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.

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.