Checking Party

I am living a topsey turvy life when a spelling test is a fun community event and a checking party more closely resembles an exam. Labels can be so deceiving.

A checking party comes late in the Bible translation process. It is when the book is nearly ready for the printers, but needs a final check and edit for small details of formatting etc. At the checking party we were looking through thousands of pages checking for consistency. One thing I checked was that headings were consistent in format (bold, centered, no full stop). I crossed out a lot of fullstops in the interest of consistency. We were also checking cross referencing and abbreviations, which meant learning all the books of the Bible in a different language.

Each time we found an error, even something as small as a misplaced full stop, we circled it, put a red line through the whole page and put it in a separate pile. This pile then got returned to someone to enter all the corrections before publication. We checked the Bible book by book, criteria by criteria. As we finished a book and a criteria (ie page numbers are consecutive) we would initial the list to say it was complete.

Bible translation has stage after stage or working, checking, editing and progressing. This has to be one of the most finicky stages I’ve come across, but it is an essential one. A book with inconsistencies in presentation, page numbers out of order etc is not a well produced book. It is the small things like that which people notice and which lead them to ask if the big theological questions have been accurately dealt with or not. From my experience so far, I can say that each stage has numerous checks, and although I am sure a full stop or two escaped my attention, the big issues are the primary focus is and should be done well.

Although the checking party left me feeling a little cross eyed, it also left me feeling encouraged. Here is the fruit of years of work. Here is God’s word in a local PNG language. For me to give several hours to small details is a gift I’ll gladly give to the bigger picture of faith and discipleship. The real party, with singing, dancing, costumes, speeches and food will be when this book comes back from the printers and is dedicated among the people it speaks to. 

Modern-Traditional Balance

As we spent our five weeks living in the village, I was impressed at the balance of modern and traditional life in each day. Mostly people seemed to have found a workable balance that they were happy with.

Our village was an easy PMV (Public Motor Vehicle) ride to Madang. A few PMVs operated on that route and each went at least twice a day (on the days they weren’t broken down!). Ladies going to market to sell buai and others going to town to work an office job were the bulk of the PMV passengers. These people then brought back cash and store goods to supplement village life and produce.

Bilum making with plastic string

While many people had mobile phones, the village did not have electricity. This meant some people charged their phones when at work or rigged chargers out of four D batteries taped together. Although the phone and the need to charge it is a modern thing, using it to keep in touch with family is an ancient thing. Community announcements were still by garamut. Different rhythms pounded on this hollowed out log indicated a gathering for church purposes, for community purposes or a death.

Often modern equipment had been applied to traditional lifestyles, making things easier. The cooking seemed fairly traditional, but the big metal pot was not. Clearing the land is traditional, but bush knives, axes and chainsaws are not. Buying a two kina heavy duty plastic bag is easier and cheaper than making a string bilum for taking buai to market. Bilums are mostly made of plastic string, not bush rope, although the technique is traditional. Clothing is very much western, as is the need for laundry soaps and buckets to wash it.

Houses mostly appear traditional, but they are held together with nails rather than bush rope. Metal roofs allow people to catch water, but they also make the house baking hot during the day. Traditional roofs are cooler. Our house was half and half, so we could catch water on one half of the house and nap under the other.

Our house, with half morata half tin roof

Traditional life is biodegradable because it is produced locally. Modern items are produced in distant factories using lots of chemicals and do not break down. Flat batteries, bleach bottle, plastic wrappers…these were all things I saw discarded. Yet unlike traditional items, they remain where they are thrown and do not return to the soil. Some items, such as rice bags, are not discarded, but are used a fire starters in the haus kuk, with questionable environmental and health consequences.

At a glance village life seems very traditional, but in each day we would find touches of modernity. Often this was beneficial, by saving time and energy, but the downsides were there also, such as the rubbish. 

Cocoa Fermentery

Woman carting water

While we were in the village, a series of meetings happened at our waspapa’s house and under the shade of a nearby tree. Our Papa was a respected leader in the community. The men of the village were discussing the building of a community owned cocoa fermentary. On the day we left, work had begun on laying the foundation.

Women carrying rocks

It really was a community driven project. Everyone had put in an amount towards the materials needing to be purchased. Everyone had also taken part in a small loan to make up the difference between what was raised and what was needed. On the first day the foundation was being worked on, women came to and from the site with their heavy loads of rocks or water (for mixing cement). The men were digging the footing for the foundation and securing the form for the concrete under the supervision of a carpenter.

Delivering rocks to where the foundation will be.

Most of the families in the community already have full grown productive cocoa trees. Most of the cocoa goes unharvested as they do not have easy access to a fermentary and there is no regular buyer for unfermented cocoa. Occasionally a buyer will come along the road and tell everyone the date of his return to purchase fresh picked cocoa. This happened once in our five weeks. All the families picked ripe beans and had them ready to sell for a small profit.

Working on the foundation

Once the fermentary is established, the community will buy the unfermented beans, ferment them and sell them on. The profits will be returned to the community. Then a harvest every two weeks and little wastage from the trees should be possible. Numerous local communities have a fermentary functioning successfully on this principle.

Finished Fermentery in another village

Within this I wondered if the cocoa would ever gain a fair trade label. They are too small a group to pursue such things, yet the cocoa is all grown on family land and sold by the community. The only reason there is sweaty labour involved in the process is that the climate is such that you wake up sweating. If children are part of the labour force it is because they are too young for school and gardens are an activity that all the family is involved in. I hope that the fair-trade label has room for such low level business.

All this cocoa, yet so little chocolate. All the beans are sold overseas. By the time they return as chocolate, the price has gone up considerably. 

Village Living: Animals

Animals domestic, wild, edible and otherwise; they all manage to feature in our five weeks in the village.

Funky Chicken

There were the pests, like the mice who kept us awake at night. They were clever mice, as one time I heard them set off the trap, but in the morning there was nothing in it…they set the trap off, then ate the food and escaped. Another morning a less clever mouse ended up in a shallow bucket of water. Not deep enough to be drowned, too steep and slippery to escape. Michelle had mercy on the mouse and threw him out with the water. The chicken had less mercy and chased it across the grass and under the house. Apparently the mouse then escaped into our outhouse, as the chicken was guarding the door. Yet the mouse was having a bad day, for there was no mouse in the outhouse, just a splashing sound coming from down the pit. I guess it drowned after all.

Punky chicken

Another pest in the outhouse was a snake. It fell from the roof and slithered across my feet as I left one time. Not nice. Not nice at all. I was not reassured by people who told me it was a house snake and harmless. Another family was equally uncomforted by that information when a similar snake made an appearance in one of their beds.

Stumpy chicken

More amusing were the funky chickens who roamed our village. In Australia there is a movement to protect heritage breeds of hens so that the dominant white breed do not become the only breed. Well, we had enough chicken varieties to calm any fears of a chicken mono-culture. Chickens with mo-hawks, chickens with bald necks, chickens with no tails and a chicken whose feathers all pointed in different directions. The shiny black rooster who strutted about the place as head of the flock redefined ‘cocky’, but I would have gladly strangled him when he took to crowing well before dawn in the tree beside our house.

Hair being burnt off pig.

Two pigs made an appearance in our village in five weeks. One was full grown and we ate it for dinner over several nights. The other was a piglet who took a liking to our waspapa and followed him all over the place. More than once the piglet was chased back to the village when Papa wanted to go further away. A wild pig also got into one of the family gardens and stole a lot of food. For subsistence farmers this is a significant loss.

Baby sugar glider

Another POC family got a reputation for liking animals. Not only did they start in a village with a pet cocky (sulphur crested cockatoo), they were brought an injured chicken to look after, a baby sugar glider and a small bird that escaped.

Victoria Crowned Pigeon

Strangest of all were the animals we ate. In an area of low protein availability, you eat what you catch. This included bats, ‘bush rats’ and birds. When the beautiful blue bird was brought to us, we wondered what endangered species we were consuming. A Victoria Crowned Pigeon, we found out. Wikipedia gives me little comfort by giving it the status ‘threatened’. It truly did taste like chicken though. The King Parrot on the other hand, had a stronger beefy taste.

 I’ve not yet eaten them, but muruk and kumul are two favourite animals that people hunt and eat. Unfortunately they are also two of my niece’s favourite zoo animals; cassowary and tree kangaroo. My next zoo trip with her when back in Australia could get interesting…

Village Living: Gardens

Gardens and family are the mainstays of PNG village life. Families are the social network. Gardens are the economic and survival tool.

Garden when we arrived

When we arrived in the village they had finished clearing this year’s garden for planting. Clearing means cutting down larger trees and burning off all the undergrowth. Fallen trees are used to define the edges of the garden or collected for fire wood. With our wasfemili, we helped plant the garden with corn, taro and bananas. As in every garden everywhere, we also spent a lot of time weeding. In the area we were in, gardens were planted with a range of productive plants and never in straight lines. Corn becomes the frame for beans to climb up. Banana palms give some shade to taro.

Garden four weeks later

This year’s garden was across the road from the house on a steep slope. Last year’s garden, the one we were eating from, was an hour’s walk away on an even steeper slope. Here we could see the plants that had grown up together. Some food also came from the gardens of previous years. As we walked through the jungle  I could not always tell where gardens began and ended, but Papa and Mama could always tell us who the garden belonged to and when it was planted. We are each knowledgeable in our own field and this was theirs.

For us, the diet of cooking bananas, taro, yam and sweet potato, flavoured with ‘greens’ and coconut milk quickly became dull. Yet these are the staples which they are capable of raising with the land and conditions they have. Plenty of carbohydrates with whatever protein you can catch. Fruits (pineapple, pawpaw, pomello) seemed to be eaten more as snack foods.

Bananas anyone?

Close by the village were plenty of coconut and buai trees, the fruit of which was consumed daily. Near our house was a small garden with greens and tobacco for regular use. It also had a row of flowers for decoration. With all the energy that daily went into travel to and from gardens, work within gardens and work turning produce into food, a row of flowers for beauty was an addition that made me smile. 

Village Living: Cash Economies

Young boy climbing a buai palm

One afternoon our wasbrata (brother) came home from school and asked for money for the school picnic. Cash is not something that the family keeps much of but the solution was straightforward. Our brother and sister went down the hill to the family buai (betel nut) plantation. He climbed the thin palm trees, threw bunches of buai down to his sister and she put them in bags to take to market the next day.

People and buai loaded onto a PMV

The following day we went with our was susa (sister) to the market. We piled onto the PMV (Public Motor Vehicle) with all the others bound for the market plus their produce. It was cramped. Before we even got off the PMV at the market, the bargaining had begun. Teams of men had come down from the Highlands to buy bulk buai to take home and resell. Although the Highlanders are bigger and fiercer than the coastal people, our sister was taking no nonsense from them and bargained hard. As the men bought the bunches of buai they would gather, strip the nuts from the branches, put them into sacks and sew them shut once full. Once all our sister’s buai was sold, we caught another PMV into town to buy store goods (rice, tinned meat, milk powder and a cream bun) then back home with the rest of the cash to give our brother for his school picnic.

Loaded PMV going to market

Buai, or betel nut, is a mild stimulant when chewed with lime and ‘mustard’ (not what we think of as mustard in Aus). These three combine to a red paste which people then spit out, resulting in bright red spatters on the ground and a high incidence of mouth cancer in the country. It only grows at lower altitudes and the trade with the highlands was the primary income for the family we lived with. Other cash crops were cocoa and coffee…feeding the stimulating addictions of the west rather than their own addiction.

Selling bulk buai at the market

It saddens me that the cash economies of this country seem to be tied to addiction. Sugar, tobacco and natural gas are other exports, each of which is addictive in its own way. Most of it is feeding the addictions of the culture I am from. Yet this is the cash which families put into education or into nutrition (the protein of tinned meat, not the cream bun!). A big LNG project is driving the economy and enabling the government to promise free education, better roads and better healthcare. Surely these are good things, but at what cost? There is no simple answer, but it is interesting to be observing  the grassroots level of production and cash return. It is good to ask the questions, even if I do not have answers.