BOLD LIFE

BOLD LIFE leads a convoy of busses speeding along Ela Beach Road.  Even from my balcony, half a kilometre away, I can tell it’s BOLD LIFE by the name emblazoned on the windscreen in foot-high yellow letters.  All the PMVs in the convoy have their hazard lights flashing and horns blaring.  In the second vehicle, what sounds like a brass band is punching out a military tattoo.  They speed around the corner and the horns fade into the other sounds of the city.  

A BOLD LIFE sighting is a challenge and an omen.  Follow its lead and live your life right to the corners of your existence.  But also remember that life happens but once, and your time is finite.  And in PNG, death comes in equally bold form. 

Death seems to happen more often in PNG.  The statistics definitely back it up: life expectancy in PNG is 20 years less than Australia (according to the World Bank, Australia is 81.85 years and PNG 62.80 years), a shameful difference for countries mere kilometres apart.

But this perception about the frequency of death is also rooted in society’s response to it.  Death isn’t private and hidden, with people alone like islands in their personal grief.  Here death is public, visible and all-encompassing.  It commands your attention, your money and your time.

An announcement of a death draws notices and obituaries in the two daily newspapers, expensive and ostentatious, from every part of that person’s life.  Then there is the hauskrai, the period of mourning held at the family’s house before the burial, a carefully-observed ceremony of presence and grief. 

Like in Australia, an industry has sprung up around traditional funerals.  An afternoon’s drive in Port Moresby will take you past a funeral parlour at Six Mile, which advertises its services as “Dove Funerals: Make it One to Remember!” and at Nine Mile, a billboard screaming “A1 Coffins”, with a picture of a coffin on it, hanging large above the intersection.

Sometimes, there is repatriation of the body across oceans and continents, through tours of cities, to the papa graun, the customary home, the final resting place.  In Wewak, East Sepik, I watched a coffin arriving as checked baggage on an Air Niugini flight.  The dead person’s family waited behind the hurricane wire as the coffin was unloaded.  Then they came forward to claim it, quietly sobbing, to place their hands on the dark wood and around each other, before loading it onto the back of a PMV and driving it back to the village.

My taxi driver taught me a lot about death.  He has grieved for many important men over the last year.  One was a distinguished pilot, one of PNG’s first, a dashing man who flew planes to exotic locations and had lots of wives (or so the story goes – I think ‘wives’ is putting the gloss on it slightly).  He and the taxi driver came from the same village in the Western Highlands.  

My taxi driver showed me the front page of the newspaper, which had a photo of the pilot’s coffin being greeted in traditional style by bare-chested women covered in mud, sitting on the ground, weeping. “Ol igat brukim bel stret” he explained.  Which doesn’t translate literally (and I think it’s an idiosyncratic Highlander expression) but basically means people suffering gut-wrenching sorrow.

My taxi driver and the women weren’t just grieving for the pilot.  They were grieving for the hole that his death left in the community.  They had lost an important man who had brought status and honour to the clan.  He had supported them financially, and represented them on the world stage.  He had made them proud.  It would take generations for another person like him to come along.  “And his sons are still kids” my taxi driver said sadly.

In Port Moresby, death brushes past you, even in places purposely built to shield you from the vagaries of life in the capital.  Recently, I was at the Yacht Club, a members-only club on Fairfax Harbour foreshore whose main clientele are the crusty white men of the resources industry. 

As I watched, a group of people got off a boat, came up the jetty and hurried past our table.  They were carrying a body on a stretcher, wrapped in a tarp, brown feet sticking out the end.  At the back, a white man, clearly in shock, stuttering out an explanation.  And then they were gone out the gate into the carpark, and the after-work crowd went back to their beers. 

A similar thing happened while I was on holidays with my family.  On Christmas day, I was in New Ireland Province off an island out of Kavieng, doing the best snorkelling of my life.  The sea was clear and the fish were everywhere.  But underwater, and on the far side of the coral reef, we couldn’t hear the banana boat overloaded with people that sped up to the island, or hear the wailing as they unloaded the cold body of a drowned boy. 

The boy had been visiting his islander family for the first time.  He was from the mainland and had never learned to swim.  No-one in the village knew first aid, so they went to the first place that did – the tourist accommodation on this island, run by an expat couple, half an hour away by boat.  By the time they laid him out on the picnic table and started CPR, it was too late.  So they collected his body, placed it gently back on the boat, and took off to the hospital in town.

Back home, if someone dies by drowning, the law can require a coronial inquest to be held, to figure out the circumstances leading up to the death and to make recommendations to change the law.  The intention is honourable – every accidental death is unnecessary and gives society an opportunity to prevent the same thing happening again.  But in PNG, that boy will be buried, the family will grieve, and nothing will change.

An obituary to the pilot has been stuck on my fridge since the end of last year.  It quotes a poem by John Gillespie Magee, which goes:

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space/Put out my hand and touched the face of God”

I think it’s beautiful.  I see it every day before I leave the house.  Being reminded of my mortality puts my life into perspective.  Like BOLD LIFE, the obituary is a challenge to live life boldly in the time I have.  And make every one of those 20 extra years count.

Bootylicious

“You’ve put on weight.  You look great!” said Charlotte as I walked into the office today, my first day back after my trip to Australia.  She pointed at my waist and beamed.

Such is the way of PNG.  It’s not the first time I’ve been appreciated for being cuddlier.  In times of feast, weeks where the beer flows freely or injury or inertia lays me low, I get approving compliments on the daily about my health and radiance.  In times of famine, where illness or emotional malaise makes food either a liability or a challenge and the kilos simply drop off, people express serious concern bordering on personal disappointment. 

For example: my conversation with a young man a couple of months ago, where he admiringly told me I was ‘getting fat’, then (unsuccessfully) tried to lure me back to his upmarket hotel room with promises of fried chicken and chocolate.

That morning compliment from Charlotte was a great way to come back to PNG, and such a refreshing change from Australia, where slim is king and some of the most evolved women I know watch the scales.  I’m not a fitness freak – my regular exercise is definitely moderate and its purpose a pre-emptive strike against insanity.  But as a general rule in PNG, I’m always happier when I’m heavier.

As you will conclude from the above, I had a fantastic time in Australia.  Trips home are a perk of living so close and this visit was a piece of pure cosmic timing. 

Late last year, several wedding invitations landed in my in-tray after a couple of months meandering through PNG Post.  As we poured over the ornate embossing and tasteful colour schemes, I realised that two of my oldest friends were getting married in the space of a week.  So I went, and the weddings were beautiful, and I did so much it feels like I’ve been away for months.

As both a philosophical mantra and a physical truth, distance gives you perspective.  During my time in Australia, I made up my mind about a few important things.

I want to go back to study and learn about advocacy and development.  But I don’t just want to spend two years deconstructing discourses with urban lefties.  

I want to understand the existential crises of donor organisations that I have witnessed and the privileging of sentimentality over outcomes.

I want to understand how Australia gives PNG around $500 million in aid each year, and key indicators in education, health, and gender continue to go backwards. 

I want to understand the feeling I get around good-hearted, starry-eyed international NGO employees who earnestly talk about ‘cross-cultural dialogues’ and ‘development experts’, and fresh-off-the-plane Canberra transplantees who mispronounce province names like Channel Ten newsreaders do, and believe that a background in whatever makes them qualified to speak about PNG.   Without an education I’m just inarticulate and frustrated, and it’s too easy to take the volunteer’s holier-than-thou approach of writing everyone else off as posers or opportunists.

I also want to write more freely about PNG.  For both my own reasons and the Program’s media rules, I focus on the positive and personal here.  There is no shortage of material in either and they make for a great yarn (unless you’re all coming here out of pity…?). 

I haven’t posted for the last two months, but I’ve still been writing: my thoughts on Australia’s political and business involvement, the sickness of some parts of expat culture, and the problems that plague PNG.  Stories that aren’t right here, but definitely need to be told sometime and some place in the future.  I’ll do my best to keep you entertained and informed in the meantime. 

Just a short post tonight.  I’m saving my energy for the Shaggy concert on Wednesday.  He’s on tour through the Pacific and has pointedly left Australia off the dates.  Some of my Melbourne friends are green with jealousy.  It’s great to be back. 

Malaria and mangoes

Before volunteers leave Australia, we undergo a week-long briefing where we are taught about everything that can go wrong during our assignments.  Health is a major component and diseases are covered in gruesome, unforgettable detail.  For instance, there is a photo of a particular intestinal worm infestation that I’ll never get out of my head.  I am only now beginning to forget the screams of my fellow volunteers and the presenter shouting with barely disguised glee: ‘I TOLD YOU TO LOOK AWAY IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE IT!”

At the end of the briefing, we’re each given a show bag of medication, tailored to the risks in the country that we’re going to.  This kit is the coolest thing I’ve ever got for free in my life.  It contains a ‘Little Book’, a quick-reference guide to the nasties most likely to take you down.  It’s written in plain English in a reassuring tone, with lots of clear headings, obviously aimed at a target audience of sweating twenty-somethings obsessively checking their temperatures and expecting the worst.

The largest part of the Little Book is dedicated to malaria, and the section opens in quite a stirring fashion with a quote by author Fiammetta Rocco:

“Sick with malaria, my body felt as if it was no longer my own.  It had been invaded, as if it had been subject to a military coup…the fever was beginning to shoot up.  The parasites in my blood that had invaded the red corpuscles were splitting them open and destroying them in a rampant urge to reproduce”.

Gets the heart racing, doesn’t it?

PNG is a haven for malaria.  It’s one of the world’s most severely affected nations.  Daily anti-malarials are standard prescription for Australian volunteers in almost all places here.  But these drugs can have some pretty serious side effects.  Take it in the morning, and you’re likely to be sunburned to a crisp by lunch, despite studious reapplication of sunscreen.  Take it at night, and you can find yourself trapped in a hamster wheel of vivid dreams and wake up drenched in sweat, searching through your friend’s kitchen cupboards for a missing animal (true story).

The one exception to the daily anti-malarial rule is volunteers who live in Port Moresby.  The belief seems to be that POM’s urbanised, dry-n-dusty climate is hostile to mosquitoes carrying malaria.  But blame it on global warming, or the fact that the majority of the city’s residents live in settlements where screen doors and mosquito nets are non-existent, but almost every PNGean I’ve met in POM has had malaria at least once. And now I’ve joined them.

At first I thought it was food poisoning, or a one-day bug.  I didn’t have the fevers or sweats I’d heard about, I just felt tired and more misanthropic than I usually do in the morning.  But a reason why malaria is such a successful parasite is that its symptoms could indicate practically any other illness. They come and go – you might be feeling terrible one day, then perfect the next, and you might be fine for the next three months until the parasite emerges from your liver (or wherever it’s decided to camp out) to make a fresh attack on your body.  The only way to know for sure is to get a blood test.

The malaria rapid test is an incredible little invention.  The whole thing takes about three minutes.  A nurse pricked the end of my finger, put a drop of blood on what looked like a tiny sticky pad, and waited for the results.  Positive.  News I met with a sinking feeling and a strange thrill.  Finally, I had earned my stripes as a true tropics dweller!

But strangely enough, when I went back the next day for the second rapid test my result came back negative.   The doctor explained that it could be that I’d picked it up early, and the medication from the previous day (an extremely large needle) was so effective that it’d taken the parasite down below detectable levels.

I decided to get a full blood screen just to make sure it was malaria, and not something really bad like dengue.  Dengue is a disease so painful and brain-scrambling that a former POM dweller, who had contracted it and was medi-vaced back to Australia for a few weeks to recuperate, arrived at the hospital with her suitcase, only to discover all she’d packed was a party dress and one shoe.

I’m no stranger to blood tests, and not a prude when it comes to the general cleanliness of my surrounds, but the clinic, and this test, made me nervous.  It may have been the makeshift tourniquet fashioned out of a latex glove.  Or the stained ‘biological waste’ bucket.  Or hearing every detail of a man behind a curtain having stitches removed from his back.  Or the mere taxonomic offence of syringes being stored in a drawer next to female condoms.

And after all that anxiety, my blood samples were inexplicably ‘discarded’ and never made it past the biological waste bucket and to the lab.  The clinic only realised this when I came back five days later to chase up the results.  I got another blood slide, but by then I’d been on the medication for a week, and the results came back negative.

My malaria (and I personally think it was malaria, even if the facts are in dispute) made me useless.  As well as all the pills, my treatment regime consisted of lying prone on my balcony trying to manifest a gentle breeze, standing in front of my open fridge and freezer in my underwear, and watching the ceiling fan rotate.  After about four days of this I was well enough to feel like if I spent another day at home I’d start chewing up my mattress.  I finished the drugs a week ago and I’m back to my normal self.

All up, I spent about K630 (around AUD$275) for a full treatment.  This includes K100 just to get through the doctor’s door each time I went.  And I had malaria-lite – I only took two days off work, and I had none of the crippling fevers, aches and vomiting that most people get.  With K600 easily being at least a month’s salary for the average working PNGean, most just take a couple of Panadol and pray that it goes away.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.  Often it recurs and leaves a family’s sole earner incapacitated over and over again.

The extreme cost of medical care compared with average earnings mean that many serious, slow-burning conditions such as cancer and heart conditions go undiagnosed until it’s too late.  If you’re seriously sick and can’t afford the consultation fee, your only option is to walk into the main hospital’s Accident and Emergency section and hope that a doctor kneels to talk to you rather than steps over you.  But you might be fighting for space with drunk men with bush knife wounds and women giving birth.  It’s no wonder people just grin and bear it.

In the absence of easily accessible medical care, people turn to traditional treatments.  Steaming yourself for any illness is the first port of call.  Combine it with certain herbs and it’s great for malaria.  Lots of kumu (leafy greens) for nausea.  Black tea for stomach upsets.  Sudden changes in the weather are invariably blamed for most respiratory sicknesses.

Another tropical friend that arrived just in time for my malaria was mangoes.  I spent many hours on my balcony with a thousand-yard stare slowly eating mangoes and, together with the efficacy of modern medicine, I credit them for bringing me back to health.

But I’m also discovering how little I know about my favourite fruit.  That they grow on trees, for instance.  I don’t know why, but I always though they grew on squat shrubs.  Embarrassing for a country girl to admit such ignorance, particularly when I like to believe I have the agricultural edge on my city brethren.

For your information, the mango is an imposing tree which towers up to 20 or 30 metres above the ground.  Trees around the city, which I had previously thought of as ‘just trees’, have now been transformed into flora of value and beauty.  The one at the Aviat Club, with its ancient trunk and massive canopy, is one of these.  Mango trees are also accompanied by bare-chested street kids, throwing rocks up into the arbour to knock the ripe fruit down.

And if your rocks miss, well how do you get the fruit down from such great heights?  You leave it up to the mango.  Without much ado, mango fruit simply loosen their ties with the tree when they’re ripe and fall.  The mangoes at the Aviat fall at frequent intervals, crashing on the corrugated tin roof with such a bang that everyone ducks and screams.  Heather almost got clocked by one a few weeks ago, when she was waiting for the car and it missed her by mere centimetres.

The seasons are changing in PNG, and both mangoes and malaria are signs that the wet season is about to begin.  Which brings with it another M word – monsoon. After five months of clear skies and winds, the city is bracing for torrential downpours and flooding.  And Christmas, when the city apparently goes a little nuts.  But I’m not fazed.  As long as I can keep eating mangoes on my balcony, I can handle anything.

8am to 4.06pm

Before I moved to PNG, I worked in a skyscraper in Melbourne that housed half of the State’s government departments.  It was a well-resourced bureaucratic warren that hummed with industry, with million-dollar views across the skyline towards the bay, where the rich and time-rich sailed yachts during office hours.

Some parts of Port Moresby are like this.  There’s so much money sloshing around in PNG but only pools in certain places. Town, Port Moresby’s CBD, is one of them.  It’s a cluster of ageing and newly-built skyscrapers, filled with workers dressed bizarrely (for PNG) in heels and suits, gliding through lobbies plated with rose granite, riding elevators through these overairconditioned behemoths.

Depending on your disposition, you could call it a diamond or a tumor – either way, it’s a rare abnormality, arresting mostly because of the contrast between it and the rest of the country.

As I’ve written before, I work at the Centre, about fifteen minutes’ drive from Town and much further away in terms of resources. In any country, the NGO sector is the poorer cousin, but here the disadvantage is so chronic it’s also missing its shoes and half its teeth.

Basic amenities are the sorest point. Due to an unnaturally long dry season, Moresby’s hydro dams are running dry, resulting in rolling blackouts.  Once I counted seven in a single afternoon.  You hear the power’s off before you see it, from the sighs, and worse, of frustration from the staff on desktop computers which don’t have the buffer of a battery between off and on.  If the backup generator doesn’t kick in (if the guard forgot to get diesel, or it’s just not working) the office heats up quickly, turning everyone from switched-on to somnambulic in no time flat.

The state of the IT infrastructure makes me reminisce about the mid 90’s. Internet, which I’d come to place in the same category of necessity as water and electricity, is only on for three hours a day for budgetary reasons.  The server’s been down since time immemorial, so to share documents we must traffic in UBS sticks.  This results in viruses running rampant, with a virulence and speed of contagion I haven’t seen since first-year college.

Years and years of unclosed matters stack up in the office, ominously covered in dust, looking every inch like the great wall of professional misconduct. Only about half the staff get email at all, so if you need to tell everyone something at once, you type it up on a memo, print out fifteen copies, and put it in their in-trays.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve gone so far back in time, it would seem perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes at our desks and turn towards the office liquor cabinet during hairier moments.  That anything gets done, on time or at all, is a testament to the patience, resourcefulness and willpower of my colleagues.

My colleagues have also helped me understand the more esoteric aspects of working life.  First among them is the work ethic.

In Australia, I watched friends sacrifice their mental health and happiness to their employers in the name of work ethic.  It’s more complicated than just money: status, identity, competition, and the general feeling of not wanting to disappoint all play a part in forming what I’ve observed to be the Western attitude to work.

The valuing of work at the expense of everything else is totally foreign here.  Work ranks way down the line.  It’s the first thing to fall if something else comes up in your life – if you’re having relationship troubles, or your in-law needs more help around the house, or your family asks you to come home to the village to help raise your younger siblings.  And absences are accommodated by the employer.  People disappear for weeks on end, without reason, then walk back into the office as if nothing has happened.

Another aspect I’m just beginning to grasp is that there’s no clear line between personal and professional.  Colleagues become a kind of extended family, and your lives are likely to intertwine well beyond your time at the workplace.  The differences of opinion you might come up against at work are mere side notes in the bigger scheme of your relationship.

So people bend over backwards to resolve things ‘the Melanesian way’, though compromise and saving face, because you don’t want to trash a connection if you might need each other sometime in the future.  Quite different from Australia, where if you know you are right, you can push the point hard, and still have drinks together after work on a Friday.

One illustration of the absence of the personal/professional distinction is a story I heard about an expat doctor living in PNG.  He performed surgery on a man who died on the operating table from complications.  The dead man’s family, who had been waiting outside the hospital, believed the doctor was responsible for his death and wanted to exact revenge.  The doctor ended up having to flee the country.  In a way, the family was right, if you don’t give the doctor the protective shield of a professional ‘just doing his job’.

This story comes with several caveats.  It’s sensational  – this isn’t a regular occurrence.  The dead man’s family were Highlanders, whom (to stereotype in the way that so many Papua New Guineans do) often take a liberal and literal approach to the old saying ‘an eye for an eye’.  And my own culture isn’t above assigning blame and seeking compensation – some of my peers from Melbourne will dine out on professional negligence claims for decades to come.  But it makes you realise how artificial the divide is.

Finally, there’s the role of women.  My short time in PNG, and the incredible women I have met here, has left me with the firm belief that the ‘empowerment’ (for want of a better word) of women is one of the most important parts of PNG’s development and advancement as a country.  Women are slowly gaining prominence and power in all sectors of society, but they have to contend with some pretty serious obstacles which make garden-variety Australian misogyny look like a mere pothole.

One obstacle is decision-making, which is often traditionally a man’s job.  Even if a woman has all the experience, information and authority, she may ask a man to decide for her.  I have watched women do this with the deftness and tact of a diplomat, where the man is unaware that he’s merely a rubber stamp.

Another area is talking in public.  Some women, often boisterous in groups of their own, will clam up in the company of men and let them do the talking.  It gets even more complicated when dealing with older men, or men of a particular relationship to you.

I’ve been lucky to work in places where my gender has never been ‘a deal’, let alone a hindrance.  Giving a woman the protection of a workplace, a public space where she can shrug off rigid gender norms, will, I reckon, have big effects on the status of women in broader PNGean society.

For a lawyer who started her career in the land of plenty, adjusting to work here is a daily frustration.  But it also makes me realise how my expectations of work are shaped by my specific historical and cultural background, and how naive it is to think they would be adopted wholesale, or even make sense here, even if the hardware (desk, computer, office hours, pay packet) is the same.

And there are many parts of Papua New Guinean work culture that I think would work well back home.  The ‘life-work’ balance.  That it’s OK to have the day off if you’re exhausted or just need a break.  Big, loud laughter.  Sisterly camaderie and care.  And that particular patience and readiness that comes from not knowing when things are going to happen, but knowing when they do, you have to be ready for it.

Some things that are red

1.            The plastic sombrero perched on top of the bottle of Sierra Tequila.

Some friends asked for shoes from Australia, some sweets, but Marj is turning 30 and her only request was a big bottle of tequila to help celebrate.  We’re starting the night at her sister-friends’ house in Gerehu, one of the Program’s blacklisted suburbs.  Coincidentally, red is also the colour of the tape we had to make our way through to get here for this one exceptional night.

Myself, Heather, and our new sisters are standing around a table covered in food.  Meat is frying in the kitchen.  Pacific reggae from the speakers on the floor. The tequila is poured out into the little plastic shot glasses.  Lemon slices in one hand, salt spilled over the backs of hands.  The driver and the armed escort vehicle are waiting downstairs for us, but we’ve been told we can’t leave until the bottle is gone. A poor boyfriend has been ordered to take photos and he obligingly snaps away as we get progressively louder.  The best ones he gets are when we’re mid-grimace.

2.            The colour of all the clothes I bought at the second-hand shop this weekend. 

Second-hand shopping is a serious pastime in POM.  The stores are usually run by religious outfits, and if you play your cards right, you can be indulging in retail therapy all weekend – Saturday at the Catholic ones, and Sunday with the Seventh Day Adventists.  Clothes are shipped over from Australia by the bale and judging by the quality of the merchandise, they haven’t been picked over by inner-city hipster vultures before they cross the Coral Sea.  A friend of mine found a Gucci skirt for K2.  Original price tag still on.  No joke.  She’s dressed in a onesie with a frangipani pattern splashed across her side and thighs.  She looks fantastic, even though we are soaked through from the rain.  ‘No other Papua New Guinean would wear these kinds of clothes’, she says ‘So of course I get the best ones!’

3.            The baseball cap on the man on the road below my compound, terrorising a group of women.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so angry.  He is shirtless and screaming.  He takes off his hat and throws it on the ground.  Then he takes his shoes off and does the same thing.  There’s one woman who’s obviously the target.  He punches her.  She falls onto the ground.  She gets up with the help of her friends.  Then he throws a rock at her.  Misses.  Then he grabs a big stick and tries to hit her with it.  She pulls it off him.  The kids playing with a broken keyboard nearby scatter when he lurches near them.   Other men walk past, clasping their hands behind their backs in a very visible sign that they are not about to get involved. 

I watch from my balcony.  Some events need witnesses.  But I eventually go inside because I don’t want to see any more.  It’s useless to call the cops.  And I don’t think that my security service, the city’s defacto police force, would bother breaking up a fight between people from the settlements.  But another feeling stops me from doing anything.  A part of my acculturation.  It’s none of my business.  I am like the men with the clasped hands.  Something we were told in our first week here – you have to learn to look at injustice and not try to solve it yourself.

4.            The dress on the t-shirt of my friend Vanessa.

We’re at the Monday night Hash.  Hash House Harriers is an international social running group for expats.  There’s a group in every corner of the earth.  Some runners are immediate past members of the Kabul HHH. 

Vanessa’s running slightly ahead of me so I look at her back.  Her t-shirt is commemorating a recent Hash event, where they all ran through the settlements and suburbs of Port Moresby wearing red dresses and causing one hell of a sensation.  It’s just a standard Hash run tonight, in the grasslands past the airport, no ballgowns in sight.  Just the sunset and rolling hills.

After months on a treadmill, it feels amazing to be running in real life.  I feel like nothing bad could happen. We get so carried away we lose the group.  We eventually realise and double back to find them. 

The leader looks pissed off.  ‘Now I’ve got to do some chastising of you ladies.  Never run too far ahead of the pack.  You might feel safe, but someone could just drive past in a car and that would be it.  So always run in sight of us, or with a guy’.  

I hope I look suitably chastised.  He has a good point.  It’s just difficult to do, when running in the open makes you feel so invincible and free.  

5.            The dried blood on the walls of the interview room in the police station.

Once I realise what I’m looking at, I snatch my bag up off the floor.  The police officer on the other side of the desk has his head down, laboriously completing about ten forms required for a report of stolen property.   Behind him, a stream of police, perpetrators and victims flow through the room.  They’re waiting around, being led, being collected, having a stickybeak, giving orders, yelling abuse at each other. 

I am grateful for my companions, the mum and dad of a friend.  The dad is a Manusian man who was a detective in the fraud squad for 16 years from just after Independence.  The station’s bossman comes in, shakes his hand and brings him up to date.  On his way out, he discretely picks up a coke bottle half-full with red liquid and throws it in the bin.  Could be buai spit.  Could be more blood, spat out from a broken jaw.

When I go to leave, the police officer gives me my carbon copies of the forms and a bone-crushing handshake, and tells me to call him.  I don’t really understand why, whether it’s a police requirement or he’s having a crack.  I don’t call.

The cultural straddle

It’s been a week since I got back from my first visit to Australia.  I hadn’t been gone long enough to get any serious culture shock, but I was pretty alarmed when I felt myself getting emotional walking to the baggage claim at Brisbane Airport after getting off the plane from POM.  But not because I was back on home soil. 

It’s only three hours flight from Jacksons International Airport, POM to Brisbane Airport, but the differences between them are heartbreaking.  Brisbane’s airport is clean, shiny, orderly, with every possible need catered for, the flippancies of wealth encouraged and rewarded.  That short walk brought home to me how much Australians have and take for granted, and how most of us have absolutely no idea how privileged we are. 

Apart from that, I also realised my shoes are totally unequipped for walking long distances.  Depressingly, that 800 metres was the furtherest I have walked in months.  Thanks to compound lyfe, strolling has left my exercise vocabulary.

And now I’m back in PNG, and in a reflective mood.

A part of my life that was brought into focus due to my time in Australia is my lack of a significant other.  The expat scene in POM is smug couple heaven.  As a long-term bachelorette, independence is my natural state.  I’m used to going places and doing things solo.   But here, the Program warns against it and it’s viewed as a security risk.  And personally, apart from the policy, I feel on edge if I’m alone. 

Being spontaneous is extremely difficult at the best of times, but it’s almost impossible if you don’t have a permanent wingman duty-bound to accompany you.  Lucky, I am a happy (and I like to think not too irritating) third wheel when the occasion requires.

I’ve also been thinking about my Papua New Guinean acculturation.  In my first few months, I’ve tried to spend as much time with Papua New Guineans as my restricted lifestyle allows.   I’ve lived overseas a few times as a student and regretted cocooning myself inside the expat bubble.  While it’s heaps of fun and easy, it’s a bit shameful to leave a country speaking the language badly and still with an Australian accent, and with hundreds of international friends but barely any locals.  

But there are barriers here, real obstacles, not just social and cultural ones I faced in Sweden and Germany (but let’s face it, seeing that back then I was a hedonistic 20-year-old exchange student who always smelt faintly like beer, even I wouldn’t have asked myself to get a coffee after the lecture)…

Most of my PNGean friends don’t have a car, let alone a drivers’ licence, and because the public transport finishes at about 6pm, after-hours activities on weeknights are out.  Most friends live in areas I am ‘warned against’ going into, where the risk of something going wrong is considered to be so high, they’d be struck off our maps entirely by the powers-that-be if it were possible.

Then there’s money.  My modest living allowance dwarfs the equivalent PNGean salary for someone doing an equivalent job.   Similarly, a discriminatory salary structure exists where expatriates are often paid many times the local salary for the same job.  Dining out, going to drinks, to the movies, the safe and accessible extracurricular activities that expats do on a regular basis are often simply financially out of reach.  It’s made worse when I consider that the only person I have to support is myself, whereas most PNGeans I know share their earnings amongst their family and wantoks.

But recently, rather than immerse myself in Papua New Guinean culture, I have felt myself wanting to revel in my Australian-ness, my Western-ness.  I had planned to be a Zen god upon my return to PNG, employing deep breathing to put some space between the action and reaction. But it’s been harder than I thought.  And in these moments, my rebellion is to draw a line between me and the environment, show visibly that I am a different element, separate to what is happening around me.

So, at least temporarily, plans for a wardrobe of meri blauses have been shelved.  I’m dressing like I’m fresh out of Melbourne’s inner north, all skinny jeans and printed cotton pants. 

I think what would otherwise be seen as a hamfisted attempt to reassert my identity passes people by.  Barely anyone in Port Moresby wastes their time and money on fashion, and (to the best of my knowledge and observation) clothes don’t come with the status subtext they do in the West. 

It doesn’t take a psychology degree to see that my wardrobe revival is the awkward stage in the long-term project of cultural adjustment.  But it’s working for me at the moment.

In line with my skinny jeans status quo, last weekend has involved a high level of immersion in the expat scene. 

First thing Friday Night was one good exception, as I had scored an exclusive invite to the Brewkettle, the bar attached to SP Brewery.  SP is PNG’s only beer producer and market supplier, an absolute monolith of a company which puts beer in every corner of the country.  It also owns the best bar in town, a cool, quiet, wood-panelled room, with brew on tap, forgiving lighting and tasteful stained-glass lamps.  Unforgettably refreshing.

Then onto a Bad Taste party, hosted by some expat friends, where I finally got the chance to wear the sequinned green short-shorts that have been gathering mould in my cupboard and my upper legs saw the light for the first time in four months.

Saturday night was the ‘go pinis’ (farewell) party for two expats who are wrapping up two years in POM before heading home.  It was hands down the best party I have been to here yet.  There was a live band (the Betelnuts – inspired, right?), an insane dance floor complete with call-and-response audience participation, swimming in underwear in the pool in torrential rain, limitless beer, and a great mix of good people.  

And Sunday, well, I steeled myself, squared my jaw and went solo to an art show showcasing PNG artists.  It was only at the end of the street, but I had to get a car to take me the 200 metres, and asked them to wait for me in the carpark while I browsed and took covert photos on my phone.  I even relaxed a little.  With a bit of imagination, I could have easily been in a gallery somewhere in the inner north.   

And perhaps that’s something I should focus on next.  The art of finding the familiar in the unfamiliar.

Lewa

PNG is about as heterogeneous as countries come.   It has, by some counts, around a quarter of the world’s languages.  Its myriad parts have been bundled together for the sake of administrative and political expedience, and even almost 30 years after independence, some identify themselves by their provinces long before they will call themselves Papua New Guineans. 

With such diversity, it’s impossible to make generalisations about how Papua New Guineans celebrate life’s major milestones.  But I can definitely generalise about my experience with major milestones, and in the last month, it’s been all about relationships.

Firstly, the very happy, very exciting news that Heather got engaged to her partner Kelvin.  In Australia, getting engaged is a Big Deal.  I’ve watched the reaction from our Australian friends.  The news is usually greeted with screaming, champagne, impromptu parties, and the inquisition with the same questions that a newly engaged couple will be asked hundreds of times:

Where did it happen? (At the lookout.  At lunchtime.  There were no drunks, thank God).  Were you expecting it? (No – I just turned around and there was a man on bended knee – got the shock of my life!).  Wedding? (Military, apparently).  Show us the ring! (Size of a house, fyi).

But this breathlessness isn’t shared by our PNG friends.  The standard response (with a few notable exceptions) has been ‘Oh, that’s nice…’

The thing is, Heather and Kelvin have been considered to be husband and wife ever since Heather got here.  They’re obviously in a committed relationship, which is recognised by their family and friends.  They basically live together.  And that is enough.  When everyone knows you’re already together, why do you need to tell them again?

‘Honestly, we would love it to happen’ a friend at work said. ‘The whole proposal thing.  We see it in the movies, it’s so romantic.  You know, we wish the men did that.  But to be honest, as long as the parents are happy with the partner, then well you’re husband and wife.  You just slip into it without much of a fuss’. 

Relationships aren’t necessarily more fluid here, they just look different.  And different again, depending on where you’re from.  A man will be introduced as your ‘friend’, but he is your beloved and the father of your child.  Where bride price is practiced, it might take years to save up hundreds of thousands of kina to pay the bride’s parents before the deal is formally done.  Sometimes, all it takes is for the parents of the woman and man to meet, acknowledge and consent to the relationship, then it’s official.

But full-on weddings, with all the trimmings, also occur.  Particularly when the family are the faithful, and they want it formalised with a religious ceremony.  I’m coming to the stage of my 20’s where holy matrimony is catching like a cold, and I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the marathon of weddings which I will face over the next three years, than my friend Becky’s wedding last week.

Becky and her husband come from different faiths, with their sacred days on different days of the weekend.  In a masterful compromise, the service was held on Friday (with day off work for attendees) on the Switzerland-esque grounds of the Gentle Whisper Hall, United Church. 

The saying ‘good things come to those who wait’ is a useful, sanity-saving mantra in PNG.  Usually, it will be a good thing, and the wait is worth it.  And so it was, waiting with the rest of the congregation for the wedding party to appear.  The groom’s clan on the other side of the aisle, dressed in blue to match the hall’s trimmings.  Silent, except for murmured conversation and the sound of the blue-and-white balloons popping at infrequent intervals.

Then all of a sudden they were there.  The groom, with an embarrassed smile, followed by his best men.  Flower girls spreading red and white petals along the aisle.  Beautiful bridesmaids with measured steps and intricate hairstyles. The bride, in white and veil,  gripping her father’s arm, bathed in camera flashes. 

Then the ceremony, its composite parts both personal and religious, in three languages, psalms sung in perfect harmony, the sermon riffing off Genesis 2:22 and how God created Woman from the Rib of Man (a fable definitely out of vogue amongst my inner-left Melbourne friends).  Signing the official papers, and then the kiss, and announcing the new couple to the congregation, to applause and foot-stamping.

Between the ceremony and the reception, my friends and I retired to my place, which was still in total disarray from our primping beforehand.  We blasted 101 More Housework Hits, a five-disc compilation CD sent by my friend Alastair which has shed any ironic intention to become our number one soundtrack for life.  We practiced our two-step, and drank tequila shots in lick-sip-suck form in what turned out to be a first time for the majority.  Some of the mad cats downed six and still managed to waltz into the reception like they’d just finished their morning coffee.

The reception was held at the Evil Place, at Dynasty Chinese Restaurant.  It’s already an incredible space, totally opulent, but it looked even more beautiful that night.  I left our gift perched on top of the gift table, already stacked high.  Gift registries aren’t big here, so apparently some newlyweds end up with three deep fryers and four rice cookers, which they palm off to friends, and everyone’s happy. 

Afterwards, we squeezed seven people in the one car (two in the boot, if you must know) to drive the block and a half to Lamana nightclub.  Nights at Lamana vary.  This one involved: bribing a security guard to mind our doggy bags; introducing a first-timer to vodka and red bull, fully cognisant of what I was unleashing; at least seven engineers from out Tabubil way called Steve; boomer white men slinging their arm over my shoulder and bawling at me about how they met their love of their life here, it didn’t matter that she was young, or didn’t speak much English; truncated songs for the dancefloor’s microscopic attention span; two-step with my friends in the members’ section.  Then home for a few more ill-advised tequila shots at 4am.

A fantastic, unforgettable day.  And night.  If there was ever an argument for increasing the marriage rate, that was it.

This weekend just gone, I skipped forward to the linear life’s next major event – children.  More specifically, the naming of a child.  In Vabukori village, after birth, a baby remains nameless until the family officially announce its name to the community.  This is done with great ceremony and a big feast – pig on a spit, tables groaning with kaukau, banana, taro, potato salad, rice, noodles, greens, ice-cream.  Sure beats leafing through ’10,000 Popular Baby Names’, or flipping a coin next to a hospital bed, as I distinctly remember my youngest sister getting her name (I think it was heads, Georgia).

The father of the special girl was Amin, a colleague of mine, and I was invited to join his family to celebrate the day.  I had planned to be as inconspicuous as possible, fade into the background, but sadly you can’t sneak two white girls into a village without drawing a major amount of attention.  In fact, I was given the honour of announcing the girls’ name.

Standing in front of a giant cake box, with the community watching on, Amin whispered to me that the name was written on top of the cake.  There was silence as I lifted the lid off the box, deciphered the red-and-pink cursive icing, and read it out: ‘The name of this precious girl is PATRICIA SAMANTHA TONY!  Congratulations from your Family.  God Bless You’.  Everyone applauded, I cut the cake, and slipped back into the fold.

Relationships.  They take their proper place in PNG – above work, above money, above status.  Where they belong.  Nambawan.  Number one. 

Bilas peles

If you ever go up to Nusa Island Resort, just out of Kavieng, make sure you meet the bartender.  His name is Adolf.  Pardon?  Like Hitler, you know, the Nazis? he might say, like he did to us, collecting our empty beer cans and grinning, enjoying our reaction.  If his parents weren’t au fait with the details of 20^th century history, at least they gave him a name that is unlikely to ever be forgotten.

I was up in Kavieng with my mum, who has been staying with me for the last few weeks, and a couple of my colleagues from the Centre, to run a Community Legal Education (CLE) workshop for the landowners of New Hanover Island.  New Hanover is three hours by banana boat from Kavieng, New Ireland, a province so picturesque it’s universally known as ‘bilas peles’, which, creatively interpreted, translates to ‘bejewelled place’.

This CLE was particularly terrifying for me, because I was doing three presentations, entirely in Tok Pisin!  I’d been given the introduction topics – the Constitution, the separation of powers, the hierarchy of laws.  As part of my capacity-building role, I’d planned to rejig the format to make them more interactive and engaging – pictures, questions, stories, rather than just boxes of text on a Powerpoint presentation.  But because my Tok Pisin is still in its infancy, I couldn’t be as flexible as I hoped.  Nonetheless, the participants indulged me, and the presentations seemed to go down well.

I definitely have a long way to go with the Tok, but I’m working on it – reading newspapers, listening to the radio, torturing my colleagues with attempts to talk about the weather…It helps that it’s the funniest language I have ever learned.  Having its roots in the late 19^th century sugarcane fields of northern Australia, it retains a lot of Queenslandisms – for instance, ‘bagarap’ means broken, and ‘lesbaga’ means a person with a poor work ethic. Luckily, I worked out what ‘pos opis edres’ meant, before I asked someone how on earth Latin made it into Tok Pisin (FYI it means ‘post office address’). 

All CLEs are important, but this one especially so.  Almost the entire island of New Hanover has been leased out under a Special Agricultural and Business Lease (or ‘SABL’).  SABLs are a topic for another post, but in short, they are a legal loophole for land grabbing the biggest scandal in PNG land law.  Rights to use the land are signed away by self-appointed representatives, who act on behalf of themselves only, and rely upon corruption (at worst) or incompetence (at best) of government bodies tasked to oversee, approve, or veto agreements which appear to be unjust.  Customary law is effectively extinguished for the period of the lease, which can be up to 99 years, and usually is.

The legal status of customary land in PNG is totally different from Australia.  The oft-quoted figure is that 97% of PNG’s total land mass is under customary ownership.  There is no title, just a right of ownership by the clan, passed down from father to son, or mother to daughter, depending on what part of the country you’re in.  It isn’t recorded in any books, and it doesn’t need to be won back through decades-long court cases, as they were never sly enough to pull the ‘terra nullius’ line in PNG.  

During the question and answer time, I was asked to explain the customary land ownership system in Australia.  I gave a potted account of native title (thankfully in English, although I’m pretty sure that’s not the language the Native Title Act is written in, ha ha ha!).  Afterwards, chatting with the participants, they asked whether it would work in PNG.  Definitely not, I said.  One man grunted his agreement.  ‘Look at what’s happened to the Aborigines’ he said.  ‘That’s what we’d be like, if we had that here’.

The point of the CLE workshops is to bring awareness to communities about their rights, but I am beginning to see another purpose, perhaps more important.  The workshops bring everyone together in one place, men and women, leaders and the disenfranchised, for the explicit purpose of talking about the law and land.  Some of the participants have never been involved in the decisions being made about their land, nor told of the consequences. 

The workshops become a flashpoint of big emotions – grief, anger, recriminations.  Some participants were the ones who ostensibly stood to benefit from deals with the logging company, who had signed away theirs, and other people’s, rights for a song, but were seeing none of the promised benefits.  An image that sticks with me – a woman in her 50’s, a mother and grandmother, thumping her chest and talking about her deep sorrow that was present in every moment she sat still in the workshop and did nothing, while knowing her land was being taken.

But despite the divisions in the group, the community is prepared to start fresh and work together.  This was made very clear by the rousing, lengthy speeches given by the participants throughout the workshop, a feature of many public gatherings in PNG.  From the president: ‘The past has failed us.  But we can’t keep looking backwards, we have to unite and work together.’  Put more bluntly by the island’s governor-elect, ‘Enough of the fucking around.  We need to act now’. 

But this feeling was captured better than any oratorical flourishes possibly could by the New Hanover song, which was sung by the participants at the beginning of the workshop.  Led by the ‘Slim Dusty of New Ireland’ on guitar, a famous performer, the community’s jester, a very old man with a mouth collapsing around his few remaining teeth, the community sang the song of the island in soaring six-piece harmonies, in tok ples, Tok Pisin and English.  I didn’t think it was possible to get chills down my spine when suffocating in heat and humidity, but it is.

After promises to return to New Hanover, a last supper feast on mud crabs, and a gift of a traditional New Ireland basket from the guesthouse’s owner to Mum (or ‘mama’, as she was known, the title a sign of respect) it was time for us to head back to Port Moresby.  We were at the airport at 4.30am, swatting mosquitoes, sharing the very basic waiting area with sunburned Germans heading home after weeks of diving, and Papua New Guinean men dressed very strangely (for PNG) in ironed shirts and suit pants, probably on their way to meetings in the capital.

As we flew into Port Moresby, I looked out over the incinerator haze and bare hillsides, and felt the thing I least expected – like I was coming home.

I’m one week away from the three-month mark that volunteers are warned about before they get deployed – when, according to those in the know, the honeymoon period ends abruptly, your outlook dims dramatically and the little things that were once quirky now become deeply irritating.  I’ve been blessed with a very stable first three months here, due in no small part to the jaw-dropping view off my balcony, great friends, eating well, regular exercise, plenty of sleep, and meaningful occupation – it’s a clichéd ole recipe for mental wellbeing but it seems to be working.  

Thank you for reading for the first three months, and stick around, there’s nine more to go, and it’s not called land of the unexpected for nothing. 

The reputational cost of the asylum seeker deal

The first I knew of the asylum seeker deal was at midday on Friday, when I got an email from the ABC’s PNG correspondent cancelling his farewell BBQ that night and obscurely telling everyone to ‘blame Kevin’.  For an expat party to be cancelled only hours before kicking off was unusual.  Something big was going down.

Sharp Talk, PNG’s leading political discussion forum, shed a bit more light.  A Manus Island politician wrote that caucus was told that morning that the existing detention centre on Manus Island would be expanded to hold 3,000 asylum seekers.  At this time, PM O’Neill was already en route from Port Moresby to Brisbane.  He was collected from the airport by PM Kevin Rudd and taken straight to the press conference to announce the Regional Resettlement Arrangement and sign the paperwork.  And that was that.  We had a new deal.

Judging from the reactions from my friends and family in Australia, and my colleagues and friends in PNG, it seems like the reaction is pretty much universal.  There is so much to be said – about the lack of consultation; the legal and human rights consequences;the whole sinister language that has become second-nature when talking about asylum seekers; the practicalities of expanding the capacity of a barely functional detention centre from 146 people to 3,000, immediately; whether Australians can still call itself a compassionate country and sing the second verse of the National Anthem, that for those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share with a straight face; whether the Sunday Chronicle’s headline ‘Ruddiculous!’ puts the NT News’ screamers to shame.  But I thought I’d focus on just one angle – the portrayal of PNG in the selling of this policy.

It seems pretty obvious that the ‘strength’, in least in theory, of the policy is its deterrent value.  The ads published in every major Australian newspaper say it clear enough – if you try to come to Australia via boat, you’ll never be settled there.  Instead, you’ll go to PNG.  To make this deterrent aspect work, to ensure that no-one even tries, you have to make PNG seem as unappealing as possible, a lost cause, a place of certain ruin.  And, so the logic goes, if no-one ever tries, no boats come, and the policy is a success.

Opponents of the policy, shocked that Australia would turf its asylum seekers onto its northern neighbour, are also leaning heavily on the ‘hellhole’ narrative.  In a GetUp! mass email sent to its supporters yesterday, PNG was described as an ‘impoverished, violence-ridden state’, which has made some Papua New Guineans irate and has social commentators mouthing off at Australian ‘latte sippers’ reciting statistics without having ever been to PNG.

The general tone of discussion, as it has ventured into questioning Australia’s aid commitment to PNG and its acquittal of aid spending, has led the PNG High Commission in Canberra to Australia to issue a rare, hotly-worded (in diplomatic terms) rebuke to Australian politicians ‘to observe international protocols and courtesies when discussing relations with other friendly sovereign nations and not impugn the dignity of our leaders who are attempting to assist Australia in this very complex regional and international issue of Asylum Seekers’.

It’s no secret that Papua New Guinea has serious, systemic and entrenched problems which affect quality of life, particularly with health, education, gender-based violence and the miniscule formal work sector.  However, the majority of its citizens live on the land that they own, and have secure access to food and shelter.  If things go wrong, they have an extensive support system through their family and wantoks.  They often don’t need to engage in the cash economy because what they need is right in front of them.

This seems to be why describing PNG in terms of desolation and despair is getting people’s backs up.  It has very serious problems, which its citizens acknowledge and are working to address, with the very little resources that they have.  But it is an incredible place, rich in culture, faith and community, and people are proud of their country.  Seeing its reputation trashed for the sake of Australian political gain is not especially palatable.

But conversely, it’s these aspects that make successfully resettling asylum seekers in PNG an impossible feat.  Without land, you are always on someone else’s, which can cause animosity and mean that new arrivals will lead an unsettled life.  Without a job, which are hard enough to come by if you’re a national, you have no money, and there is no Centrelink safety-net equivalent.  Without connections, life in PNG is extremely hard.   And PNG is already dealing with its own refugees – it already hosts 9,000 refugees from West Papua, who have fled violence under Indonesian rule.

But from within my cocooned world, the deal is still just an idea.  I see the human cost only in the shell-shocked journalists, ducking away from their desks for a quick smoke and beer at a gathering they were meant to be hosting, before heading up for another eight-hour stint strapped to the keyboard, trying to unearth the costings beneath the bluster.  And in my friends in Australian government agencies, who have disappeared into the abyss and have been pretty much incommunicado since Friday night. But we are all watching and waiting to see exactly how the impossible can be achieved.

Veeping with the stars

In some ways, Port Moresby is a lot like Canberra.  There are lots of roundabouts.   All the government buildings are crammed together.  It’s small – everyone seems to knows each other and what everyone’s doing.  And it’s flat, figuratively speaking – you see the people you read about in the newspaper in the street, and rub shoulders with the rich and powerful in the supermarket.

I have already literally rubbed shoulders with PNG’s Prime Minister at Trukai Fun Run, when I was dragged through the crowd at the finish line to emerge right at his side.  Making the most of my opportunity to converse with the country’s leader, I gasped ‘Hi, Mr O’Neill!’ to which he smiled benevolently and posed for the cameras, before he was whisked away into his shiny black four wheel drive.

Last weekend, I once again got to bathe in the glow of fame – I had the pleasure and privilege of being a VIP groupie with PNG’s number one pop band at the premiere concert of their national tour. 

(I’m not going to mention them by name – internet penetration in PNG is only at 2% but it’s growing, and when people eventually use the internet to find out about their favourite bands, it would be upsetting if this blog is the first hit that comes up).

Despite my adolescent hopes for my adult self, my life in Australia has been depressingly celebrity-free.  The best I can do is that my ex-housemate’s crazy boss had Gotye sleeping on her couch for a few weeks between albums.  I’m not a natural groupie, but I’ll try anything once.

We’d been looking forward to it all week.  We gained VIP status through Heather’s partner, who went to uni with the singer and some of the band, and was the head of security for the night.  You know you’ve made the big time when you have military men as your bouncers.

On Saturday afternoon, hopped up on Goroka plunger coffee, I was arranging my outfit for the night ahead.  A plasticky fluorescent pink top with a cut-out back, bought that morning with clubbing in mind and the hope that any spilled drinks would just slide off.  My black chinos.  My peep-toe flats I’d soaked all day in Domestos to kill the greenish mould that has engulfed every leather shoe I have. 

And my new glasses, the ones that sit perfectly on the bridge of my nose, no glasses strap necessary.  Since my first pair of round-rimmed, vine-wreathed, purple and green glasses which stalked my teenagerhood, I’ve never felt good wearing glasses.  But my new pair, purchased after email consultation with the family fashion squad, look set to break the curse.

We head down to Illusion Nightclub early to watch the soundcheck.  The band circle through their songs.  It’s a big lineup: two backup singers, some rappers, percussion, drums, everything you could want, really. They’ve just dropped a new album and the lead singles are playing every time you turn on a radio.  I don’t know much about music genres, but if I were to take a stab, I’d say it’s Pacific pop, strong reggae overtones, with production sounding like it’s straight out of the early 2000’s.  Awesome, right? 

Then it’s time for the pre-party.  We head up to the singer’s condo in a massive round building perched right on top of the hill.  There’s lots of food, and a pool table, and two middle-aged Australian men totally engrossed in the Cats v Hawks game.  We sit on the balcony and get talking to a backup singer, who’s nervous, but awesome, and tells us her incredible life story – how she came to singing after her father died when she was young; about her beautiful daughter, actually the biological daughter of her sister; the haters who are stalking her on Facebook; how she’s going to school us on the dance floor.  We drink.  We wait.

Then the singer stalks into the condo an hour late, and thirty minutes after the band was meant to be onstage.  He’s wearing upsized silver sneakers, brown skinny denim, and custom-made Adidas hoodie with eye-popping tribal prints (one of only five in the world, apparently).  Who knows where he’s been?  It doesn’t matter now – he’s got the band’s matching caps and t-shirts, and in two minutes the convoy of sedans carrying the band has crawled down the hill to the nightclub.

The cars all pull up and everyone gets out, and we’re standing around in a giant circle under the fluorescent lights, getting ready to make our entrance.  The sounds of a very drunk and impatient audience echo out of the door to the nightclub.  Then suddenly the singer realises that he’s left the set list back in the condo.  Frantic calls, but no-one back there is picking up.  And so he gets back in his car and drives back to collect it.  It’s a tense ten minutes as the band waits for him to return (he later tells us that he doesn’t really follow the set list, anyway – he just cues the band however he wants).

Then we get inside and are ushered to the ‘VIP area’, which turns out to be some bench couches separated from the crowd by a glass fence and several burly men, with some fancy lights in the wall.  The drinks are on the band’s rider, so of course it’s spirits, bottles of Jim Beam bought wholesale on the tab and slopped indiscriminately into glasses of coke and ice.  Everyone’s smoking, and it’s so thick that it hurts our eyes and stains our hair so badly it takes three washes to get out.  It feels, strangely enough, just like a provincial French discothèque.

Then the band walks onstage and starts playing.  We push our way to the front. It’s like the Beatles have come to POM.  Young women are screaming, shoving past security, reaching their hands out.  Beside me, a middle-aged woman dressed in all in black is standing very still, tears running down her cheeks. I hold her hand and ask her if she’s OK – yu orait mama? She tells me that she’s the sister of the singer’s mother, who recently passed away.  She’s still in mourning, that’s why she’s dressed that way.  She wanted to come to see how proud the singer would have made her sister.  When he waves at her, mid song, she clasps her hands together and bawls. 

We head off to the ladies.  There are only three cubicles for the entire club, and one’s not working.  There are fifteen sweaty women queuing up and everyone’s talking at once.  It’s going to take ages.  It’s the perfect place to take my Tok Pisin for a spin.  I yell out how happy I am to be exactly where I am, mi laikim stap lo hia, and a lady with tattoos across her forehead yells back that she’s happy that we’re there, amongst Papua New Guineans, not living above them, like other people do.

But right at that moment, a staff member with a monogrammed shirt grabs us, drags us out of the toilets, and pushes us through a hidden door in a secret wall to the staff toilets.  Two empty, quiet cubicles, for our uninterrupted use. 

A couple of lessons learned from that experience.  Full bladder trumps sentiment.  And while you can try to forget the skin you’re in, others won’t.

Then the singer has had enough.  It’s around 4am.  He’s almost the first person to leave.  He signs the last cheques, shakes the last hands, and then a group of us head back to his place for a post-party, via a drag race through the empty streets which we lose because we were following the road rules. 

The next day.  I am lying very, very still on my bed, while the children down on Ela Beach scream and play and the breeze blows through my bedroom like any other Sunday.  Suffering another rebuke from my body that I’m no longer the happy-go-lucky 20-year-old I once was, who could bounce out of bed to be a functional human being the morning after a big night.  At some stage in the afternoon, I make it downstairs and put on their CD, and I feel a little bit better.