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.

Bilas peles

If you ever go up to Nusa Island Resort, just out of Kavieng, make sure you meet the bartender.  His name is Adolf.  Pardon?  Like Hitler, you know, the Nazis? he might say, like he did to us, collecting our empty beer cans and grinning, enjoying our reaction.  If his parents weren’t au fait with the details of 20^th century history, at least they gave him a name that is unlikely to ever be forgotten.

I was up in Kavieng with my mum, who has been staying with me for the last few weeks, and a couple of my colleagues from the Centre, to run a Community Legal Education (CLE) workshop for the landowners of New Hanover Island.  New Hanover is three hours by banana boat from Kavieng, New Ireland, a province so picturesque it’s universally known as ‘bilas peles’, which, creatively interpreted, translates to ‘bejewelled place’.

This CLE was particularly terrifying for me, because I was doing three presentations, entirely in Tok Pisin!  I’d been given the introduction topics – the Constitution, the separation of powers, the hierarchy of laws.  As part of my capacity-building role, I’d planned to rejig the format to make them more interactive and engaging – pictures, questions, stories, rather than just boxes of text on a Powerpoint presentation.  But because my Tok Pisin is still in its infancy, I couldn’t be as flexible as I hoped.  Nonetheless, the participants indulged me, and the presentations seemed to go down well.

I definitely have a long way to go with the Tok, but I’m working on it – reading newspapers, listening to the radio, torturing my colleagues with attempts to talk about the weather…It helps that it’s the funniest language I have ever learned.  Having its roots in the late 19^th century sugarcane fields of northern Australia, it retains a lot of Queenslandisms – for instance, ‘bagarap’ means broken, and ‘lesbaga’ means a person with a poor work ethic. Luckily, I worked out what ‘pos opis edres’ meant, before I asked someone how on earth Latin made it into Tok Pisin (FYI it means ‘post office address’). 

All CLEs are important, but this one especially so.  Almost the entire island of New Hanover has been leased out under a Special Agricultural and Business Lease (or ‘SABL’).  SABLs are a topic for another post, but in short, they are a legal loophole for land grabbing the biggest scandal in PNG land law.  Rights to use the land are signed away by self-appointed representatives, who act on behalf of themselves only, and rely upon corruption (at worst) or incompetence (at best) of government bodies tasked to oversee, approve, or veto agreements which appear to be unjust.  Customary law is effectively extinguished for the period of the lease, which can be up to 99 years, and usually is.

The legal status of customary land in PNG is totally different from Australia.  The oft-quoted figure is that 97% of PNG’s total land mass is under customary ownership.  There is no title, just a right of ownership by the clan, passed down from father to son, or mother to daughter, depending on what part of the country you’re in.  It isn’t recorded in any books, and it doesn’t need to be won back through decades-long court cases, as they were never sly enough to pull the ‘terra nullius’ line in PNG.  

During the question and answer time, I was asked to explain the customary land ownership system in Australia.  I gave a potted account of native title (thankfully in English, although I’m pretty sure that’s not the language the Native Title Act is written in, ha ha ha!).  Afterwards, chatting with the participants, they asked whether it would work in PNG.  Definitely not, I said.  One man grunted his agreement.  ‘Look at what’s happened to the Aborigines’ he said.  ‘That’s what we’d be like, if we had that here’.

The point of the CLE workshops is to bring awareness to communities about their rights, but I am beginning to see another purpose, perhaps more important.  The workshops bring everyone together in one place, men and women, leaders and the disenfranchised, for the explicit purpose of talking about the law and land.  Some of the participants have never been involved in the decisions being made about their land, nor told of the consequences. 

The workshops become a flashpoint of big emotions – grief, anger, recriminations.  Some participants were the ones who ostensibly stood to benefit from deals with the logging company, who had signed away theirs, and other people’s, rights for a song, but were seeing none of the promised benefits.  An image that sticks with me – a woman in her 50’s, a mother and grandmother, thumping her chest and talking about her deep sorrow that was present in every moment she sat still in the workshop and did nothing, while knowing her land was being taken.

But despite the divisions in the group, the community is prepared to start fresh and work together.  This was made very clear by the rousing, lengthy speeches given by the participants throughout the workshop, a feature of many public gatherings in PNG.  From the president: ‘The past has failed us.  But we can’t keep looking backwards, we have to unite and work together.’  Put more bluntly by the island’s governor-elect, ‘Enough of the fucking around.  We need to act now’. 

But this feeling was captured better than any oratorical flourishes possibly could by the New Hanover song, which was sung by the participants at the beginning of the workshop.  Led by the ‘Slim Dusty of New Ireland’ on guitar, a famous performer, the community’s jester, a very old man with a mouth collapsing around his few remaining teeth, the community sang the song of the island in soaring six-piece harmonies, in tok ples, Tok Pisin and English.  I didn’t think it was possible to get chills down my spine when suffocating in heat and humidity, but it is.

After promises to return to New Hanover, a last supper feast on mud crabs, and a gift of a traditional New Ireland basket from the guesthouse’s owner to Mum (or ‘mama’, as she was known, the title a sign of respect) it was time for us to head back to Port Moresby.  We were at the airport at 4.30am, swatting mosquitoes, sharing the very basic waiting area with sunburned Germans heading home after weeks of diving, and Papua New Guinean men dressed very strangely (for PNG) in ironed shirts and suit pants, probably on their way to meetings in the capital.

As we flew into Port Moresby, I looked out over the incinerator haze and bare hillsides, and felt the thing I least expected – like I was coming home.

I’m one week away from the three-month mark that volunteers are warned about before they get deployed – when, according to those in the know, the honeymoon period ends abruptly, your outlook dims dramatically and the little things that were once quirky now become deeply irritating.  I’ve been blessed with a very stable first three months here, due in no small part to the jaw-dropping view off my balcony, great friends, eating well, regular exercise, plenty of sleep, and meaningful occupation – it’s a clichéd ole recipe for mental wellbeing but it seems to be working.  

Thank you for reading for the first three months, and stick around, there’s nine more to go, and it’s not called land of the unexpected for nothing. 

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.