Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea

addendum

I just want to note, in response to some recent comments, that this blog is highly personal , and may appear to be a 'rant' in some instances, and unprofessional in others---to which, I would agree. The author of these pages is not the academic, but the individual. 

Hair, makeup and wardrobe in PNG and beyond

Some photos courtesy Bill and Carolyn Bochtrup, Michael Osborne, Rod Eimes, and no doubt others I've overlooked...

Watching TV in Madang

Notes from the recent past: Chris’ wife Sandra goes on a workshop up the north coast, and we all see her off knowing she'll leave as one and come back as two. Her best girlfriend Dianne will be looking after her. I start to feel malarial Weds, and Thursday afternoon I’m faint and nauseous even after my first dose of chloroquin. One of Sandra's friends comes by the house to announce that that Sandra's at the labour ward here in town. Turns out she started labour 3 AM (which we didn’t know at the time) and went with Dianne to the local hospital up the coast, where they sent her to Modilon.

But I didn’t know until after I had had a two-beer dinner with CUSO volunteers at the Resort, for which I had summoned all my malarial energy because I liked them so much, and then liked them too much and drank two beers. This clobbered me, so when I got the word I rushed to Modilon to find Sandra's friend Dianne had already been evicted from the inner sanctum, and I marched in as the bossy white missus and found Sandra writing in pain. She was walking it out, too, wobble marching in a short path wearing only a laplap around her waist, and when she saw me she moaned ‘Mama! Pain!’ I held her as she walked, suddenly aware what it means to be in labour with zero meds, not even an aspirin, and mumbling something about how it should be a few hours yet, to which she cried in English, “You cant say that to me!” and slumped to the ground between beds, absolutely writhing in pain, blood coming out between her legs, gurgling ‘ooo mi laik pek pek.’ I squatted to stroke her back and I said ‘thats fine, thats how it feels’ (like I knew or something!!), and we got her to the bed where she threw off the laplap and screamed with pain now, pulling at her inner thighs to get herself ready to go. The nasty matron had been telling her to sh ut up, and then sneered when she saw that Sandra had pek peked on the floor. As if anyone had self-control at this point. Matron got cross now and ordered me to leave, clearly ticked that Sansra has a white missus attendant. Later we found out she'd hit Sandra for making too much noise. Dianne and I were both furious, and pledged to report the bitch. Eventually, maybe only an hour later, Dianne walks out of the birthing theatre with a baby in her arms---a little girl! All perfect and wrinkly and quiet. It was 10 PM July 18th 2002. Chris and Sandra’s first child, the first baby I ever felt myself invested in, the child I would always be most intimately attached to. Baby Nancy (never a doubt she wouldn't get that name). Chris slept outside all night an d Dianne slept on the floor beside Sandra, like the best buddy she is. The next morning they all came home, Chris sick as a dog and sleepless with a cold, Sandra exhausted and in terrible pain still from sutures and no painkiller. I gave her aspro, and Chris, good man, instructed her not to cook or work for a full month. 

I’m headswim mingly loopy with under-medicated malaria and get a call from Pam Bates at TNT saying Leibert has broken his wrist badly and could I look after him in hospital in Madang? Oh gawd. We've just had the baby. Leibert’s coming tomorrow, and he’s in bad shape, coming by Airlink at 2.20. I take Chris and we go to the hospital first to chase the ambulance out there to pick Leibert up, which it does, blessedly. The plane is slightly delayed, and Christian is exhausted and sleepless for days now. Leibert has both wrists broken, and one has a splintered bone, like the end of a baseball bat, coming out of his mid forearm. We get him to the clinic and wait forever for the medic in charge, while he’s heroically faint with pain, and the doctor then then takes an hour or so to plaster one wrist and splint wrap the other. Poor kid had fallen off a tall laulau tree and landed on his hands, only to be left in excruciating pain for two days while they found a way out for him.

I give him half a vicodin from my old stash to get him numbed, and the doctor explains that he’ll send him to the children’s ward now for recovery. Chris and I get ready to go, but Leibert is terrified and begs us to stay. Annoyed and exhausted, Christian stays. The first thing he’d said to Leibert when the kid walked off the plane barefoot without even a change of clothes was, “It’s your hambaking that made you fall!” Leibert was, as always, cool and aloof, not the normal seven year old. But clearly grateful too.  I'm still feverish now and at home I find Sandra is now shaking with chills, having come down with malaria herself. Ruben is also pissed off at the hambug Leibert, too, for throwing a spanner in his plans to make a big chicken supper for Diana, as thank you for minding Sandra. He's also ticked that they sent him all the way here without a toea in his pocket, assuming as always Bubu Nancy will take of it. No doubt Ruben believes Leibert’s draining me of finances he himself deserves (ooo ma laria makes me cynical). So, for the next few days, as Sandra goes cold turkey through malaria and teached the baby to nurse, we go back and forth from the haus sik with food and endless entertainment for Leibert. The only kind thing all day has been the big man from Ramu who's here staying in Ruben's room, saying to me, You're working too hard on this, take it easy. 

Partl y recovered, I attend morning coffee at CWA Saturday, which is nice. A very small clutch of the only white women in town, all happily yabbering at one end of a long folding table, mismatched ceramic mugs in hand (for which they’ve donated fifty toea to the tin) and no Papua New Guineans to be seen today. (One wonders why they ever show up?) Lydia rocks in and we ask about her  trip to Wuvulu and up through the remote and beautiful Hermit Islands, which she declares to be her favourite place so far (she and her husband run a dive boat). She’s an Ooplunder, from the Nurth Counties. The people there are suuuu polite, she says, suuu weel mannered. Usually, she said, we get into a place and all the dirty mangi with their buai mouths come round and we say no jumping on deck and before you know it they’re on deck peering through yer windows—I hate it. We don’t go into their homes and peer inside do we? And oo in the Hermits just the headman came out to see us, very polite, everyone else on shore waiting, came out to say hello and sell vegetables you know. Luvely people, long wavy hair, there’s a bit o Micronesian in them. Whereas on Wuvulu you have a mixture, some of them the brute ugly Papua New Guinean face, and others this lovely Micronesia look, you know.

Im getting a fever again.

The family is watching Survivor 2, The Australian Outback, because it’s the only thing my TV will pick up tonight, being replayed from Ch 9 Australia on EMTV, as these dentally brilliant and buff Americans struggle through their first day trying to make fir e. Leibert is in fits of hilarity. We’ve got him at the house now after he’s run away from the haus sik twice, requiring Uncle Ray to race around the grounds only to find him sitting at a bus stop both times. Now he’s back home, and generally petulant, not exactly like when he first lived with us and threw off his clothes in protest if we scolded him, but still the rebel we know and love who is more inclined to spit out his meds in the potted plants than relent to getting well. Yesterday Donald and Frank were watching a Natl geographic show on K2 the mountain, and it was a little hard for them to figure out time frames: old men are talking heads, cut to archival footage of their 1953 expedition, then faux archival imagery of black and white figures, and here and there frame-eroded still shots, etc. Their heads are spinning. I’m explaining to them how these old men climbed this huge mountain a long time ago, and how they slipped and lost one team member, Art Gilke. Frank says, They’re on another planet right? I say what? Oli stap long narapela planet tru? No, they’re just in another country—China I think, or Tibet. Then I look back at the screen and realize how it does look lunar—why shouldn’t it be another planet? Only a few days ago we were watching the news segment of the American who bought a ride to space for 20 million dollars and came down safely, happily, with his Russian crewmembers. K2 might very well be on Mars. Throughout the entire  documentary Donald can do nothing more than ‘tsk tsk’ and shake his head.

Another evening they were watching something mildly salacious on HBO and Uncle Albert turned to me to say, They used to have a really good show coming from America on to EMTV, but we don’t see it anymore (all this in Pidgin). Days of Our Lives. Oh yea, I say, that’s a good one. It was good, he continues, because you could follow people’s lives every day.

Donald is a sweet kid. Yesterday when he was here he was on the sofa looking at TV and the phone rang. I answered and started to talk to Tabah, sort of across Donald’s head as I continued watching the TV. Did Tabah want to come see Cyril’s carvings" Donald says, “Yea, sure.” Maybe Tabah can come over later, I go on, and again Donald says, “Yea, sur e.” Cannot fathom there's someone else I'm talking to. I can only imagine what a day in midtown Manhattan would be like for Donald, everyone scurrying past chatting to imaginary colleagues and invisible masalai. People shouting Americanisms into the air: Don't go there! Like for real! Would I kid you about this? Fuck off! I'm not buying that...

I remember another time when Frank and Dominic from the village and I were watching A Current Affair and there was a segment on the Klu Klux Klan in Georgia or somewhere, and how a few Liberal Party members in Australia are becoming m embers secretly, and how they support Pauline Hanson, and all that. They were interviewing southerners and the grand poobah or whomever, all of whom freely talked of their belief in keeping the races separate and pure, and I realized that, because there were no pictures of black people, no violent imagery, and because the sound was muddy and they were speaking with southern accents, neither Dominick nor Frank knew what the segment was about. They even momentarily zoomed in on a document about ‘lower grade negros, such as Australian Aborigines’, being interbreedable with apes, which sets them apart from Caucasians (really!). Neither Dom or Frank flinch, they look blank, but quickly brighten up when Mekim Music videos come on afterwards.

Wait, there’s one more great TV moment for Madang: months and months ago Sandra’s relatives were here from Raikos (this was before I tabooed the Raikos from my place after going away for a project to come back and learn from neighbours there’d been something like 40---no kidding—Raikos people sleeping on the floor of my place---forty--- toe to head, like units of measure) and we were doing something on the livingroom floor—maybe packing something---while the TV was on. I remember two young lads had just walked in the front door from the dock across the road, natural as anything, heading for the toilet ---scuse me? You are who????---and Sandra jumped up and bellowed at them to get outside, who do they think they are just coming in like that ( i.e. wrong weekend,  guys). Crisis averted, we are back to our packing when we hear a soft knock at the screen door. It’s two very small and very lean men, also Raikos people, but this time from the top of the Finisterres almost to Nahu Rawa District, from whence they’ve had to walk all the way to the shore and catch a boat to Madang. My name got to them through the Bibi-Sor grapevine and they want to know, very meekly, whether I can help them get a radio for their station up there. We’d done a walkabout through the Raikos road all the way up and across the top of those mountains, to the Dumpu and Ramu side, which is in fact serviced from Lae before it is from Madang, and found that the villages up at near-summit are some of the most remote in PNG. Peter Barter had given some CB radios during his Health Minister tenure, but these folks had never had anything in the way of communications, and truly did need help. I stood there thinking how fu nny it was we screamed at the two kids earlier, who might well have been from the same village (although probably not, for their sheer bloodymindedness), and here we were genuflecting for these nervous older men. They come in for cold water and to sit a spell, during which time the entire household is dedicated to a telemovie about Betty Broderick, an American suburban matron who shot her ex-husband and the new wife in bed, not for alienation of affection but for alienation of a lifestyle to which she had grown accustomed. I wondered if that notion might gather sympathy in my livingroom. Justifiable homocide for cutting off the credit cards and downsizing the second car?

Baby Nancy is two and very bossy, and Sandra and I are at the Resort Hotel’s pool swimming with her and we see two expats from Goroka, D and B and their their pretty new baby girl, Sara. The older one, name forgotten now, is surrounded by mixed race nannies (is that a conscious distinction made?) and struts to the end of the pool where Nancy, Sandra and I are lounging, and Sandra is floating on a small blowup donut, as she’s so pregnant with grandchild no 2. This little girl isn’t much older than Nancy, and much fatter but less agile. She sees the donut and more or less demands it. We shrug, thinking the minders will scold her, but they just shrug too, so we hand it over, and she runs back to the baby pool with it. That’s fine, but then later we notice she’s done with it and hasn’t returned it. Not even her Mum has acknowledged the gift. So we send baby Nancy who just stands there near them, floaties on her arms, until they recognize her point and the girl hands back the unused donut, while scolding Nancy to go away! “Go away!” And she even follows Nancy a bit, who keeps turning back and smiling, disbelieving that a child could be so mean, and still wanting to play. (My heart is breaking). At one point it looked like the girl was running toward Nancy to strike her.  Finally B comes over and takes her girl back, apologizing, leaving Nancy a bit dumbstruck but happy to scurry back to us. We all laugh and nod at each other, but I’m no little aghas t at how this girl has inherited her father’s ugly personality rather than her mother’s delightful one.

Sometimes I think, alright. I’m ready for polite society again. But then….This morning I’m water aerobicizing with Sandy at the Resort pool and she recognizes Andrew from one of the Lae based dive boats. Hi, hi all around. Heard you went to the dive conference in New Orleans?--“Oh yea, man, it was brilliant. Fantastic town. Couldn’t handle the paper cups though, you get your drinks in paper cups so’s you can walk around. But I loved it. Met a negro girl on the flight from Hong Kong. She worked for the airlines or something and got a trip to Hong Kong or something, and she sat next to me the whole way back and she couldn’t believe we Australians have no problem with racialism.”

Huh.

“Anyways, she and her girlfriends took us all out and we had a bang up time, really tops. They loved us!”

Up with Capitalism: The Weekend Australian carries a science piece on the ‘savage garden of eden’ sneers at the long-standing idealization of the primitive, complaining that “today, surprisingly, many nice, clean, sweet-smelling middle-class folk have somehow persuaded themselves that the tribal world, where there is no soap, no deodorant and certainly no tampons, represents a better way of life than their own…it is more communal, more collectivist, more committed to the solidarity of the group.”  The author says “the modern phenomenon of anticivilisational xenophilia is an intellectual problem. The adoration of cultures other than our own, the worship of gods other than those we were brought up  with, a devotion to all religions other than the one our parents believed---what S.J. Lovejoy and George Boas call in their book the ‘revolt of the civilized against civilisation’ with its admiration for precivilised social forms and a love of the exotic, the strange, and the outré—this is indeed a genuine puzzle…What is clear at the onset, however, is that it involves an inversion of much that is natural, normal, and universal in social life.”  The conclusion is that it never works in a collective society, he says. “The lines on which peaceful, modern, spontaneously co-operative organization is built are broadly those of the free market—as indeed, from the 1930s on, people such as Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek, and Michael Polyani tried patiently to explain—and these spontaneous forms of large-scale social order consist of vast self-regulating systems utterly different in their dynamics from tight little fraternally bonded communes.” (Extract by Roger Sandall, Sydney author of The Culture Cult, from June’s Quadrant, and originally a talk for Blackheath Philosophy. www.culturecult.com) 

An inversion of what is NATURAL AND NORMAL and UNIVERSAL---I must remember that.

Watching a seventies theme movie on TV with Tom Skerritt and Michelle Phillips, its called Savage Heart, about desertification and desperate poverty in Africa, an early take on Africa's crisis of want, and when the credits roll it seems that one of the producers is named---really truly---Robert Eatwell.

Harriet’s ham and cheese sandwich

I have stacks of steno pads filled with place names like Ambiramba and Kaukuku and people called Linus and Akawi and Kelagi, and only some of it will survive to be part of a report or testimonial somewhere. With these pads are stacks of photos of peeling cupboards with cockroach eggshells, fraying pink and light blue and mint green checked sheets, tins with Malay product labels, stalls of buai sellers, panoramas of river die-back and freakishly big headed fish. Kids with unnamed skin problems, one of them balding. My belly is full of salt as a principal flavoring, tasteless gummy sago meals and biscuits covered in beef bullion salt. My head is full of stories about witchcraft and persistent love and trust through the Bougainville crisis. Harangues and excoriations and NGO infighting. The idea of ‘being NGO’ as more righteous than a church denomination. I am NGO, we work long hours, sleep and eat with the people, we’re not paper pushers. etc. The smell of raw sewage, mud brown stairs and plastic sinks clogged with hair, filthy, corners rounded with black dust, water resistant towels and freezing washes in milky water cachements or streams, always at night, when my body glows in the dark and everyone sniggers.  Reading smelly worn bestsellers by candlelight, giving way after the evening meal to the darkness, where everything is limited by fuel you have. Sleeping to traditional songs on Radio Kalai blasting away. Waking up to welts of mossy bites on my face. Long finely wrought dreams of the next time I can brush my teeth and taste the Pepsodent and sit in a warm bath dissolving the corns on my feet. The bath becomes a claw footed tub with steam rising, in some hotel Shangrila. Always aware that my dreams of being levitated away are in a whole different range than those of the people I’m snoring next to on the floor: they dream of a foam mattress and indoor plumbing; I dream of aromatherapy and a mani-pedi, or a hotel room with glistening fixtures a Vanity Fair perched across the bath. Eternally listening, hearing life stories and long jokes that seem to have no punch line. Chatter that is unpractised and goes nowhere.  It’s not polished because people don’t speak on this plane of policy or development, or they don’t speak of these things to someone like me. They struggle for articulation. While I struggle to find gummy toilet paper wads in my pockets as I squat in the bush, burying the waste, for lack of a better idea and fear this might be someone’s fallow garden. Passing live trussed possums in the markets as they beg me silently for help. All the batteries and trek technology—which pocket for the GPS, the torch, the recorder, the walkie talkie. Sores and puss and packets of amoxycillin. Mounds of rice, gravy chicken or coconut aibika and tulip and bananas and yams and the endless constipation. Broken thongs backsplashing your thighs through puddles. The smell of betelnut lime, of frangipanu in the evenings, of mangoes and shellfish and cookfires and ginger. Broken curtains, missing louvers, screens and railings, stores with nothing on the shelves but three packs of Navy biscuits and Indonesian crème cookies. A place where the telephone is a miracle and it takes half hour by telikad to get through, no redial function, no 125^th caller winning something on a radio show. No colorful brilliant seaside compensation like the supersaturated pinks and aquas of the Caribbean.  Women are drab, but for their l faces and figures.  Self effacement as a lifestyle. Makes me think of all those Californians who care for their bodies like brand new cars, with constant check ups and topping up fluids, changing tyres and waxing the little dings.

Little pleasures

I’ve had a terrible day, and come back home to make a cheese lettuce tomoato sandwich, because I know we have the good bread from the butchery, but more importantly the Best Foods mayonnaise I just now wiped the store clear of because it arrives maybe twice a year. Nothing is more emblematic of my distance between where I was born and where I make my home than the chronic longing for one brand of mayonnaise.  So, Im making this sandwich and thinking of nothing, two cats fighting for cheese at my ankles, and baby Nancy stealing each slice as I cut it, and I have a déjà vu of being Nancy’s age, older maybe, on 23 Jefferson Rd, the first house I ever lived in, at the dining room table, watching my pigtailed mother eat the most exotic thing my sister and I had seen to date—a deli-bought a ham and cheese sandwich, with beautifully thin and  corrugated sliced of swiss cheese and baked ham, and a crisp leaf of lettuce. We are gobsmacked, my mother oblivious. What had we eaten before that moment? Peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, egg salad, BLTs, fried egg; all sorts of things manufactured in our little kitchen with white-flecked red linoleum counters. Where my mother once knocked a pan of frying fat onto her hands and had to spend a week in bandages. Where she enlisted an exterminator who pulled apart the old dishwasher and ran from the hive of cockroaches he’d unearthed. There she is in my mind now, hale and hearty pigtailed brunette---not even forty!, holding a pink and yellow centred sandwich close to her mouth, elbows at the table, before she inverts her right wrist (she is left-handed) to allow me a bite. Then another for my sister. This is a taste of something so rare and delicious as to never be forgotten. My Madeleine moment, and a door opened on my mother’s other life, some prior or parallel existence where she eats deli sandwiches and is unspokenly tabooed from enjoying them in our presence. This memory is followed by bashing a bowl of egg salad for sandwiches in Vermont with guests on the front verandah having gin and tonics after tennis, and we sense she prefers to be apart from them, because something she says is embittered sounding, and makes us grateful she prefers our company to this crowd of Lily Pulitzer- frocked guests from ‘the club’ now being entertained by my extroverted father.

Baby Nancy asks,  What’s that? And I do exactly the same thing, giving her a taste of something so exquisite she will start making them herself soon enough.  We look up to the television moments across the room, to a cinematic familiarity that doesn’t need audio, where someone is stopped from leaving the room by the revelation of a startling truth, and they stand listening to the argument put forward by this person until their wooden expression falls.  I’m pretty sure Ive never seen this is nature —except maybe with selfconscious American friends after a drink or two. Later I am trying to explain to Chris and Sandra in Pidgin how I lived with the assistant director of the film they’re watching on TV--Desperately Seeking Susan---and Sandra wants to know about the dress Rosanna Arquette’s wearing, because it’s the first time she’s seen shoulder pads. Why are they there? To make her look fatter?

I visit ailing Adrian in the haus sik , who’s broken his thigh bone, and is having strong painkillers smuggled in by friends, which returns him to the conversational cheer I have known so well—and has us giggling about the dypso Xray wallah here who has a whiskey flask in his back pocket as he pushes this unwieldy machine around the wards for immobile patients. He was able to get two good shots of Adrian’s thigh, only one of which, for some reason, included the break. Now Adrian’s got a great rusty nail running from his bum down his thigh, something he said innovated by Hitler’s surgeon, but which in this case promises to set off security alarms all the way back to Belfast when we ship him home for better care. His luck, he says, they’ll have to detour through Sarajevo where the machines are sure to be broken, and arrive at the Northern Ireland border to be celebrated as the first Irishman with a pin in his bum not donated by M15 or the IRA.

Tourists

A typically bizarre American tour group. Arlene looks like a hard core lesbian, with short badly dyed yellow hair and a monobrow across one good, one glass eye. She loves her beer and wears snap breast pocket shirts and says she’s living off her husband’s money, who died of drink. She closes both eyes to speak to me, and endure the intimacy of face to face conversation. Everett is a New Yorker retired to Florida, who can never escape the look of a hunched, overweight, bug eyed loner that walks First Avenue and lived with his mother until he was fifty, polishing the skill of telling good puns. Arlene doesn’t know what a grinding salt or pepper shaker is, and doesn’t have time for special orders or vegetarianism, or the prissy travellers were stuck with. Wants to travel continuously through the rough and ready developing world. Everett grows smitten with her, and shows a soft heart and sharp brain in the end. There are also four friends, two surgeons and their wives who always travel together, and must be seated as a unit for every meal.  Aaron and Gerte, he’s Jewish and she’s Aryan German (go figger), and he’s friendly but she never smiles for the first couple of days and on arrival at the airport pulls her bag away from Willy the Huli wigman who is only trying to help (and who glaces at me with pained expression). Aaron, for that matter, seems to have pervasive squeamishness about everything from water to bedsheets, and carries purell and handi-wipes, and plenty of anti-diarrheal meds. At one point he stops the bus to get out because he finds ants on his arm. The second couple are even more mismatched: he is a gentle white haired Italian with a perpetual smile and the manners of a metrosexual. She is a tough cookie with a hard grating voice, and a quick snarky comment about everything, whose apparent self image is that of the jaded world traveller (waiting for the meal in Port Moresby she says, ‘Welcome to Africa…’). She chides her husband, plays the nagging wife, until he insists she stop playing the curmudgeon. I ask her if, as her passport info suggests, she’s Iranian, and she says, ‘Oh god no! I’m a jew girl! My parents were fleeing from Hitler at the time.’

Marcia is a prison guard from Las Vegas (for lawless callgirls?) and she walks with her shoulders back to balance a big chest, on spindly legs, which makes her look like a toy. But a fierce toy.  Then there’s Mary and her dear friend Dot, both in their sixties and annual travelling companions. Mary’s a social worker in Miami who emotes at everything, loves the people, cries at the Hagen show, snubs the rougher contingent of travellers (like Arlene and Everett), and generally makes her self ingratiating. Dot is very nice, has a disabled adult son, and gets away on trips like this as her only escape. They are mirrored by Allison and Marge, two other good friends and constant travelling companions, older, more hilarious for Allison’s deafness and strong East side accent, although she lives (where?) in Florida I think now, and her friend from Philadelphia, the delightful ex-model Irish-Catholic Marge with a grey cropped hair and big constant smile, who helps Allison tell chapters in their hilarious travel escapades at meals. After Kaminimbit, we speed off in the river boat and Mary’s penis gourd goes flying, so we circle and circle to retrieve it as it floats in the middy water, and Marge cracks up with me. At lunch she tells the story of them travelling in the Amazon on a river boat where they shared a room and Allison, having forgotten her pajamas, was stark naked as Marge got up to answer a knock at the door one night, to find a frantic female staffer saying ‘The ship’s on fire!’ Marge turned to Allison and said, ‘Get dressed, we’re goin down!’ (big laugh here!) They got themselves out to the deck to find they were the only guests who had fled, and it wasn’t the boat on fire, but one fuel drum on shore that was up in flames. We love the keystone cops of this and Allison goes on to tell us how in Jordan, they are undressed in their small hotel room, having a drink in their underwear, when Marge goes to wash her face, and the faucet seems to stick, so water starts to flood the bathroom in no time. They call down for a plumber, and soon a knock on the door reveals a short young man, virtually a boy, in plumber’s belt, alongside a tall attendant. They stare dumbfounded at the two women who are explaining the flood in their bathroom and are apparently unaware of their undressed state until the lad comes inside and begins his short task of fixing the sink. They both scramble to give him a tip---thank you thank you. Then they go out for dinner, and come back to the room later where they hear another knock. The tall man is back---he apparently sleeps in the hallway outside—and he is bearing a hand towel and a bar of clean soap in a dish for them. They thank him, tip him, close the door, and wonder if he’s mistaken them for prostitutes or something. Another knock. More soap and towels. He stands there waiting, they hand him a tip, close the door. Fifteen minutes later another knock. Another towel and soap, and now they ask him why he’s doing this. He says he wants to emigrate to the US and needs to practice his English. They laugh, chat alittle, tip him again, and close the door. It’s two more knocks (a total of five visits) before they tell him to please stop—they need to sleep! Finally he relents. Now Marge tells a story from Italy, where they both stood with an opened map at some street corner, looking for a destination and Marge  having to pee very urgently. So she stood back as Allison waved down a cab---soon a car pulls up, and a smart young man opens the passenger door, and Allison approaches, saying, “We just really need directions to….” and at the very same moment a young woman in hotpants and platforms edges up to his window, nudges Allison aside, and gets in.  They pull off and Allison says to Marge, “How rude! He didn’t even answer my question!”

Picky eaters and mobile phones in PNG

I keep hearing an ad on the radio these days selling some kind of noodle or imported rice. Can’t remember the product, but the mother character is thrilled to serve it to her family because, in her words, she no longer has to persuade the little ones to finish their food-- ‘or even the big one!’ I love this, because I hate this, because it’s a perfect example of cultural frisson, PNG’s version of advertising’s global disjunctures. It’s not like selling ice cream to Eskimos, or electric blankets to sub Saharan Africans, but it is inappropriate in a much more subtle, more insidious way. Ask yourself when you ever met picky eaters in the developing world? What PNG housewife has to convince her husband or kids to finish their food? Remember, this is the land of big is better---not exactly Tonga, but where “You look fat!” is a genuine compliment. Picky eater? That’s like trying to find a confirmed chardonnay drinker or Woody Allen fan in a place where packaging still has a second life as fancy dress accessory and coffee filters, baggies and everything cardboard gets painstakingly re-cycled. Oh Mum, please, not vermicelli again! --Okay, it does happen, maybe, amongst the most cosmopolitan of Port Moresby Papua New Guineans in the fifteen minutes after they return from a holiday in Brisbane, but we are still a country without public distinctions between cappucino and café au lait, between white and pink diamonds, or Fifty Cent and Kanye West. Picky eating? Someone in Australia believes this to be a universal, biological imperative of childhood, rather than the first small steps on a march toward anorexia, bulimia and collagen addictions.

OK, then yesterday: I’m driving along the main street in Madang and three PMV trucks chockablock full of what look to be Kainantu Eastern Highlanders covered in black soot and holding bows and arrows come rolling in the opposite direction, toward town, without chants or noise of any kind. Is it a death? No, because they’re wearing black ash not white clay. More likely a show of force of some kind, parading through town to make a point to someone or some people, but what or whom I will never know. They’re updating the traditional highlands threat gesture of ‘this means war!’ but doing it almost perfunctorily, as if without conviction. At first, I’d had this wild thought that I was in Hagen again, or that these blokes took the wrong turn off the highlands highway (‘Hey where are we?  This isn’t Kundiawa!’) I love the fact that Madang people are walking carelessly, barely giving them second looks, along the sides of the road. So what. Whereas in Hagen everyone would stop and pivot with the cavalcade, waiting for the violent outcome. The most Monte Python aspect of it was the fact that I never learned, never heard, never read in the paper what ultimately transpired. And that all the while I pass them on the road I’m distracted by another radio program, this time a talk back show highlighting some hastily thrown together trade fair for Telikom, the national telecommunications company, where the show host keeps asking one of the salesgirls on the ground what each product means, like broadband or satellite reception, and she dodges every query, even the one where he askes, “Tell us what your target consumer would be for this,” to which she says, “Anyone who wants to be targeted.”

I’ve just been through a few email discussions on the Oceanic anthropologists’ listserv ASAONET, where people raise and discuss issues dedicated to Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian ethnography. The listserv is one of the only, pathetically few, venues where my being a resident in the field gives me heightened authority, and so rather than submit tentative and apologetic questions to the academic population at large  (which ranges from New Zealand to Slovenia) I can type out almost anything with the unchallenged authority of the inside man. Recently one subscriber wanted an update on the Digicel revolution in PNG—referring to the introduction of a telecommunications (mobile phone) company that is actually based in Ireland and has had enormous success in the developing world, especially the Caribbean. This was my response:

It is amazing. Digicel is owned by an Irish billionaire who has had
fantastic success in the Caribbean by simply canvassing every corner of each
country, and offering sweet enough deals with most national (public)
telecommunications companies not to put them out of business (in most
cases). Their business model is to go everywhere, drop prices, throw in free
minutes and just cover the market. Here, though, while theyve put up
repeater towers everywhere in the highlands, and are beginning to in the
islands (which means people without NBC radio these days can make a cel
call!)--the Somares are so heavily invested in Telikom that they refuse to
give them a reciprocal agreement, for fear of being bankrupted. Digical has
offered all kinds of perks, but no deal (even kick backs on digicel to
telikom calls). But as of now Teleikom callers cannot ring digicel and vice
versa. Lots of bad press about digicel regarding their 'exploiting' the
spectrum license agreements (so says PNG's Pangtel in today's paper), but
this is really smoke and mirrors. The promise of digicel is
extraordinary---and could mean everything for the decentralisation of
development, for emergency services, for transport to market problems, and
everything that plagues a developing country with few roads and so much
jungle. Theyve got towers where Telekom refused to put them for years; and
where they dont have electricity to power their repeaters, they drop gen
sets and pay for continual refueling. It's really a revolutionary concept,
and has brought that annoying tingle ingle ingle to the most unexpected
places, like the aural delusions of a whole new PNG.
Nancy

But I was called up on this unalloyed enthusiasm for privatisation, and rightly so, because however well it works, there are always costs for closing down a public enterprise. So I wrote back:

Good point… More than a neoliberal juggernaut, it is a titanic
bully-match for what we have all been taught is the 'heart and mind' of a
country. Forget the army, today's coup arrives by cel phone. And it IS the
fact that we have seen too much Suhartoism in the Somares to trust anything
Arthur will now say about the importance of a public telecommunications
system. Neither way the cards fall will be democratic; it's a battle of
foreign over homegrown individualism and power-mongering. No one has any
doubt. It might be one thing, to say absolutely honestly, if our
entrepreneurial savior looked more like Richard Brandon rather than Elmer Fudd
(which makes his development-speak kind of weird), and it might be another
thing yet if we were not experiencing a feeding frenzy of philanthrophy
amongst the very rich and celebrated these days--who can do more, spend
more, commit more than the next (Shakkira just gave $40 million to
children's charities?)  -- in behavior that makes all the paperwork and
'transparency' ideals of NGOs look reactionary and almost stingy---but we
now have a truly interesting tableau between these two big round guys: Grand
Chief Sir Michael (in the form of his son), and next year's knight,
Whatsisname OBrien ---both cloaked in the garb of global equity, nationalism
of the best kind, progress and the little man!

It couldn't be better if someone wrote the script.

In the end, though, I can ring an aid post worker or bereaved relative from
almost anywhere on the mainland now, something undreamt of before. The
question is, who assumes all the new towers if Digicel gets evicted?
Arthur's pet company, Green Mobile (or whatever its called--clever name)?

This could be a real coup for the Grand Chief.

And the other thorny issue is the power of democratic media in a country of
undemocratic communication ideologies ---apart from all the obvious good of
having access in the bush, and apart from the annoyance of that tingalinging
being spread across the globe---what happens to the old McLuhan position in
the face of an AIDs crises for example?

Nancy

Great moments in human history

                             Just testing how to insert family photos into the body of the blog. A little text and a lot of photos. It looks better to fill the space up with images , but I'm not making it work too well.  Every time I add another shot, the whole lot finda another way to cascade.   All manner of faces and people related somehow across oceans and time zones. Ah, the nets we cast. This particular jumble includes a recent family wedding; shots of my kids and grandkids; more shots of the Karawari; plus Mama Sugum, Yali Singina's trophy wife and keeper of the flame. And Dui, whom we miss very much. There are also shots of my mother, whom I miss very much (how could I know there were so mnay questions I still need to ask her?). . .Sadly, my kids are known to my family in the US mainly through photos, although my son Chris came to Indianapolos in 2000 for a cornea transplant, and my father, brother and sisters, my ex Thomas, and nephew Jesse, have all been to PNG.