Over

It is a very particular experience to empty a home where you’ve been happy. That, I have imagined, watching Lisa slowing compacting her life into cases, washing, folding, giving things away. My life, of course, is somewhat more hasty and chaotic. Isn’t it always? And it is scrambled together, mouldy and dirty and incoherent, in the course of a sudden, tearful Friday night, leaving trails of anti-malarial tablets, bobby pins, scraps of something useful strewn across the floor, and mud in the shower.

I’ve been in Port Moresby since Saturday, silent and uncertain. I’m here now to say goodbye.

Last week the Australian government agency that sponsors my voluntary placement here in PNG was forwarded an email which raised concerns regarding my safety here in Alotau. That little email has generated tornadoes of print and phone calls back and forth: Alotau, Port Moresby, Canberra and back again. The upshot of this week of suspended, silent drama is that I cannot safely remain in Papua New Guinea. The reputation of my volunteer program has taken its own belting in the past year, and if I were to be involved in a security incident after they had received a written warning about my safety, it could spell the end of the program. Unfortunately for more people than me, PNG is a place where things do happen to people, all the time. And I have very suddenly run out of government-funded gambling chips.

This is heartbreaking, for oh, such a lot of reasons. I would like to reflect on two of them.

When I started this blog, I didn’t have a clear idea what its style, its shape, its overarching substance would prove to be. If I imagined anything, it was self-aggrandising tales of boots-and-all bravado, world-weary dispatches from the northern frontier – flak-jackets in paradise. Because that is what I knew of PNG from my inner-Sydney sanctum: guns and violence and carjackings and machetes and rapes and brutality. And jungle.

And of course you know, because you’ve read it: my PNG has not been that. It is beautiful. And kind and brave and brutalised, and yes, violent, and terribly sad. The truth that I’ve tried to capture over the past months is that this is not a violent country, but a country afflicted by violence. And it’s particularly cruel to be pulled away, for this of all reasons, when I’ve finally felt like I might be able to change a few minds about this place, even on the silly, helpless scale of a blog.

I’ve been safe here, because Papua New Guineans have kept me safe. And as hard as it has sometimes been to be a white woman in PNG, it is harder to be a woman (or a child, or a long-long), and not to be white.

The other thought I have for you is much closer. It’s been made very clear to me that the decision to remove me from my assignment in PNG has been made on the basis of perceptions rather than truths about my safety, and the associated reputational risk to the program. I’ve been treated with respect, fairness and a great deal of sympathy but my work is meaningless in the face of that risk. Because of course, none of this is secure. It’s not just one volunteer project in Papua New Guinea, but an edifice of jobs and programs that balance on a budgetary whim. And we in Australia have no great appetite for international development aid. (Ironically enough, for various strategic and philanthropic reasons, PNG receives the lion’s share of Australia’s foreign aid budget each year).

I don’t believe the decision to send me home was a just one. It’s easy, and masochistically gratifying, to see myself as a little person up against a bureaucratic machine, and in one sense I am. But the truth is, what happened here was that an agency’s activities and decision-making were effectively determined by another little person (and a little email). I think there’s a valid question here for us as Australian citizens and voters: how is it possible that one small-town racist can call the shots on a international agency? How do we let this happen?

And, a question about international development (which is something I had pledged to leave to smarter, more experienced, better-informed minds): Do we think this is a good thing?

This is Alpha 2 to Base, do you read me?

Alpha 2, over.

I anticipate that I will be back in Sydney in a few days, but lovely readers, I have one last request for you from PNG – please wait around and check back in a week or so? If you’ve been along for the ride so far, you will know I have lot of bent-heartstrings and a lot of unfinished business here. There is one last something I will need your help to do.