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.