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.