Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea

Donald update

I was going to post some new shots of the caves from our second big walkabaut in the Imboin area, but National Geographic magazine wants me to hold onto them in case they need them for an article. Having given us some project money, they now have first media rights. Sounds promising. But I will post an update on little Donald, for those who saw his picture from 5 months ago, when we brought him under our wing and couldn't believe he was, as people claimed, 18 years old. Simon Williamson from BBC and I thought it was just another shaggy dog story, this scrawny kid wearing nothing but a ripped t shirt and standing only as high as my shoulders. But it took barely a day of food for him to begin the metamorphosis back to healthy teenager, first by chatting away (what sugar does for the brain), and eventually by clearing sores and giving his limbs some shape. By Christmas, when I came back, he was alert and hearty and happy--ironically looking his age, i.e. older than ever before. This is not to say he doesn't have lingering problems, like with clarity of thought (but then don't we all?)  Here he is now :

   And here he was 5 months before:   

Food: still the wonder drug.

The fixer upper squirearchy

Because this is PNG I cannot ever, really, be a landowner in the sense of stakeholder or Mama Graun. But I can buy land that's already been alienated by the State (although the act has been made considerably harder since the arrival of a Chinese nickel mine in Madang). After being led on by one homeowner for nearly three years, we finally got our deposit back, and were lucky enough to have another property to pop it down on.  Capitalising on someone else's loss, or really mismanagement, we bought a plot of land with a kit house that was in default to the bank. Now we're renovating, and it's slowly becoming habitable. Right now Junior and a handful of other Karawari kids live there. Ela  Enterprises has put in two new outside staircases, a water tank, a toilet and shower, opened up the main room, and are about to start on phase two, which will involve a big verandah out front, a cement floor below (so we can have workers meeting down there---and eventually build up office rooms). The kitchen will also be renovated, and the floor tiled, and sooner or later, if all goes well, we'll bring a satellite in for TV and internet at Chez Sullivan. Junior has been meticulous about the gardens and general maintenance, so we bought a freezer so he could run an ice block business from the front yard.

If all things go as planned (i.e. bank loans), we will also buy the little peach colored house next door and have a compound, making us a squirearchy in the settlements of Madang. Later we'll flip them for a place in Lake Com0, or a B&B in Provence.

This of course reminds me of a story about my Raikos in-laws, the relatives of Chris' wife, who live just close enough to town to always be around and just far enough away to need a place to crash. When Sandra first came to live with us, the whole family had finally 'arrived'  at the height of bourgeois modernity, with our everstocked pantry, cd player and TV, not to mention clean sheets, good towels, lots of cutlery, a shower and washing machine. My house became Sandra's house, and in so doing, a Raikos collective house. As might be imagined, there were painful adjustments, including the rising paranoia in my gullet. On a given day you would find me counting sheets, towels, socks on the line and even spoons in the kitchen drawer-- until eventually, involuntarily, I learned to 'let go' in more ways than one. But the last straw came when, before a party, I pulled out my old Provence tablecloth, legacy of a beloved French ex, and couldn't find the matching serviettes. I searched everywhere, but the entire household shrugged---sorry, no, never saw those, have no idea---i.e. they're gone, Mums, get over it. But I kept looking, it irked me so---there were supposed to eight, I believe, and I could only find three. Finally I 'let go.' Then Christmas arrived and my sisters and brother came to visit and we all brought food and gifts to Raikos for a celebration. Sometime during that visit we walked to a village nearby where they were having an enormous and glorious singsing with great clay pots of food and wooden bowls and pigs exchanged, and when I looked across at all the brilliant headdresses bouncing and swaying across the singsing ground I noticed five bright yellow Provence serviettes bobbing up and down above the crowd. 

I do wish to note, though, that I am no longer the mere evil mother-in-law but have graduated to revered matriarch, with a home in town, another in DCA, another in Yimas Village, Sepik, and a base camp in Awim Village, at the head of the Arafundi River. My god: homeless to realty mogul in so little time. Sandra and Chris are, for the time being, living in the Karawari, so I have grown very complacent about my home furnishings. Some may aspire to a weekend house at the shore, or  a pied a terre in the the city. Others buy islands, or just a leer jet to shuttle from rental to rental. I prefer to shuttle from my various tropical estates, juggling mortgages, rents and eternal indenture to every villages that has built me a thatch house.   

Today's shots show  the McMansion in progress, plus the house nextdoor behind the lovely flowering tree. Note Madonna, Jason, Junior, and Josh, and elsewhere a shot of Josh and Nelly learning to drive, when they're really just searching for the elusive Reverse.

In closing, Im going to repeat a story by Michael Bates, of Trans Niugini Tours. Apparently their company pilot, George, was flying villagers in and out of Ambunti, on the Sepik, to Wewak, and one of them wanted to bring his dog along. George had to explain that dogs could not fly unrestrained, according to DCA rules, but must be transported in a box. The picture here shows what George found when he returned to Ambunti.

 

Tane takes off

Belatedly I am posting the last shots of Tane before he took off on a PMV to Hagen and a flight to the Karawari in late January. These go out to everyone who kindly contributed to his travel and stay with us while he recovered from surgery. Look at that smile! By the time he was ready to go, you could barely catch him, zooming around the house and compound on new feet, in new gum boots, chasing cats and everything that bounces back. They had to pay for an extra seat in the PMV when they left, so laden down were they with gifts and goodies, not to mention new shoes.  Many thanks to you all, and especially to Zach Simonson, Tane's guardian angel. We do promise to post Tane's soccer league shots  when they come in.

The OC, Madonna and me: more TV in Madang

Until recently the household here in Madang revolved around an 8 PM screening of MacLeod 's Daughters, the outback soapie that made sheep dips sexy, and which cast such a spell on the everyone from Uncle Ray to Leonard to visiting neighbours, that all myths about PNG time were finally laid to rest. Food was not cooked, soccer balls were still, and mobile phones were switched off for the hour of 8-9 PM each and every night. And while I kind of liked the fact that Nelly and Joyce, both in their twenties, saw rugged women on cattle stations as role models, and the men as secondary characters (its very much an Amazonian series) I was also worried that even these outback girls' preoccupations with youth and beauty, however subliminal, might be taken to heart. But ever since the New Year and some programming reshuffling, our early evenings are rededicated to a new show: the OC. The OrangeCounty. A saga of wealthy suburban Californian kids who, thanks to impeccable makeup and great clothes, not to mention botox and personal trainers, look a lot older than their own parents. Now I'm always happy to watch Peter Gallagher, whose blue eyes, big brows and pouty lips make him McDreamy, I agree (here he is blanching in B&W from my flattery), but I'm less happy to hear the sharp sardonic tone of teenagers in conversation with their parents or, for that matter, themselves. One lad told the new kid at a Christmas party today, Welcome to a life of paralyzing insecurity and self doubt.- This was only moments after girls served each other eggnog as one balked, That's disgusting! and the other said, I know! Walking to the kitchen I overhear one partygoer scream, Of course I'm screwed up, I'm the daughter of a diva slut!

Boy is that one going to haunt me.

Meanwhile, Nelly watched Brokeback Mountain on DVD last night. She was gutted by Heath Ledger's death, after having seen Casanova on Star Movies, and I brought back both DVDs from Canberra recently. Can/t remember what I told her about Brokeback, except that it was a serious picture, and this morning, god how I love these kids, she said it was so good, so different, how he kissed the guy madly behind a building in town and all. I told her he met and fell in love with his co-star wife during this movie, which I suppose was my way of reassuring her he was straight after all, but I still think her reaction to this man-man affair was brilliant. Are they lesbians? she wanted to know, fetching a new word for a new category of gay. No, just two cowboys who fall in love I think. She smiles, Yeah, it was good. Now, as fate woud have it, the OC has introduced a lesbian character.

Leonard has found the Harry Potter merchandise insert in his DVD and wants to buy the Lord Valdemort magic wand, which looks very much like an old Sepik carved cassowary bone dagger. But I know from experience this item will arrive beautifully packaged, but plastic, not some hoary natural substance with the appropriate flick of the wrist weight. Why don't you carve a bone dagger yourself? I ask. But it won't magic then! But Leonard, you have more magic in the Sepik than Lord Valdemort ever did, and if you make it yourself, the wand will have Sepik magic, not Hogwart's magic, which is even stronger. He shrugs, refolds the mutlicolored advert and walks away.

We have a new member of the family: Madonna. Last year I met her in Kaningara, in the Blackwater area of theSepik, where she was living with relatives away from her home in even more remote Mariama. She's albino and adorable, and wasn''t going to school or anything, and had no sunglasses or protective clothing at all, so I suggested to relatives (and then her parents in Mariama) that she come live with us, to which they agreed. I wanted to bring her in from the sun, see the doctor, get more school. She walked through to Yimas recently from whence our cave team leader, Josh, brought her by plane and PMV to Madang. What a brave kid, and already we're smitten. She giggles a lot, and Uncle Ray is especially taken by her, he's nicknamed her Maddox. So Maddox she is.

I have spent years, by the way, talking about Madonna Ciccione, the other Madonna, as someone who used to live in my East Village building in NY, and who hung her underwear on the fire escape, played a thumping boom box on the floor, and later, when she'd hit the big time, told a reporter she was so pleased to have escaped that East 4th St dump. But before that interview, she also ensorcelled my boyfriend, Rob, who, as the First Assistant Director on Desperately Seeking Susan, having suggested her to the director, Susan Seidelman, would come home from work every day with another cheeky story about that crazy Madonna on set.     How she told an extra, Wouldn't you want my life right now? (echoes of my fave narcissist, Julian Schnabel, around the same time, in Artforum, where he declared that he was cruelly envied for his talent, his beautiful French wife and his overpriced dinnerware....appropriately Schnabel has moved on to be a Hef-like pajama-clad film director--to be heckled by a drunken Sean Young----there is a god ) and said of a party with David Bowie and Mick Jagger, They're old people!, and then took the bait when Rob eluded to his time in 'Nam ---even if he'd have had to enlist in grammar school (we think it was his buzz cut). We'd chuckle away over dinner as if only the erudite, self-conscious East Villagers, people who watched Quadraphenia and adapted Beckett (Desperately notwithstanding) , deserved the attention this Madonna was then getting. She was the ditzy one of us who made it big and was now being called a marketing genius. It annoyed me no end that I'd go to a club and some queeny hairdresser would be gushing about her impeccable skin; and it unnerved me that Rob could be enthralled by her narcissistic charms all day. I showed up at the set one day, but Madonna was oblivious, and yet Rosanna Arquette's teenage sister, Patricia, was strangely unsettled (I think I was wearing something she envied). Then at the wrap party for the film, while Madonna flirted up Rob and I played the mousy girlfriend (sensu Tina Fey), it occurred to me that I should dance the night away with Jellybean Benitez, her celebrated and ever so cool sound producer boyfriend, in spite. Alas, he did not follow the script. Still, Rob went home with me, and we had a Christmas card on the fridge for months of Ms Ciccione holding crewmember's infant: Greetings from Madonna and Child.

So I'm pleased to say that Madonna now refers to another charismatic blonde, this one  natural, no eyebrows, no designs on Rob. Favorite shot for the day: Jacob and Maddox, with no white balance.