People Like Me

PNG islanders have a phrase in tok pisin, which may be exhaled – like the best of holiday catchphrases – in a state of torpid contentment, to say: everything’s alright. Only that’s not quite the literal translation. Due to some wardrobe deficiencies and a draconian hotel policy on shorts, my friend has worn a lap-lap to the bar. Round the edge it is printed, repeatedly, in proud and cheery woodblock: Em no rang yet!

I have been wanting for a long time to share the delights of Papua New Guinean bureaucracy with you. These are tales of bank queues, senseless forms, no trains, no automobiles and routinely overbooked planes and The Edifying Fable Of The Committee Meeting (Volumes I-XIV). It’s all very funny, in a slightly hysterical way – I’m most often reminded of the experience of reasoning down phone lines with someone who can apply perfect logic to the delusion that police are broadcasting satellite radio through their teeth. The strategy is roughly the same, too – take a deep breath, be patient and just let this one roll.

But I’m not going to tell that story today.

One reason is that all my anecdotes are too well-rehearsed, picked over in a multitude of expatriate conversations. It’s a motif for a cartoon villain – the ever-fertile, barely varying topic of the broken systems of PNG, uniformly inept and frustrating, but treated with an entirely variable degree of affection or attempts at understanding, and a variable quality of amusement – all these minor notes and discordant jangles.

“It’s like they don’t even understand the concept of efficiency,” says Kate, who does not work and does not speak to any local person who is not a waiter or her driver, and is therefore clearly an expert in both workplace efficiency and Papua New Guinean psychology.

I don’t want to write about these things because I am worried that I will get it just that little bit wrong, and I will sound like someone else.

I have been finding it difficult to define people like me, here. Back home, I am so patently of a tribe: my wantok are marked by our postcodes, our name-dropping, our secondhand clothes and boutique educations – but above all, by our politics, and the earnest collective desire not to be an arsehole.

In a town as small as Alotau, it can be hard to find anyone of my age and income to socialise with, let alone someone who can map my cultural reference points and share in all my preoccupations and big questions. So, a crowded restaurant – Laura and her partner Liam nursing coffee cups and discussing the demise of News of the World – and I feel like gasping, like I have taken in too much oxygen already – relieved and panicked all at once. These things – phone calls, trips to Moresby – are hooks to a world that I chose and furnished for myself. I need my people, I tell myself, to keep me decent, maybe to keep me sane.

It’s been a long day in our cramped, chilly conference room. Mark, exhausted, has told us a story we all already know, about a sixteen year old in a holding cell, not so far from here, not so many months ago: 5 police and a radiator fan belt. A riot, and a funeral. The last hour’s conversation, however, has relentlessly circled the question of incentives, sitting allowances and just how much it is reasonable for the National Juvenile Justice Committee to subsidise a biscuit budget. Frankly, I am A Bit Fed Up.

When we spill out and part ways, Negil asks me if I would like to join her for tea. Her room is the largest, with a tiny sitting room and kitchenette at the back. She has bought an immense bag of oranges from someone’s friend’s sister, and five of us sit munching in a haze of fresh, sharp scent while Pat boils the water. I like these women, a lot.

And they are not my age, and most of them earn a fraction of my volunteer’s allowance, and some of them haven’t been to university, and it’s a safe bet that none of them have read the same books as I have. Still, I am not explaining, correcting, qualifying, arguing. I am nodding a lot, actually, and talking less than I normally would.

We drink tea, and eat oranges, and we complain about Papua New Guinean bureaucracy.