East Sepik – notes on land and place

Sorry for the late post – I’m trying to average one a week, but last weekend was full of preparations for my week-long work trip to Nungawa village, East Sepik – a fine example of the ‘real PNG’ that everyone has been telling me I must experience.  Now I’m back, have had my first wash in a week that wasn’t out of a bucket, baked some thank-you cakes, had a nice cold beer, and I’m still buzzing.  If I wasn’t fully there before, I am now 100% committed to seeing as much of this beautiful, crazy country, beyond POM’s city limits, as I possibly can.

We were up in Nungawa to deliver a community legal education (CLE) workshop.  As it turns out, organising an event in PNG is mind-numbingly complex. As host, you are responsible for the food, shelter, and transport of not only yourself, but every participant, for the duration of the event, and then getting them back home.  At every turn, there are negotiations and calculations, decisions made on the fly and on an extremely tight budget.  Happily for me, my rudimentary Tok Pisin meant that I remained in ignorant bliss about most of what was going on around me, but I was deeply impressed by the equanimity of my colleagues, as almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, for instance: 

…A PMV we chartered was meant to collect us from the airport.  It didn’t.  Instead, it took a group of people who made it past the baggage claim first, and we had to wait for three hours before another PMV came along and took us the two hours to the village, arriving right on dusk, tired and hungry…

…Our contact on the ground, a local bigman, was meant to coordinate our trip and negotiate prices and labour with the villagers.  He didn’t.  He had been too busy campaigning for the upcoming election, and wouldn’t answer his phone at crucial moments, leaving us to deal with a stack of misunderstandings and awkward conversations…

…The workshop was meant to start on Monday.  It didn’t.  Only five participants had arrived by the time it was meant to kick off.  So we postponed until Tuesday, and waited around for word, workshopping plans B and C.  At dusk we found out that a PMV carrying the participants had broken down on the way, and they were stranded waiting for another vehicle.  They finally rolled into the village at 9pm, having made the last 15km in a PMV with no headlights, guided along the perilous road by two torches duct-taped to the bumper bar…

But by Tuesday, everyone had arrived, everything was in place, and we were ready to begin.  At 9am, the garamut (a big wooden drum that serves as the main form of communication for the villagers) was beaten three times, and half an hour later the participants had gathered in the venue, an open-sided hall, with a palm-thatched roof and a dirt floor.  The meeting was opened with a prayer, the blessings sealed with three claps, and the workshop began.

Part of the Centre’s core work is to run CLE programs to educate customary landowners about their rights under PNG law, starting with the Constitution (‘mama lo’) and going right down to the individual acts.  As well as the educative aspect, landowners can have their questions answered and get on-the-spot legal advice. 

In Nungawa, the main concern is the operations of a company which is logging in a nearby forest and transporting the logs on massive trucks on a road that runs straight through the village.  Like many unsavoury operators in PNG, the company got an ‘agricultural’ lease on the land, ostensibly for planting oil palm.  But it’s become apparent that the oil palm plantation is a ruse, and the company’s main operations are the logging of valuable kwila trees, which they transport as whole logs to the wharves and ship to Malaysia for processing.

By getting an agricultural lease instead of a forestry lease, the company bypassed the necessarily regulatory requirements under the forestry acts which make sure that the operations are transparent, sustainable, and importantly, that the customary landowners have given their free, prior, and informed consent to any operations.  None of this happened, and the company now has a 99-year lease over the landowners’ land, and with the support of local police, are doing whatever they want with impunity.

It was spine-chilling to watch as the landowners learned how the law worked, how it was meant to protect them, and how badly they had been cheated and exploited by the company.  The purpose of the CLE program is to raise awareness, not to aggravate situations, but by the time we left the landowners had resolved to start blocking the road and were discussing ways they could seek some redress for the situation.

The abuse of the agricultural and business leases (SABL) loophole over the last 10 years has led to almost 5 million hectares of customary land, 11 percent of PNG’s total land area, ending up in the hands of corporations.  The problems in Nungawa village are not unusual and are repeated in likely hundreds of communities across the country.  A special report into the SABLs is due to be released this week or next, but knowing the vast gap between promise and delivery in PNG, I am not holding my breath.

As a newly-arrived volunteer who barely knows my arse from my head when it comes to how the Centre / PNG / environmental law works, the CLE program was as educational for me as it was for the participants.  Given the low level of literacy in the village, the program was delivered entirely in Tok Pisin and mostly verbal, and it was quietly thrilling as every day it got easier for me to keep up with what was being said.  By the last day, the villagers kindly indulged me and I was up on my feet doing a presentation in stilted, terribly accented Tok Pisin.

The most important thing I got from the workshop was a deeply felt understanding of the importance of land in PNG.  In Australia, land is primarily an asset, something that you can borrow against, that you can build your life on, short as it is.  Having Torrens title makes you the rightful owner of your patch, even if it’s just the tangible part of the framework the State has chosen to utilize to order, categorise and monetise land.  As we learned in legal theory (and as I tried to extrapolate upon in my extremely convoluted and now woefully dated 2008 essay about real property in Second Life) land, like all property, is best viewed as a ‘bundle of rights’, each of which can be separately or jointly exploited at the whim of the current owner.

In PNG, ‘Where you are from?’ is always the first question everyone asks each other (that is, if the answer isn’t immediately obvious from one glance at your face).  Your ples (place) is your identity, birthright, safe haven and resting ground, your dependant and your guardian.  When everything else fails, you can return home and your ples will provide for you. 

Even in Australia, in every place I have lived, including the farm where I grew up and which has been in my family for generations, I have never felt anything like this connection to land.  I have always felt like I was a visitor, just passing through.

Being in Nungawa, on the beautiful Sepik Plains, being shown around by the customary landowners, learning about their land and the deeply offensive idea that it had been taken from them without their consent, I was struck by how, in contrast, Port Moresby is a ‘nothing place’.  People come here – they’re not from here.  Even if a person is POM born and bred, they won’t admit to it – they’ll gloss over the details and say they’re from Central Province, or refer to their mother’s or father’s ples instead.  This ownership vacuum probably plays a part in Port Moresby’s crime problems.  With no-one acting like its parent, it’s no wonder it goes feral sometimes. 

Getting around

I’ve almost been in PNG a month, and I’ve been reflecting on how lucky I was to have spoken to so many ex-PNG dwellers before I came over.   So many coffees, emails, lunches, wine dates and Skype chats with ex-volunteers, colleagues, friends of friends, and total strangers generous enough to give me some of their time.  They were singularly excited about my opportunity and their stories were overwhelmingly positive.  They also laid down some hard truths about daily life in PNG.

The consequence is that I have felt quite well prepared for life here, much better than I was before I moved to Sweden, then Germany a few years later.  Even though those countries were ‘Western’ with all their familiar trimmings, I was totally in the dark about the Swedish state’s monopoly on the sale of liquor, and the German sense of humour, both of which would have been useful to know in advance.

From what I’d been told about Port Moresby, I believed my personal Everest re: life adjustment would be that I couldn’t go where I wanted, when I wanted.  That living out a life in a compound, or certain ‘safe’ areas, would be claustrophobic and suffocating and I would go crazy without serious daily meditation.  That’s a part of it, but not quite.  Restraint on my freedom of movement has been the biggest hurdle, but surprisingly, the problem lies not with the ‘restraint’, but with the ‘movement’.

Port Moresby’s transport options are busses and cars.  The busses, or PMV’s (public motorised vehicle – I think) are cheap, cheerful, and completely off-limits for volunteers under the program.  Don’t even get me started about alternative forms of transport.  The only bicycle I’ve seen was being ridden by a kid across a paddock (extremely poorly, I might add).  And I haven’t seen a single motorbike yet.

So it’s down to cars.  Only two taxi companies are reputable, but even then they’re unreliable and expensive.  To overcome crippling transport issues, and to ensure the safety of their precious cargo, the program has enlisted a hire company to provide an after-hours driver and car to be shared among the volunteers in POM (about 8 at the moment).  You call up the 24-hour number, tell the driver where you are, and if everything works out, they’ll pick you up at roughly the right time and take you where you want to go.

It’s a one-of-a-kind arrangement, which isn’t perfect, and allegedly costs a bomb, but it allows one to carve out a life outside the compound.  The drivers are friendly, professional, and patient.  And we are very lucky.  Some volunteer organisations leave their vollies to fend for themselves.

During business hours I have a different arrangement.  My work has undertaken to provide me with transport between work and home.  When they first agreed to this six months ago, I guess they thought it was in the bag.  But since then, the front tyre fell clean off the company car while it was going around a roundabout, and practically all of the annual transport budget was sunk into getting it repaired until the mechanic finally fessed up that, even if they could fix it, it would be a death trap to drive.

So with no funds left, my transport is my boss, who leaves his home half an hour early to negotiate the traffic on the north side of town.  Or when boss is busy or away, it’s the taxi driver I mentioned a few posts ago (whom I frankly never expected to see again) who flies the Maroons State of Origin flag from his antennae and occasionally texts me updates of the scores of NRL games.  I still don’t know the first thing about rugby, but I appreciate the thought.

Mr Taxi is still K40 (AUD$20) a day, too expensive for an ongoing option. So for the meantime, my transport starts at 7.40am every day, when I hear boss beeping at the guards to let him in the front gate, and then the sound of his sedan groaning up the hill to my house.  I get in the car, and he puts it into reverse, at which time the GPS system greets us in friendly yet cautionary Japanese.  We joke about kidnapping the next Japanese person who comes to town to finally shed some light on what the old duck is saying.

On our way to work, when my boss isn’t encouraging my nascent Tok Pisin (PNG’s national language) he likes point out the number of illegal PMVs on the roads.  PMVs are white and green/purple minibusses, usually packed to bursting with passengers hanging on in the doorway.  They have routes, and collect fares, but you have to pay a registration fee to be legal, and most don’t bother.  With road law enforcement limited to licence checks at lumbering road-blocks (easily avoided once the word gets out), illegal PMVs flourish.  There are a lot of people in POM and they need to get around.  If a driver wants to make extra cash, he’ll only do a half-trip – take everyone’s fare, but order them off the bus at the halfway point and circle back to the start of the route to do the same thing again.

My dad always said the best way to drive was like everyone’s out to get you.  As a learner driver, I didn’t like this approach – I thought it was paranoid and took a dim view of the competency of fellow drivers, who should be given the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise (sorry Dad!).  But here, people DO drive like they’re out to get you.  Lane lines are treated like a mere decorative feature, speed limits are non-existent, and looking before you merge just does not happen.

But on the flip-side, people also drive like my dad – hyper-vigilant pessimists under constant attack, expecting the worst.  Drivers have lightning-quick reflexes and are responsive to what’s happening around them.  If anyone looks like they’re about to do anything stupid, other drivers will beep at them, and they’ll pull their head in quick-smart.

My drive into work is relatively smooth, thanks in no small part to Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla.  If a royal cavalcade or prime ministerial convoy will be driving along a particular road on their short trip to PNG, you can be certain that in the weeks before that road would have been redone and resealed, bringing the entire city to a standstill while the local government puts on a good front for its international guests.  As the royal couple sailed along the Poreporena Highway late last year, they would have had no inkling that most parts of POM have roads so rough they can break axles and potholes so big you could bathe in them.  Long-term residents now talk about engineering a ‘scenic tour’ which goes right past their compound for the next visiting dignitary.

At around 4.15pm, the end of my working day, my boss drives me back over the hill into Town and drops me off out the front of The Aviat, a dilapidated but much-loved sports club that looks like it’s straight out of Townsville, Queensland, and serves SP Beer at AUD$3.50 a stubbie in return for having every flat surface double as SP Beer advertising space.  It also has a cheap and mostly empty gym, so I muck around there for an hour or so, until 5.30pm, when we call the driver company to pick us up at 6pm.  6pm is the ideal, but PNG is not called the land of the unexpected for nothing.  POM is beating patience into me, one late pickup at a time.

 

If you are my friend on Facebook, you can check out some of my photos behind my stories here.

Social life

Friday night after work is no different here than it was in Australia.  The happy-hearted feeling about the boundless possibilities for the weekend, the pressing need for a cold beer, the excess energy.  Lucky for me, Heather is also a dance fiend, and neither of us needed much convincing that Friday was just right for our first excursion to Lamana.

Lamana is POM’s ‘premiere’ nightclub, three stories of Ibiza-esque lights, noise and hard spirits, wedged in behind a strip of government buildings in the Waigani district.  The balconies look down onto an open-air dancefloor, where you can watch people jiving in the scantiest pieces of clothing outside Mykonos.  The crowd is mostly nationals, with a few white people predictably embarrassing themselves on the fringes.

It felt so great just to dance, in a place where physical movement is either restricted or planned well in advance.  And safe – Heather’s partner, Kelvin, was with us, and his mere presence as a big, buff, Papua New Guinean man is excellent general deterrent.  My elation lasted for days, barely dampened by the police roadblock on the way home (totally illegal – it seems like most of the things police do here are illegal) or my less-than-spritely demeanour the next morning.

On Sunday, I went to my first meeting of the Port Moresby Ladies’ Association at the US Embassy Residential Compound.  The PMLA is a group of friends who have elevated their status to an organisation with a fancy title, much like my beloved Law Ladies Who Lunch back home in Melbourne.  Its members are mostly partnered expat women, from the States and Australia (although there were some French and Mexican ladies there too) who have lived in POM for a while and got their lives pretty well set up.

The themes were Pot Luck Brunch / Clothes Swap / Breakfast at Tiffany’s / Pool.  My humble scones and jam were no match for the gourmet breakfast food the women put on, including Crème Brulee French Toast and Mexican Breakfast Lasagne.  As befitting the occasion, there was an endless supply of sparkling wine and gossip.  At sometime in the afternoon, The Men, who had been in the next apartment over watching Django Unchained and eating pizza, came to visit and quickly decamped to the basement.  After seven hours I called it a day, and left while the party was still going strong, with a mani-pedi assembly line on the coffee table and Bride Wars on Blu-Ray.

Last week was World Environment Day, and the Centre had a stall at a schools event organised by the Department for Environment and Conservation (DEC). I was given my very own World Environment Day T-Shirt, a polyester polo with this year’s message, ‘Think, Eat, Save’ screenprinted on the back.  There is a thriving T-shirt culture in PNG and T-shirts are in high demand, particularly ones with printed words.  Sometimes it’s inconceivable that the wearer actually knows what the words say.  For instance, the elderly woman with a T-shirt that reads ‘The Liver is Evil and MUST be Punished!’ But I digress.

I got many compliments on my t-shirt, particularly its size and colour, despite it almost coming to my knees, and being that fluorescent lime green that only the most shameless of cyclists wear.  But all my colleagues were wearing the same bright colours, so at least I felt like part of the team.

The event itself was interesting.  It was held on the indoor basketball courts, a massive empty space, which dwarfed the stage and the stalls that the Centre and other environmental NGOs had put up.  The main entertainment was an all-male singsing group (singing and dancing, in traditional dress) from the Milne Bay area, who performed a courting song which was heavy on the emphatic groin thrusts and arse-slapping, much to the delighted screams of the schoolkids and embarrassed laughter from the NGOs.

The main act was the Minister, who gave an impressively long speech about the environment and his childhood and how good the DEC/Government/PNG was with environmental conservation.  Unfortunately I tuned out, and instead spent the time practicing the phrase ‘He just likes the sound of his own voice’ in Tok Pisin until my pronunciation was just right.

Then it was onto the awards for environmental competitions that the schools had run earlier in the week for debates, essays and projects.  We didn’t get to see any of the works, but we applauded as the mortified kids ran all the way up to the stage to shake hands and receive their prizes. Prizes included laptops, vouchers, and wheelie bins full of rakes. At the end of the day, so that no-one went away empty handed, the Minister announced that every school would receive 1,000 kina (about $500AUD).  Gotta love those cash-payment afterthoughts.

In the morning, before the schoolkids got there, two representatives from the company Rimbuan Hijau (RH) arrived to case the joint.  Everyone watched as the two extremely conspicuous Malaysian gentlemen in ironed business shirts, chinos, and RH langyards strolled around, taking one copy of every brochure.

RH is a notorious wood processing company which has been involved in some very bad environmental practices.  Having gone head-to-head against it in the past, the Centre now runs an informal boycott against it.  But it’s hard to do as RH is practically everywhere.  It built Vision City, POM’s first mall.  It runs a popular supermarket called ‘RH Hypermarket’ which specialises in Asian foods, particularly tofu, that beloved protein of mine.  It owns The National, one of PNG’s two daily newspapers.  Vision City, at least, is unavoidable – my colleagues instead refer to it as ‘that bad place’ and try to avoid seeing anyone when they go there.

One more story from this week.  I call my driver to pick me up from the gym.  Standard procedure.  He didn’t answer, but a woman did.  She asked who I was, I told her my name, and said I’d reach my driver on another number.  Then I hung up.  Then I got three missed calls.  Then a message:

HW DA **** R U ILL TEAR U APAT ELUZA

Two more missed calls, then:

IL HUNT U DOWN

PLS EXPLAN IF U DON WANT TO DIE COS AM A WITCH

Then fourteen more missed calls.  Then quite a few more messages, mostly threatening, some cajoling, all short quite a few letters.

It became quite clear that the woman was in a relationship of sorts with my driver, and she thought he was cheating on her with me.  Not exactly a logical conclusion, given that he was a driver and would have plenty of women’s numbers in his phone, who would be calling him at all hours.  But not something to be laughed at, as tempers can flare pretty quickly when it comes to jealousy, and the outcome often violent.  Luckily she only had my name and number, so I was safe.

By 9am the next day, I’d let the program know (threats are a reportable security incident) and they recommended that I get a Papua New Guinean man to speak very aggressively in Tok Pisin next time she called.  It’s a well-known remedy to phone stalkers.  My work colleague was raring to go and almost took my phone out of my hands to call her.  I resisted, wanting her to come to me, but she didn’t call again.

I found out later that my driver had gone to confront her and explain the situation to her, but before he could do so, her brother came up behind him and hit him with a brick.  But he got away safely, and he doesn’t want to talk about it.  ‘I’m sorry’, he said, when he picked me up to go to the supermarket.  ‘It’s over now’.

The working week

Like all good things, my life of leisure on the balcony of the banana house had to come to an end, and end it did on Monday, my first day at work.  My workplace, the Centre, is a small environmental law NGO, almost certainly the only one in PNG, which is dedicated to promoting and defending environmental and customary rights in PNG through law and advocacy to ensure sustainable resource management for the benefit of present and future generations. 

The Centre has two main activities: legal representation and litigation for customary landowners; and community legal education workshops in villages in the sights of mining or forestry companies. There is an urgent and woefully under-resourced need for both of these, exacerbated by the poaching of most of PNG’s environmental law lawyers from NGOs to work directly on the Liquid Nitrogen Gas (LNG) Project.  And then there’s the scale and brazen nature of the environmental disasters and legal injustices some companies are involved with.  For instance, where landowner signatures have been forged on a 99-year lease over massive tracts of customary land.  Or when a company flies in police on the state payroll and pays them directly to harass, assault, imprison and maliciously prosecute legally protesting landowners.

The volunteering I’m doing is capacity building, which means I’m not taking a specific job which could go to a Papua New Guinean (or ‘national’ as they are referred to by expats) – instead, I’m working collaboratively with staff to build their skills and improve the way the organisation works, so that when I leave, the positive changes remain.

Unlike many people who volunteer under the program, I didn’t study ‘development’ at uni, so I’m on pretty shaky ground when it comes to understanding how to actually, literally, capacity build.  But those in the know say that for the first three months, you shouldn’t try to do anything substantial, but instead read, listen, participate, and learn, until you have worked out how things operate, who the bright sparks are, and what changes are likely to be embraced, rather than turfed the moment you leave.

The office is located at the top of a punishing set of stairs in a compound in downtown dusty Hohola, a suburb about 15 minutes’ drive from my compound and a hub for civil society organisations.  The RSPCA’s on the corner, ChildFund is down the road, and we’re directly above Medicines San Frontiers, a fisheries watchdog group, and a cage for two intimidating green parrots.

I’m meant to have a driver to take me to and from work, but that arrangement was terminated after a no-show one night (which I’m guessing was party and/or opportunistic afternoon drinking related).  Now my boss himself is picking me up every morning, after having navigated the bottlenecked traffic north of POM and coaxed his struggling Japanese sedan up the steep hill to my compound.

The staff at the Centre are lovely, and the women are especially friendly and funny.  They lobbied for me to get permission to leave the office with them at lunchtime so that I can sample the hot chips downstairs, and reacted with extreme joy when I wore my meri blaus, the sack-shaped, colourful, remarkably comfortable, national costume for women.

They’re also very resourceful.  On Tuesday, a talkback radio program held a panel on topical environmental issues, which included one of our lawyers, and we all listened in on a wireless someone found in a cupboard in Finance.  Between heckling and suppressed giggling, one of the legal interns phoned in, posing as ‘Crystal from East Sepik’, and asked the panel Dorothy Dixer questions about access to legal information for people in the villages.  Given that literacy rates in PNG are only somewhere around 60%, radio’s the medium for getting your message across, and the opportunity was seized with gusto and to great effect.

But despite work being awesome, I’ve been struck down with my very first health issue.  Let me put it in context.  Since my ancestors emerged from the bogs of Ireland one hundred and fifty years ago and set sail for a better life, five generations of exposure to the scorching Australian sun has done nothing to better equip their descendents for life in the southern hemisphere.  For example: despite being a vocal proponent of the ability of Australians to be both pale and socially accepted, I’ve already had some sunspots removed, and I’m on a strict daily sun-protection regime until the end of my days.

But despite my bodily failings, I’ve been I’m not totally fresh out of the box.  I’ve been to tropical environments before.  I was prepared for the swollen ankles, the frizzy hair, the humiliating sweat patches. But not, as it turns out, for PNG air-conditioning.

It might be that it’s cranked up so high that cardigans and shawls are a common office accessory, despite it being 32 degrees outside.  Or that it’s not quite filtering out the smoke from streetside incinerators burning everywhere in this city, now that the wet season is over and the rubbish is finally dry enough to torch.  But whatever the cause, the result is bloodshot, weepy, veiny eyeballs, that feel like they’re full of sand and look like I’ve been on a three-week bender.  A contact-lenses wearer for fifteen years with barely any problems, PNG has laid me low.

Before I left, I bought a pair of glasses for free, a first-time customer offer, from a company known for its prolific Facebook advertising (I’m not giving it to them for free here).  Turns out my eyes are much closer set than I estimated, and the result is a pair of glasses that fall off my head with every downward glance.   But my lenses have failed, and these are my only plan B.  This drove me so crazy at work that I ended up fashioning a makeshift ‘glasses strap’ out of hair elastics, to hold them onto my head, and hiding the whole shameful contraption under my hair.  I’m giving my eyes five days to recover, then I’ll work out what next.  Glasses strap, for obvious reasons, isn’t a long term solution.

It felt like the week had barely begun, and then it was Friday night, and first stop was the monthly drinks at the Australian High Commission, known to Port Moresby locals as ‘Fort Shitscared’ for its, some would say paranoid, profusion of barbed wire, guards and dogs.  It was an 80’s night, and our resourceful expats had stretched the theme as far as possible across several decades.  Because technically it’s illegal to sell alcohol, an ingenious system has been devised where you first buy a ‘drinks card’ at a stall, then walk five metres to the bar, have your drinks card punched, then get your beer.

We met, and heard of, some interesting characters that night.  The older expats who take off their wedding rings and flirt like mad with everything that moves.  The younger expats who only come here to chase the Australian Public Service grade salary bump-up that comes with the hardship location. Or the poor sod who recently ended a relationship with a Papua New Guinean woman and was now waiting in fear for her family, who have threatened to dismember and kill him, to come knocking on his door (the word is that due to some powerful backers in business, he’s safe for the time being).  I’ve realised that it’s a close-knit expat community with a love of a good yarn, and great stories like that won’t stay secret for long.

Banana boat to banana house

I’ve moved into a banana house. Everything around me is yellow – from the heavy security grills on the external doors, to the balcony railing, to the interior walls (by the good grace of some omnipresence being, a paler shade). Approaching Port Moresby by boat, you see steep hills covered in compounds and apartments, a patchwork of dull grey concrete and glass. And then there’s my place, halfway up, shining happily like a radioactive pimple.

You probably know by now, but expats in Port Moresby (‘POM’ for short) all live in compounds, and that’s just the way it is. My compound doesn’t really have a street address as such – officially, it’s something like Lot X, Section X, Subdivision X, and most people are as dumbfounded as Google Maps certainly is if you give them those coordinates. But most navigation in POM seems to be done in reference to landmarks, so once you can name a nearby hotel or club, you’re pretty much home and hosed. Literally.

My compound is guarded around the clock, and is surrounded by high fences topped with coils of barbed wire. I have three locks on every external door. But once I make it onto the balcony (after I’ve lost my self-composure tussling with my twenty or so keys yet again) I can’t see any of it, and the view is fantastic, over Ela Beach, the coral reef, the islands, and straight south to Australia. A sea breeze is constantly flowing through my house. Yesterday there was even a rainbow, just to put a cherry right on top of my wonderful house sundae.

Housing prices are totally insane in Port Moresby, tear-jerkingly exorbitant, an aspect of the world’s limitless and dedicated interest in PNG’s natural resources that they are certainly not thanking us for. My place is at least three times what I was paying in Melbourne for my inner-suburbs bachelor pad. And I’m a volunteer, not making anyone any money and definitely not making it myself. It sounds like if you’re not on the consulting gravy train, or in mining, or the LNG project, you can’t afford to live here unless your work covers the cost of your accommodation. Or you’re a dependent (or ‘trailing’, strange word) spouse.

Lucky for me, my accommodation costs are paid for by the program I’m volunteering with. I am only just starting to understand what a rare and privileged position I am in.

Moving on from housing, development, and cost of living (stay tuned for rants on these topics in the coming months) this week has been extremely hectic with countless stories and events occurring in the last four days. In short, we finished up our induction at Wellness Lodge, went on our first unescorted excursion, moved into our houses, and spent lots and lots of kina buying the main bits and pieces that constitute a just-functional house.

On Thursday, after four days induction at Wellness Eco Lodge, we were driven to the jetty at Ela Beach to be taken to Fisherman’s Island, a small community 20 minutes on banana boat from POM. We were going to stay the night with Joel, a man who works in the tourism department on the mainland, and his extended family.

A few years ago Joel decided that tourism would be well served by having visitors experience living like the majority of Paupua New Guineans, in a village, in order to better understand the country. Someone in the program heard about Joel, and they knew someone who knew someone who knew him, and two years later Emily, Heather and I are in a banana boat, wearing lifejackets in accordance with program policy (in stark contrast to the crew), watching Port Moresby recede behind us and wondering whether the tropical island straight ahead with the yellow sands and cartoon-like palm tree silhouettes could possibly be our destination.

About a thousand people live on Fisherman’s Island, and have for many generations, but it has no freshwater supply save for the rainwater they can catch when it comes, and this, they told me, is very infrequently. In order to survive, the villagers must buy drums of water from their friends in a sister village in Port Moresby, and arrange for it to be shipped out across the choppy strait on banana boats. The language is also completely different, and the Papua New Guinean woman from the program who accompanied us, and who lives directly opposite in a village on the mainland, couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

After four days at Wellness, the safety and freedom of Fisherman’s Island was great. We spent a very leisurely day walking around, musing on the much-missed joys of perambulating…

…playing soccer with the ever-present scrum of kids who watched us through the window when we ate and whispered/screamed/stated quite factually ‘bratasina’ (‘white woman’) at us…

…taking photographs of the pigs in wood cages along the shoreline who were squealing their heads off as the tide came in metres below them, trying not to imagine whether they experienced this level of distress every 12 hours…

…swimming in the lukewarm sea in t-shirts and shorts (PNG-style bathers) over colonies of fat thorny starfishes…

…watching a fast and ferocious netball game, played on a sand court, with the rest of the villagers who sat around chewing buai and screaming with laughter when the players fell over and dusted themselves off with big grins…

After dinner, the bell tolled for church service, the night’s big event. I’ve been thinking a lot about going to church in PNG. Not for any religious reason – I’m unlikely to see the light anytime soon – but I want to do what I can to be part of the PNG community, not just the expat community, and church seems to be the backbone of community in PNG. Em & Heather were also interested, so we went along to check it out.

Because the church was packed and it was a hot night, we sat outside the church on a pew that had been liberated from its brethren and watched the service through an open window. The men and women sat on separate sides of the aisle in their Sunday best, and sang hymns in three-piece harmony in perfect pitch, sounding nothing like the grating union of unflinching sopranos and mumbling tenors that issue forth from congregations back home.

The service was mostly in Pidgin and the local language, so I drifted in and out, but suddenly I heard the word ‘tourist’ and felt Em and Heather stiffen beside me. The congregation stared at us, smiling. Joel translated softly: ‘He’s saying welcome to the tourists who are visiting the community. He hopes that you enjoy your stay here, and that you have safe travels and may God protect you on your way’. Then the congregation closed the blessing with a CLAP CLAP – CLAP CLAP CLAP! and went onto other business. We were stunned. It’s a good feeling, you know, to receive a blessing from the faithful, particularly when the sentiment is so on-point.

The next day, we said our goodbyes to the family, swapped numbers, promised to come back, and hopped back onto the banana boat to POM. We circled into the harbour and there was my yellow house on the hill. I feel so better prepared now to start my risk-managed, security-conscious, compound-living life, now I know that Fisherman’s Island freedom is not so far away.

Chewing buai

The moment my molars split the flesh of the buai nut, my mouth goes numb. I grab onto the chair in front of me. ‘Keep chewing!’ commands Nigel, the Papua New Guinean man in charge of program development, who has gleefully taken it upon himself to give the newly arrived volunteers an introduction to PNG’s favourite stimulant. ‘Everyone talks about buai, betel nut, but it’s important that you actually know how it works and what it feels like’ he says, ‘And here you can do it in a controlled environment’.

This environment is the wood-panelled dining room of the Wellness Eco Lodge, where we have spent the first day of our week-long induction briefing. The walls of the compound are painted with the directives NO SMOKING NO ALCOHOL NO CHEWING in bright red. But it looks like we’re the exception. The manager walks past and grins. The waitress rolls her eyes, watching us from the kitchen.

Heather, a volunteer to my left, gags and spits the nut into the bin at our feet. On my right, Emily is chomping away, with a pained look on her face. My mouth is full of juice and spit, and I spit it into the bin, then spit almost immediately again, bringing the bin right up to my chin while trying to hold the partially masticated mess in my cheek.

‘OK, now get the mustard, and dip it into the lime’ says Nigel. These ingredients are sitting on the table, and neither look like the mustard or lime I’m familiar with. The mustard looks like the seed pod of a silver birch, and the lime is actually lime, the mineral, the powder used to mark lines on tennis courts, not the citrus you squeeze over your pad thai.

I roll the mustard around in the lime. ‘Too much’ says Nigel. I dust it off. ‘Hmm, not enough’ he says. I’m talking to an expert. When I asked him if he chewed a lot, he grinned at me with his red-stained teeth and said ‘Of course’. He vetoed the first buai I cracked open because it was too pink, which means it’s extra potent, and might overpower a first-time like me.

I bite off the lime-covered end of the mustard stick and attempt to mash it into the buai flesh in my mouth. At this point, Emily is done – she spits it out and cracks up laughing.

Like a cow steadfastly munching away on the cud, I continue to chew, spit, chew, spit, watching my spit turn pinker with every bite. I start to feel the speedy effects of the chemical reaction taking place on my tongue – my eyes widen, I feel the air-conditioner breeze on the hairs on my arms, like my whole body has been hoisted a few centimetres up.

Then I’m done, and I deposit the mash into the bin, where it sits stodgily among the green buai shells like vomit after a night on vodka and pizza. ‘Congratulations!’ says Nigel. ‘That is buai!’

I neck two glasses of water and try to pick the fibres out from between my teeth, the terrible taste still haunting me. Nigel packs up the equipment and bids us farewell. Before I have time to fully recover, we’re on the phone to our taxi company, trying to organise the pick-up for our first solo expedition beyond the compound gates to Vision City, Port Moresby’s first mall. Then the lightning flashes and the sky opens, and the power goes out, again.

XOXO

I’m in the air, strapped into the emergency exit row, many thousands of metres above the country I’m leaving today. I’m off to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, to volunteer as a legal officer for an environmental law NGO, for one whole year.

The day has arrived, and I’m waiting for it to sink in, still bracing myself for the anxiety, regret, and/or euphoria which I thought I would feel. But like most of the finalisations and farewells of the last two weeks, I feel very matter-of-fact about it all.

I’m leaving Melbourne, my gorgeous, easy city, but I feel stagnant from so much comfort, and the road has been beckoning for some time now.

I’ve quit my job, but I’d been there for three years, the longest I’ve had any job, an eternity for any Gen Y’er schooled in optimism and opportunism.

I’ve broken my lease, and I’ve still got eleven months left on my mobile phone contract, but it’s just money, right? And it gives me a vague sense of satisfaction that it’s my financial and legal relationships, rather than the ones that actually matter, that have caused me the most grief in my departure.

I’ve left my friends and family, but Port Moresby is still in the same timezone, and the nearest part of Australia is only 11km away, and a pub in Cairns only an hour and a half by plane. It doesn’t feel so far removed, at least in theory.

Like some overprepared expat nightmare, I have checked almost 50kg of baggage, which includes my yoga mat, new runners, speakers, art supplies, books I never had the stomach to tackle in Australia (starting with Swann’s Way, highly recommended by my sister), clothes I never had the gall to wear in Australia (knee-length shorts, Crocs), and a very serious-looking medical kit for all the tropical diseases and parasitic worms PNG can throw at us. Qantas has happily waived the excess baggage fees for the leg to Brisbane, but as Air Niugini doesn’t have quite the same, shall we say, customer service standards, I’m prepared to conduct my first bit of PNG-related advocacy haggling like my life depends on it at the check-in counter.

Commencing our descent. See you on the other side!