experiences. If you have been more discriminating in your reading you will be aware of the varied quality of the reports depending on my moods.

I am not of this place, and my time here has been a collage of bright meri blouse encounters. Ways of being in the world- the laughter, the young men holding hands, the strong women carrying billums hanging from their foreheads.

On this tapestry, which are in fact colonial remnants there are beetle nut stains. Thoughts and words are whispered and swallowed instead of being spoken out loud. Bigman actions are corrupt and patronizing. Dependency and cargo cult are well rooted into every living being. The more I tried to be culturally sensitive and not say what I saw going on around me, the more I lacked respect for myself. How do the people in PNG do it?

Here is a request I received and scanned today, from a schoolteacher I met in a Sepik village two weeks ago. It is amazing that I received this letter so quickly considering there is no mail service from her village. And a map showing the Sepik River and of course the diving.

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