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.
Papua New Ginnivan 