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.