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.

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.