This week, I have been concentrating – compacting memories with a squinched intensity, hard-pressured enough to push a shutter in my mind, and capture these things for you. So.
(snap)
At the far edge of the island, Mark, posed like an explorer – legs an intrepid triangle, balancing on the scribbled sharp volcanic splash of rock and pointing towards New Hanover on the horizon. He is holding a single beer bottle, which we have been passing between us with swashbuckling egalitarianism. Beside him, there is a small
(snap)
spotted white dog – damp and rakish, with a cheeky tilt to his head – he swam after our boat, and appointed himself our tour guide, leading us through
(snap)
thick-winding jungle, coconuts, vines like dark cords – shells and coral underfoot, where Japanese guns loom in secret clearings.
Here are some images of training:
an overhead view, perhaps, of a cluster of heads and hands and whiteboard markers, bent round a single sheet of butchers’ paper; and the mandatory group portrait – look-at-us-smiling-we-have-matching-t-shirts! – which in this case, is captured on a white sand beach – behind them, coconut palms, bending coy and conspiratorial and
(snap)
a stretch of sea, impossible, turquoise-bright – and way, way out, in the corner of the frame, an optical quirk: the dark figures of young boys fishing, one duck-diving, bobbing, the other standing on a submerged reef. From this angle, he is a parable.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
The Smallest Voices
“…Yeah, I’ve heard there are places in New Ireland where children aren’t allowed to go after dark…?”
Mark leans back – curious, polite. He and Suzie are old friends, and she has flags in the corners of her face for him: a smile, a twitch, a purse, an eyebrow, not quite a wink. Suzie has been telling us about island sorcery – the love spells that will set you barefoot, night-wandering, mad – the women who cast their spirits out to wander with stolen forms and strange faces – who wake tired – and people who are willed to death. But: “It won’t work if you don’t believe it…” (don’t worry white kids). She directs an amused glance at me, my body language inverted – I am leaning towards her, eyes wide, frightened – certainly half-believing, at least for this moment in the dim light of the balcony, folded as we are in the blackness of the Bismarck Sea.
“Yes – and when they come back, they cry, cry, and they lose weight…”
They waste away. Their spirits are detached from them, and they must be called back. Pat tells us that in her husband’s place, in Central Province, children can’t be carried in bilums after dusk – they might be snatched from their parents’ backs. Strange things happen after dark, Suzie and Pat agree. And you know something is wrong when a child won’t stop crying.
My return to Alotau is on a little plane again, cramped and sweaty after a marionette sprint across the tarmac. I have two scotch fingers, apple juice in one of those airline plastic cups that remind me of doctors’ samples, and a blocked nose which makes me feel as if my eardrums are bursting. Around me, the smaller passengers seem to be suffering the same misapprehension – there is a chorus of screaming that keeps up throughout the hour-long flight, which gives me ample time to reflect on how silent, for the most part, Papua New Guinean children can be.
Don’t get me wrong, there is boisterous noise – as I write, I can hear the scattered register of small voices, swooping, screeching. Every day at 3pm, kids cluster behind the probation office and pelt rocks at the fruit trees that overhang the fence, by the river – clunk, clunk, on the flat tin roof until Karen affects a gruff bass and bellows “HEY!” from behind our faded curtains. It is part of my job to visit schools, and attempt to demystify this country’s juvenile justice framework while seven-year-old potential felons (and let’s not forget, in PNG the age of criminal responsibility is still seven years old) wriggle and giggle like a hat full of caterpillars. I believe I can say with some authority that there are plenty of happy sounds to be heard from the children of PNG – it’s the sounds of distress that are missing. Children don’t cry.
Even when they are four years old and they have cut their fingers deeply on the small knife that their grandmother was using to pierce coconuts for the white lady and the other strangers at the centre of the family’s orbiting attention. What they do then is they take a grubby piece of fabric and they wrap it round their little injured hand and hover quietly at the edges of conversation until somebody notices, answering in a fuzzy whisper:
“… hurt …”
“… knife …”
At the school, the teachers had a hundred questions – not about juvenile justice, or the responses I have rehearsed with the kids (“Who do we ask for?” “SEEBEESEE!”) – but about child protection, and the new Lukautim Pikinini Act. Could we tell the children about child abuse? What are their rights? They brought us anecdotes – neglect, bruises. Babies having babies and fingers pointing at fathers.
There are so many ways that it hurts to be a child in PNG. They are brutally enumerated in the literature I trawl through in empty hours at work. And now I am shivering again, in the heavy air, in my big bright room full of dappled sunlight. Who knows what dark things it would take to make these tiny stoics cry and cry and cry.
Mark leans back – curious, polite. He and Suzie are old friends, and she has flags in the corners of her face for him: a smile, a twitch, a purse, an eyebrow, not quite a wink. Suzie has been telling us about island sorcery – the love spells that will set you barefoot, night-wandering, mad – the women who cast their spirits out to wander with stolen forms and strange faces – who wake tired – and people who are willed to death. But: “It won’t work if you don’t believe it…” (don’t worry white kids). She directs an amused glance at me, my body language inverted – I am leaning towards her, eyes wide, frightened – certainly half-believing, at least for this moment in the dim light of the balcony, folded as we are in the blackness of the Bismarck Sea.
“Yes – and when they come back, they cry, cry, and they lose weight…”
They waste away. Their spirits are detached from them, and they must be called back. Pat tells us that in her husband’s place, in Central Province, children can’t be carried in bilums after dusk – they might be snatched from their parents’ backs. Strange things happen after dark, Suzie and Pat agree. And you know something is wrong when a child won’t stop crying.
My return to Alotau is on a little plane again, cramped and sweaty after a marionette sprint across the tarmac. I have two scotch fingers, apple juice in one of those airline plastic cups that remind me of doctors’ samples, and a blocked nose which makes me feel as if my eardrums are bursting. Around me, the smaller passengers seem to be suffering the same misapprehension – there is a chorus of screaming that keeps up throughout the hour-long flight, which gives me ample time to reflect on how silent, for the most part, Papua New Guinean children can be.
Don’t get me wrong, there is boisterous noise – as I write, I can hear the scattered register of small voices, swooping, screeching. Every day at 3pm, kids cluster behind the probation office and pelt rocks at the fruit trees that overhang the fence, by the river – clunk, clunk, on the flat tin roof until Karen affects a gruff bass and bellows “HEY!” from behind our faded curtains. It is part of my job to visit schools, and attempt to demystify this country’s juvenile justice framework while seven-year-old potential felons (and let’s not forget, in PNG the age of criminal responsibility is still seven years old) wriggle and giggle like a hat full of caterpillars. I believe I can say with some authority that there are plenty of happy sounds to be heard from the children of PNG – it’s the sounds of distress that are missing. Children don’t cry.
Even when they are four years old and they have cut their fingers deeply on the small knife that their grandmother was using to pierce coconuts for the white lady and the other strangers at the centre of the family’s orbiting attention. What they do then is they take a grubby piece of fabric and they wrap it round their little injured hand and hover quietly at the edges of conversation until somebody notices, answering in a fuzzy whisper:
“… hurt …”
“… knife …”
At the school, the teachers had a hundred questions – not about juvenile justice, or the responses I have rehearsed with the kids (“Who do we ask for?” “SEEBEESEE!”) – but about child protection, and the new Lukautim Pikinini Act. Could we tell the children about child abuse? What are their rights? They brought us anecdotes – neglect, bruises. Babies having babies and fingers pointing at fathers.
There are so many ways that it hurts to be a child in PNG. They are brutally enumerated in the literature I trawl through in empty hours at work. And now I am shivering again, in the heavy air, in my big bright room full of dappled sunlight. Who knows what dark things it would take to make these tiny stoics cry and cry and cry.
New Perspectives
I’ve been off and away for the past week and a half: conducting a training workshop at the edge of the ocean in idyllic Kavieng, New Ireland with CBC staff and another Aussie volunteer, before stealing some time in Port Moresby with a handful of my original gang of nervous idealists. We had brunch! It is actually impossible for me to do justice to the thrill of publicly consuming rather firmly poached eggs and coffee made with UHT milk. I felt like I had snatched back a little piece of a life that was recognisably mine – not a lasting feeling in Mosbi town, for better or worse.
For more cosmopolitan hijinks in the crazy, crazy place that is Port Moresby, you can find dispatches from my brilliant friend Laura here
In New Ireland, I would rather leave you to picture something we didn’t do, through tragic constellations of transport and timing, and my throwing up a lot. And because I didn’t go, and because it is wonderful to imagine, and because, in its own way, this is a description I can’t improve, I am quoting Wikipedia:
This area is famous for its shark callers, men who can lure sharks to the side of their dugout canoes by singing to them.
Oh strange and wonderful place, keep on surprising me.
For more cosmopolitan hijinks in the crazy, crazy place that is Port Moresby, you can find dispatches from my brilliant friend Laura here
In New Ireland, I would rather leave you to picture something we didn’t do, through tragic constellations of transport and timing, and my throwing up a lot. And because I didn’t go, and because it is wonderful to imagine, and because, in its own way, this is a description I can’t improve, I am quoting Wikipedia:
This area is famous for its shark callers, men who can lure sharks to the side of their dugout canoes by singing to them.
Oh strange and wonderful place, keep on surprising me.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Fun, Fun, Fun
My friend Lisa organised a Fun Walk.
What this means is:
tents in a big muddy playing field, which ends where the water begins, plus palm trees, and billowing smoke from wood-fired barbeques, and a trickle of people in the early dawn, walking the seven kilometres out to the starting point so they can walk back in with a raffle ticket on their arm, and maybe a t-shirt, and lots of coloured t-shirts, in fact, which all say MILNE BAY FUN WALK (I have one), and a swarming mass at the registration tent, where I am standing on a chair and shouting: “Everybody take two biiiiiiiiig steps back!”, and everybody is laughing, and patient, and eating sausages, and people keep pressing bundles of small notes into my hand, donations, and Lisa and Pam are wearing silly hats, and there is a band, and then the children arrive, little ones with motor disabilities pushed in wheelbarrows covered in palm streamers, by firemen, and I am drinking barely diluted Tang, which tastes pretty good actually, and catching friends in the crowd, and it is harder than I thought to find the people I know because there are FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE here, and Lisa is on the megaphone now, and she is exhausted but smiling, and the sun is so hot, and I am dreaming of a coconut, and then the tent just sort of vaporises into somebody’s helpful hands, and people wander away, and the air over the town is heavy, it ripples, you could cut it like a lime and squeeze out these two things: first, a rainstorm, and second, Joy.
What this means is:
tents in a big muddy playing field, which ends where the water begins, plus palm trees, and billowing smoke from wood-fired barbeques, and a trickle of people in the early dawn, walking the seven kilometres out to the starting point so they can walk back in with a raffle ticket on their arm, and maybe a t-shirt, and lots of coloured t-shirts, in fact, which all say MILNE BAY FUN WALK (I have one), and a swarming mass at the registration tent, where I am standing on a chair and shouting: “Everybody take two biiiiiiiiig steps back!”, and everybody is laughing, and patient, and eating sausages, and people keep pressing bundles of small notes into my hand, donations, and Lisa and Pam are wearing silly hats, and there is a band, and then the children arrive, little ones with motor disabilities pushed in wheelbarrows covered in palm streamers, by firemen, and I am drinking barely diluted Tang, which tastes pretty good actually, and catching friends in the crowd, and it is harder than I thought to find the people I know because there are FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE here, and Lisa is on the megaphone now, and she is exhausted but smiling, and the sun is so hot, and I am dreaming of a coconut, and then the tent just sort of vaporises into somebody’s helpful hands, and people wander away, and the air over the town is heavy, it ripples, you could cut it like a lime and squeeze out these two things: first, a rainstorm, and second, Joy.
Somewhere over the Rainbow
The national radio station has been broadcasting from the covered sections of the Alotau market. I can hear them as I arrive, picking my way through the altogether more transient set up sprawled outside the gate – neat pyramids of rich, tiny tomatoes and pawpaws basking in halos of their own ripened scent, all spread on palm leaves with tidy signs that say K2; 70t. The sellers smile mildly as I make my laboured and ill-informed selections, and hustle me in a collective effort towards the lone pile of thick-leaved, dark and bitter parsley I have been searching for.
In my first week, Sisi swept me through the steaming pans and idling palm fans – swat, fly, fish – and selected the best of everything for me: a big, rubbery chestnut, spotted fish with the skin on, the softest piece of tapioca – then, starfruit, ready to eat, and the right kind of oranges (thin-skinned). Her soft disapproval – a little snitching sound between the teeth – when I reached for an inferior onion, or pineapple too-ripe. Oh, the skills of grandmothers! I have a sudden, heartsick longing for my Nanna, who came from a village too, after all, and who would have known how to go about the parsley.
Inside, people are seated along the benches usually covered in produce. Lisa waves from the other side – she is about to be interviewed – and I wander through to a perch among the crew. I can see the bay from here, bent palm trees and the bruised, ominous tropical blue sky. They are interviewing a band – old men from Milne Bay who nurse guitars and the puny punchline of a ukulele. Then they begin to play.
I don’t know how to describe it. There is a breeze, warm and salt-smelling, which bowls against me like a labrador, and somehow those thin high happy notes are riding it, guiding it, even. It is one of those moments when I feel so palpably Elsewhere – the sky, the water, and the fat frangipani tree, this music – they belong to each other. They harmonise. I am enthralled by the strangeness and at the same time nostalgic, in no particular way, for places I belong.
The man with ukulele is singing softly, as mournful as a ukelele song can ever be: and there, he is smiling the words, his mouth a crumbled half-set of teeth, stained a bloody red with betelnut. At the end, there is more chatter – this band, it appears, is one of the last of the traditional Milne Bay string bands. The man was singing in his first language, which belongs to the hill country of the southern side of the bay.
“Can you translate the meaning of the song?” asks the interviewer.
The old man smiles.
“It is about the wind. When it blows, it brings memories of home.”
In my first week, Sisi swept me through the steaming pans and idling palm fans – swat, fly, fish – and selected the best of everything for me: a big, rubbery chestnut, spotted fish with the skin on, the softest piece of tapioca – then, starfruit, ready to eat, and the right kind of oranges (thin-skinned). Her soft disapproval – a little snitching sound between the teeth – when I reached for an inferior onion, or pineapple too-ripe. Oh, the skills of grandmothers! I have a sudden, heartsick longing for my Nanna, who came from a village too, after all, and who would have known how to go about the parsley.
Inside, people are seated along the benches usually covered in produce. Lisa waves from the other side – she is about to be interviewed – and I wander through to a perch among the crew. I can see the bay from here, bent palm trees and the bruised, ominous tropical blue sky. They are interviewing a band – old men from Milne Bay who nurse guitars and the puny punchline of a ukulele. Then they begin to play.
I don’t know how to describe it. There is a breeze, warm and salt-smelling, which bowls against me like a labrador, and somehow those thin high happy notes are riding it, guiding it, even. It is one of those moments when I feel so palpably Elsewhere – the sky, the water, and the fat frangipani tree, this music – they belong to each other. They harmonise. I am enthralled by the strangeness and at the same time nostalgic, in no particular way, for places I belong.
The man with ukulele is singing softly, as mournful as a ukelele song can ever be: and there, he is smiling the words, his mouth a crumbled half-set of teeth, stained a bloody red with betelnut. At the end, there is more chatter – this band, it appears, is one of the last of the traditional Milne Bay string bands. The man was singing in his first language, which belongs to the hill country of the southern side of the bay.
“Can you translate the meaning of the song?” asks the interviewer.
The old man smiles.
“It is about the wind. When it blows, it brings memories of home.”
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
This is the story of a stand of trees
Your place is over those mountains. Two days of walking – it is better, you remember, when you are climbing and descending – the thick leaves shelter you, although in the rains, the mud-soft slopes will test you. But the road is hot, rough, unforgiving. It did not reach your village before – two years, maybe – when you last came this way with your grandmother, laden with garden food to sell at the big covered market. Two days. The vehicles did not stop for you, and you reached town late, and slept outside the market on the gravel, close together.
This time, you came by vehicle. Jolting about in the back of the high police wagon. That is probably how your brother got his black eye.
Where you stay in the police station is not a room meant for sleeping, it is full of chairs like a school, and a desk. A man lies behind like a bent stick, he smells of jungle juice and his head has patches of blood. They give you Coke and cream crackers for a meal, which is good, although you would like some more crackers. They talk to you in Pisin and English and you look around for that Constable who brought you in from your place who will understand but he has taken the vehicle back there and you don’t know how long you will be and maybe it is better here at the police station because you haven’t been to town for two years and your brother has never been and you don’t really know where you are.
You tell the police officers you are twenty one.
What happened is that there was a place that belonged to your village but then the coastal people came up from town because maybe some of them had had land in that place but you don’t think it was true because maybe it had been too many years and they were not from there anymore. There were trees there. They chopped them down and built canoes, left them half-carved, adrift in the grass and climbing mustard, among the wounded stumps. The village was angry.
You and your brother have slept rough since your grandmother died. You don’t go to school. Those old ladies let you cut betelnut, and sometimes you can sell in the village, and you have wantok there but you are too old to adopt and nobody has much to share but you get by. You like it better there than town, except for that cut space, which reminds you. In the night, you and your brother took bush knives and hacked the canoes into pieces, like kindling. That is your place.
That man from your village is here, but you mostly ignore him. He told you to make compensation to those coastal people after they caught you and you sat down with the village magistrate. You are proud of your place, and proud of the way that people look at you about the village now. Nobody from your place would make that compensation. The village is proud of you. You have no money, anyway.
That man has told the police that you are seventeen, and your brother is only fifteen. You don’t think they believe him. He has brought more people with him, another, older man who asks you questions quickly in Pisin, like he will maybe punish you or else run out of breath, and a dim dim lady who made your brother embarrassed because she touched him on the shoulder.
That man is telling the dim dim lady in English about the canoes. She nods a lot and makes small noises, but he keeps on telling her, until she starts talking and putting her hands around like she will hit him. The other man, the shouting one, is friends with the dim dim lady and he is nodding and smiling.
When the police come in, the dim dim lady starts to talk to them, slowly, loud and hard, not like she talked to you and your brother, and she stands very close to them. That Sergeant is not happy. You breathe fast in your mouth, will he hit her? Doesn’t she know that police can belt you? They leave.
You eat another cream cracker and sit on the floor, aim a kick at the chairs, but quietly. If you had a bush knife you would slash at the desk, hack through that high window, cut the room the police station the town and all these people with Coca Cola and sea canoes and guns and money and they would all be pieces of firewood and you would cook the best things you can think of in a clay pot over them burning.
This time, you came by vehicle. Jolting about in the back of the high police wagon. That is probably how your brother got his black eye.
Where you stay in the police station is not a room meant for sleeping, it is full of chairs like a school, and a desk. A man lies behind like a bent stick, he smells of jungle juice and his head has patches of blood. They give you Coke and cream crackers for a meal, which is good, although you would like some more crackers. They talk to you in Pisin and English and you look around for that Constable who brought you in from your place who will understand but he has taken the vehicle back there and you don’t know how long you will be and maybe it is better here at the police station because you haven’t been to town for two years and your brother has never been and you don’t really know where you are.
You tell the police officers you are twenty one.
What happened is that there was a place that belonged to your village but then the coastal people came up from town because maybe some of them had had land in that place but you don’t think it was true because maybe it had been too many years and they were not from there anymore. There were trees there. They chopped them down and built canoes, left them half-carved, adrift in the grass and climbing mustard, among the wounded stumps. The village was angry.
You and your brother have slept rough since your grandmother died. You don’t go to school. Those old ladies let you cut betelnut, and sometimes you can sell in the village, and you have wantok there but you are too old to adopt and nobody has much to share but you get by. You like it better there than town, except for that cut space, which reminds you. In the night, you and your brother took bush knives and hacked the canoes into pieces, like kindling. That is your place.
That man from your village is here, but you mostly ignore him. He told you to make compensation to those coastal people after they caught you and you sat down with the village magistrate. You are proud of your place, and proud of the way that people look at you about the village now. Nobody from your place would make that compensation. The village is proud of you. You have no money, anyway.
That man has told the police that you are seventeen, and your brother is only fifteen. You don’t think they believe him. He has brought more people with him, another, older man who asks you questions quickly in Pisin, like he will maybe punish you or else run out of breath, and a dim dim lady who made your brother embarrassed because she touched him on the shoulder.
That man is telling the dim dim lady in English about the canoes. She nods a lot and makes small noises, but he keeps on telling her, until she starts talking and putting her hands around like she will hit him. The other man, the shouting one, is friends with the dim dim lady and he is nodding and smiling.
When the police come in, the dim dim lady starts to talk to them, slowly, loud and hard, not like she talked to you and your brother, and she stands very close to them. That Sergeant is not happy. You breathe fast in your mouth, will he hit her? Doesn’t she know that police can belt you? They leave.
You eat another cream cracker and sit on the floor, aim a kick at the chairs, but quietly. If you had a bush knife you would slash at the desk, hack through that high window, cut the room the police station the town and all these people with Coca Cola and sea canoes and guns and money and they would all be pieces of firewood and you would cook the best things you can think of in a clay pot over them burning.
Confidentiality, stolen stories and the ethics of truth-telling
I couldn’t write like this in Australia. I like it, this outsider’s vantage – it lends itself to lyricism and expansive gems of whitewashed wisdom – but it has its dangers, too. Cameras are just one way to snatch a soul, and I am conscious that I am writing about a place that has no voice(s) in Australia. Beware, dear Reader, and note that pronoun – the endless I – if you need a reminder. You are reading the flimsy impressions of someone who has just notched her first month in PNG. Be careful.
Not everybody that I write about in this blog knows that I am keeping a public record of my time here. I am generally unfussed about this – I would never commit someone else’s secrets to print – but I have also been fooling myself that this is just a digital, somewhat one-sided version of the boozy debriefs that are the pivots of my life at home. Which is not quite the case, it turns out. According to a helpfully shaded map of the world, there are a hell of a lot of you reading, in places as far-flung as Russia and Malaysia and Iran. Which is very exciting to me (HELLO! THANK YOU FOR JOINING US!) but also a little daunting and complicated. Particularly when it comes to writing about the work that I do here.
I am a volunteer in juvenile justice and non-custodial corrective services. My work throws me into contact with some of the most vulnerable and the most stigmatised members of this small community. And the stories they tell me are high-risk in a number of ways – matters before court, for example, or the chance of reprisal.
Back in Australia, my silence would be mandated by organisational policies, or by my affirmation before the Supreme Court of NSW. Which is not to say that there are no acceptable ways to discuss my working preoccupations, but there is always a process of editing that goes on. We have it polished, my friends and I, rinsing our anecdotes of detail and identifying features. That is not how I write.
I can’t tell you, but I can’t not tell you, either: that would be a half-a-truth that missed the point altogether. These stories are the reason I am here, and the most compelling corners of everything I want to share with you. So I have decided to take some liberties.
Not often, but occasionally, you may read something here which will be less true. Not untrue, but maybe many truths, patched, layered, unrecognisable. If you want to know which bits I saw, which bits I read, which bits someone told me, which bits happened in another province or another village or three years ago or to somebody else – ask away. You can email me, or buy me beer, try your luck. I would venture to suggest, though, dear Reader, that this would be what they call Missing The Point.
Not everybody that I write about in this blog knows that I am keeping a public record of my time here. I am generally unfussed about this – I would never commit someone else’s secrets to print – but I have also been fooling myself that this is just a digital, somewhat one-sided version of the boozy debriefs that are the pivots of my life at home. Which is not quite the case, it turns out. According to a helpfully shaded map of the world, there are a hell of a lot of you reading, in places as far-flung as Russia and Malaysia and Iran. Which is very exciting to me (HELLO! THANK YOU FOR JOINING US!) but also a little daunting and complicated. Particularly when it comes to writing about the work that I do here.
I am a volunteer in juvenile justice and non-custodial corrective services. My work throws me into contact with some of the most vulnerable and the most stigmatised members of this small community. And the stories they tell me are high-risk in a number of ways – matters before court, for example, or the chance of reprisal.
Back in Australia, my silence would be mandated by organisational policies, or by my affirmation before the Supreme Court of NSW. Which is not to say that there are no acceptable ways to discuss my working preoccupations, but there is always a process of editing that goes on. We have it polished, my friends and I, rinsing our anecdotes of detail and identifying features. That is not how I write.
I can’t tell you, but I can’t not tell you, either: that would be a half-a-truth that missed the point altogether. These stories are the reason I am here, and the most compelling corners of everything I want to share with you. So I have decided to take some liberties.
Not often, but occasionally, you may read something here which will be less true. Not untrue, but maybe many truths, patched, layered, unrecognisable. If you want to know which bits I saw, which bits I read, which bits someone told me, which bits happened in another province or another village or three years ago or to somebody else – ask away. You can email me, or buy me beer, try your luck. I would venture to suggest, though, dear Reader, that this would be what they call Missing The Point.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Here be Dragons
We crossed rivers to get here. The flooded causeway, where children materialise between the gravel pits and jungle to shout indistinctly at the sloping vehicle – and a stream, fed out of a red-clay gash which is marked with my clumsy-arse city-girl scrambling. My shoes are canoes capsized, sagging and flapping with water.
Samuel and I have been delivering the summons to next week’s meeting of the Provincial Juvenile Justice Committee, an errand which has taken us way out of town to the razor wire thickets of the prison and off-road to secretive villages amongst the palm plantations.
We have a curious dynamic, Sam and I – our friendship is a delicately negotiated work in progress, which has veered eccentrically over the past weeks: he, sullen; me, overcompensating; his heavy-handed flirtation, my big-sisterly boundaries; my sharp, aggressive demands – abrupt frustration – and his quiet muleish dissent. It is all so very Cross-Cultural Communication 101, but knowing that I am making textbook mistakes has not imparted much grace – only blame, blame to the situation. I am doing it Wrong. And again and again and again.
But Sam is young, and smart, and bored. These things I understand. He doesn’t really know how to talk to girls, but he understands, too, that I am far from my place, and my different ways, and he is gracious, has forgiven my sharpness and unpardonable, humiliating criticism. There is an earnest mutuality in our laboured jokes, and today a spirit of warm complicity – we are out on the road, away from the office, so we take detours and he points out schools, beaches, villages – landmarks of note, small and (still) entirely worth remarking.
“Thelma is next. I will drop you at the probation office.” It’s not really a question, but –
“You want to see the settlement?” He smiles. A challenge.
Yes. I have tried to explain Thelma why I don't visit that part of town – embarrassed, my flung arms a semaphore apology, my exasperation an offering of shame. In an air-conditioned conference room in Port Moresby, we were given a list: No-go Zones; Forbidden for Travel. Now, in the comparative safety of Alotau, with Sam and the monster-size CBC vehicle, for certifiably work-related reasons, I have a chance to bear witness to somewhere off the map. Yes yes yes. I babble about fearfulness, exaggeration, and wanting to See For Myself, as we lurch up the hill.
What I see (for myself):
chickens,
frayed children,
wetness, greenness
and
houses, small, on metal stilts, put together from woven palm and fibreglass sheets, broken in patches as if they were punched.
There are a lot of mosquitoes.
People are sitting around watching, chatting, nursing babies, hacking coconuts, as I deliver Thelma’s letter to her mother. Samuel seems to know everyone. He announces me abruptly to the gathering group of gossips and curiousities:
“She wants to see the settlement.”
So we talk for a while, about life here – how many wage-earners in the compound, how many who come from here, Alotau, or from here, Milne Bay. The young people. Oh, the young people. How do they do with what chances they have. Are they hopeful? I make some children cry, and by the end of half an hour, I am Auntie Lydia, with “another skin”, don’t cry, say hello, em orrait.
Thelma’s mother has a question for me, voiced with hooked kindness – I am ok, I’m a nice girl, but she needs to know my Why.
“You don’t have settlements in Australia?”
No. Not quite. Not like this.
“So. Where do the poor people live?”
I have crossed two rivers, two countries, an ocean. I need a better answer to that question.
Samuel and I have been delivering the summons to next week’s meeting of the Provincial Juvenile Justice Committee, an errand which has taken us way out of town to the razor wire thickets of the prison and off-road to secretive villages amongst the palm plantations.
We have a curious dynamic, Sam and I – our friendship is a delicately negotiated work in progress, which has veered eccentrically over the past weeks: he, sullen; me, overcompensating; his heavy-handed flirtation, my big-sisterly boundaries; my sharp, aggressive demands – abrupt frustration – and his quiet muleish dissent. It is all so very Cross-Cultural Communication 101, but knowing that I am making textbook mistakes has not imparted much grace – only blame, blame to the situation. I am doing it Wrong. And again and again and again.
But Sam is young, and smart, and bored. These things I understand. He doesn’t really know how to talk to girls, but he understands, too, that I am far from my place, and my different ways, and he is gracious, has forgiven my sharpness and unpardonable, humiliating criticism. There is an earnest mutuality in our laboured jokes, and today a spirit of warm complicity – we are out on the road, away from the office, so we take detours and he points out schools, beaches, villages – landmarks of note, small and (still) entirely worth remarking.
“Thelma is next. I will drop you at the probation office.” It’s not really a question, but –
“You want to see the settlement?” He smiles. A challenge.
Yes. I have tried to explain Thelma why I don't visit that part of town – embarrassed, my flung arms a semaphore apology, my exasperation an offering of shame. In an air-conditioned conference room in Port Moresby, we were given a list: No-go Zones; Forbidden for Travel. Now, in the comparative safety of Alotau, with Sam and the monster-size CBC vehicle, for certifiably work-related reasons, I have a chance to bear witness to somewhere off the map. Yes yes yes. I babble about fearfulness, exaggeration, and wanting to See For Myself, as we lurch up the hill.
What I see (for myself):
chickens,
frayed children,
wetness, greenness
and
houses, small, on metal stilts, put together from woven palm and fibreglass sheets, broken in patches as if they were punched.
There are a lot of mosquitoes.
People are sitting around watching, chatting, nursing babies, hacking coconuts, as I deliver Thelma’s letter to her mother. Samuel seems to know everyone. He announces me abruptly to the gathering group of gossips and curiousities:
“She wants to see the settlement.”
So we talk for a while, about life here – how many wage-earners in the compound, how many who come from here, Alotau, or from here, Milne Bay. The young people. Oh, the young people. How do they do with what chances they have. Are they hopeful? I make some children cry, and by the end of half an hour, I am Auntie Lydia, with “another skin”, don’t cry, say hello, em orrait.
Thelma’s mother has a question for me, voiced with hooked kindness – I am ok, I’m a nice girl, but she needs to know my Why.
“You don’t have settlements in Australia?”
No. Not quite. Not like this.
“So. Where do the poor people live?”
I have crossed two rivers, two countries, an ocean. I need a better answer to that question.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Snapshot (1)
It was a surreptitious dawn on the edge of the water: turn away one moment to bail deep rainwater from a canoe, turn back, and the sky is white. The bay was still, shadow-coloured like creased silk and away at the edge of the sky, a smudged, dream-like horizon.
I haven’t given you a picture of the bay, have I? Please don’t think I haven’t tried – I’ve snapped and cursed, snapped and cursed – but It. Just. Won’t. Fit – those plains of still water and the impossible slopes diminish on the screen, their colours leached like food that tastes of tins.
So here it is, just this side of black and white – in the middle of the endless ocean, the ladies of the Alotau Outrigger Paddling Club have their right legs hooked over the side of a six-seater canoe, like a sweaty, tropical chorus line. We are stretching. And maybe it’s only a trick of the light, but I’m sure if I just reach, re-e-each that little bit higher, if I could stand up in the centre of the canoe, I could touch this pale glowing sky, and tear off a piece, for you.
I haven’t given you a picture of the bay, have I? Please don’t think I haven’t tried – I’ve snapped and cursed, snapped and cursed – but It. Just. Won’t. Fit – those plains of still water and the impossible slopes diminish on the screen, their colours leached like food that tastes of tins.
So here it is, just this side of black and white – in the middle of the endless ocean, the ladies of the Alotau Outrigger Paddling Club have their right legs hooked over the side of a six-seater canoe, like a sweaty, tropical chorus line. We are stretching. And maybe it’s only a trick of the light, but I’m sure if I just reach, re-e-each that little bit higher, if I could stand up in the centre of the canoe, I could touch this pale glowing sky, and tear off a piece, for you.
Living the Dream
There’s a certain type of conversation that certain types of expatriates (mostly the do-good variety) have in any number of last bars at the edge of civilisation. At any given moment, somewhere in the developing world, someone is wittily bemoaning the challenges of daily life – chuffing, self-deprecating and mockingly exasperated.
(for a whole lot of brilliantly rendered moaning about moaning, see here)
There’s an unspoken scoring system comprising various axes of remoteness, personal safety, communicable disease, language, dress, general obscurity, human rights violations and proximity to livestock. We were already learning to play expat bingo at our pre-departure training in dreary, functional, thoroughly first world Canberra (PNG took out all-comers on the security question, but Bangladesh was undoubtedly the overall winner, with the double-hit of risk of assault and explosive diarrhoea).
Alotau scores relatively low in most categories. It is safe and sleepy. There are supermarkets, guesthouses and a handful of expatriates. People speak English. On the other hand, it is inaccessible by road, and, you know, MALARIA. And the money shot: No tampons available for purchase anywhere in town.
Oh yes, it is open season on bodily (dys)function at the expatriate auction, the most intimate ailments broadcast like brass buttons and girl guide badges. Which brings us to my own personal moment of arrival, in a concrete toilet, with cracked seat and high cell-like window, surrounded by containers of petrol and inexplicable tubs of water – no soap. I am doubled with loose and tortured guts – self-inflicted after accidentally swallowing a caustic mangle of betelnut, mustard and crushed coral, the widespread local stimulant. NB. Betelnut should be chewed and spat, not ingested.
Hunched there, amid all the indignity of my rebellious stomach, it occurred to me that in all probability it is these stories I will still be telling years after I have left this place. Wonder fades, the foreign becomes familiar, but toilet jokes are forever. In the world of the intrepid volunteer in international development, there is never any loo paper.
(for a whole lot of brilliantly rendered moaning about moaning, see here)
There’s an unspoken scoring system comprising various axes of remoteness, personal safety, communicable disease, language, dress, general obscurity, human rights violations and proximity to livestock. We were already learning to play expat bingo at our pre-departure training in dreary, functional, thoroughly first world Canberra (PNG took out all-comers on the security question, but Bangladesh was undoubtedly the overall winner, with the double-hit of risk of assault and explosive diarrhoea).
Alotau scores relatively low in most categories. It is safe and sleepy. There are supermarkets, guesthouses and a handful of expatriates. People speak English. On the other hand, it is inaccessible by road, and, you know, MALARIA. And the money shot: No tampons available for purchase anywhere in town.
Oh yes, it is open season on bodily (dys)function at the expatriate auction, the most intimate ailments broadcast like brass buttons and girl guide badges. Which brings us to my own personal moment of arrival, in a concrete toilet, with cracked seat and high cell-like window, surrounded by containers of petrol and inexplicable tubs of water – no soap. I am doubled with loose and tortured guts – self-inflicted after accidentally swallowing a caustic mangle of betelnut, mustard and crushed coral, the widespread local stimulant. NB. Betelnut should be chewed and spat, not ingested.
Hunched there, amid all the indignity of my rebellious stomach, it occurred to me that in all probability it is these stories I will still be telling years after I have left this place. Wonder fades, the foreign becomes familiar, but toilet jokes are forever. In the world of the intrepid volunteer in international development, there is never any loo paper.
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