Feast and Famine

I have touched on the question of ownership and generosity before , but as it is an issue that I continue to be challenged by, it is an issue that I continue to write about. This post is some thoughts on a variety of related issues, all pertaining to the question of giving or holding.

Taking food to share with someone else (A.Evers)

PNG is traditionally a feast or famine culture. When the harvest, the fishing or the hunting was good, people feasted. When the crop died and the prey got away, people went hungry. As there were not many foods that kept well, things were consumed while fresh and available, not preserved for another time. When things were abundant, they were shared. This was a practical measure that meant things did not go to waste. It was also a pragmatic investment in relationships that meant when someone else had a time of abundance, you would be given your share. This tradition of feast or famine continues to shape ideas of ownership and sharing in PNG. This is particularly true for the majority who remain subsistence farmers, but also true for those in towns who deal with pay checks and budgets. As someone from a culture that preserves and rations, I am often in conflict with the feast and famine cycle. I am used to keeping hold of what I have and making sure I have enough over an extended period, keeping my consumption more level. That I hold on to things when others are in a famine period can seem selfish from one perspective, but good stewardship from the other.

A table laid and waiting for speeches to be done
and the feast to begin

Another challenge is that in a culture of reciprocal giving is that I can never outgive the other person*, regardless of if I have more than they do. Part of this culture is that one party should always be slightly indebted to the other. This ensures that the giving keeps going and the relationship remains strong. If accounts are balanced, then the relationship is in danger as there is no longer a need to connect. To maintain relationships, and as a promise that I will continue to come back to the village, I am always slightly behind on the giving. There is no official tally, but there is a sense that I am indebted to the community.

Corruption is a big challenge in PNG and is also part of this complex web of questions of ownership in community. Traditionally, goods were shared primarily with one’s own network to build and maintain relationships. When political power is gained and people are given control of public money, those with a relationship to that person expect this pattern to continue. They helped to get their relative into power, now they want their slice of the pie. This is a huge social pressure that it is difficult for people to resist. I am not in favour of corruption, but I do recognise the long and challenging road that it will be to bring change, as this is about old cultural practices, not just about greedy individuals.

A feast at my house before I left at
the end of one village stay

Alongside of these issues I find myself chewing over the idea of the ‘theology of enough’. The little I have read appeals to me, as it is a challenge to live with enough, but not too much. How much that means varies, but it means assessing what I have and deciding if more necessary or if it is better to share with others, so that they too may have enough. It is not a call to renounce all earthly possessions and live in poverty, but a challenge to not be swept up by the consumption of a world that bases identity on possessions.

What is enough in a feast or famine culture? What is enough in a preserve and pace yourself culture? What is enough when reciprocal giving is the foundation of relationships? What is enough when I am richer than many around me? How much do I save for later and how much do I give away now?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but it is a good thing to be kept alert and not complacent about these issues of poverty and riches, giving and receiving, and owning and sharing.

*Yes, every place has its greedy people who take and do not give. This is a breach of the reciprocity on which relationships are based, and is therefore a bad relationship.

Third Gender

A while ago there was a pastoral support team visiting Ukarumpa and they put on a session for single ladies. This was a bold move by a married couple, so I went along to encourage them to continue to recognise the different needs of singles working cross-culturally. So often if feels like everything is focussed on families and we singles are sidelined as if somehow incomplete.

The session was a good time, as it was basically a safe space in which to share our challenges and joys with a compassionate audience, which was both a group of singles and the wife of the pastoral couple. Along the way, one of our singles who has been here decades made a comment that rang true: When working as a single woman in a traditional PNG village, you are effectively a third gender. We do not fit the culturally defined role of women, yet clearly we are not men, so we must be something else.

Women cutting and raking grass to clean up the village.

Women in my village spend their time gardening, fishing, cooking and looking after children. Few have good English and many did not make it past grade three. Meanwhile, I do not live off my garden, do not fish for my supper and have no children. I have a collection of university degrees and spend my day working with words and books.

Men in my village also garden and fish, with hunting and house building also being their responsibilities. They are more likely to have gone further in school and had reason to travel outside the village. They have much more access to, and therefore understanding of, life outside the village. One man has a Masters degree and has travelled the world before retiring to the village. Another man from our village is one of the Prime Minister’s body guards and has travelled to many more countries than me.

I dare not speak for all of PNG with its hundreds of tribes and cultural variations, but for there to be distinct roles for men and women would be fairly normal. For me to not fit into these roles is also normal. Instead, I find myself in a ‘third gender’ role, where my education, livelihood, life experience and lack of children set me apart.

One time my position as a third gender was clear was the day the village was preparing for visitors. The young men were building shelters for people to sit in during the meeting. The women where cutting, raking and burning grass so that the village looked tidy. The older men were sitting under a house, chewing betel nut and supervising proceedings.  I was invited to join the men under the house. The conversation covered local, national and international politics as well as development issues, and I was included with the respected men.

 The shelters being built by men for the visitors to sit in.

On the same day, some re-fencing happened at my house that included me with the women. When I arrived in the village a week prior, there had been a welcome gate put outside my house. I was enjoying having my own gate. That day, the gate was removed and a fence put in its place, with the very clear message that I would come and go through the neighbours’ gate, as I came under his protection and was part of his household.

Most of the time I am thankful for my unique third gender role, as it gives me freedoms not given to village women in a patriarchal society. It leaves me room to be different and to do my work in Bible translation. I am allowed to teach and work in a way that local women are not able. Some days being an outsider is a burden. It is difficult to connect with the women around me when our everyday lives and experiences are so different.

Being the outsider (in so many ways!) in the village is one of the reasons I enjoy time back in our organisational base. There I can be normal… whatever that is! There are other single women who work in villages like I do that I can connect with and we can share our stories and challenges. There I am in a community where education and experience are something we all have and where I can be with my own kind. Being a third gender in the village is mostly a good thing, but so is belonging.

Cancer

Cancer. It is a word that strikes fear into many of us, as we have seen the suffering of friends going through treatment, or you’ve experienced it yourselves. It is a rare person who does not know the loss that occurs when the disease is stronger than the treatment. In the last year I have had friends all over the world fighting various manifestations of cancer. Some of them are winning, some of them are not. I am thankful for the access they have had to quality treatment and care.

In the village though, it is a very different story.

My friend is a doctor at a nearby hospital. She came to stay with me in the village for the night when she was doing a TB clinic in a nearby village. In the morning we had a crowd of people waiting outside for their chance to see the doctor. When I say the hospital is ‘nearby’, it is actually three hours away and hard to get to for most people and having the doctor in the village was a chance not to be missed.

 View from my verandah, which was briefly a clinic that morning.

As there was a limited amount of time before my friend had to leave, she prioritised the patients who got to see her. One of the first was someone who had been unwell for some time. After a discussion and an examination the diagnosis was cancer. To receive treatment, the lady would have to go to a hospital far away. Reaching the hospital would require three hours of boat travel and 18 hours of travel in the back of a truck along treacherous roads. She would then have to stay for months, away from family and garden, with the outcome of treatment uncertain. When one is a subsistence farmer who is reliant on a network of relationships for social security, this sort of time away from people and place is nearly impossible. She chose to stay in the village, where she will die from the disease.

As part of the same trip, my friend had returned another cancer patient to their village. Cancer treatment is not something her small rural hospital is able to offer, and the most compassionate course of patient care was to return them to the village to die among their family.

Off to the TB meeting with community leaders,
having finished the critical consultations. 

This is the reality of life and death in the village and people largely accept it as such. At home we fight death for all it is worth. I am glad that my friends have been fighting death this year, as I do not want to farewell them quite yet, but I also see the value in accepting that death will come. I wish my village friends had access to the healthcare my international friends have access to, yet I respect their valuing dying at home and among family rather than fighting for life in a strange and distant place.

Having a foot in both worlds, I am slowly learning to live with this and the many other contrasts and tensions that are ever present.

Chalk, pencil, pen and pixel.

How does one go about writing a draft of the Bible? With a variety of implements!

First the Kope translation team works on a draft together, writing ideas on individual pieces of paper, sharing them and then writing their combined draft on the blackboard. This draft is then reviewed and rewritten until it is clear, accurate and natural. Once the team is happy with the draft it gets written into the exercise book of drafts, in pencil. It is their choice to use pencil even though I would prefer pen as it is easier to read. This draft is then read over and corrections marked with red pen. I take the draft and type it into my computer for eventual printing.

In the space of a day, the draft has been through chalk, pencil and pen to reach pixels. This may seem like a lot of rewriting to some, so let me explain the reasons for each.

Chalk is affordable and lasts well. Whiteboards are fancy, but the markers have a bad habit of drying up at inconvenient moments. This is not a problem with chalk, although kids getting hold of it and having some creative fun can diminish supplies rapidly. Using the blackboard allows everyone to contribute to one written edition as it is easily seen and commented on.

Pencil allows for endless rubbing out as people revise their ideas, which is a definite advantage over pens. Pens also don’t work well if people rest their hand on the page while writing and leave a trail of sweat and grease behind. You can’t see this trail, but pens don’t work well where people have previously rested their hand on the page, as my co-workers tend to do.

Pixels require expensive equipment as well as training. Not only do computers cost a lot, but the equipment to power them costs as well. Learning computer skills takes time. At the moment I am the computer owner and operator for the Kope translation programme. One day we will have a computer for the team and I will take on the bigger challenge of teaching computer skills, but I know that it will be a big task.

Chalk, pencils, pens and pixels. These are our implements as we draft the Kope New Testament.

Compartmentalisation

Living in a global world, with a global network of friends, comes with its challenges. While teens today apparently suffer from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) if they are offline for too long, I find myself compartmentalising my life and deliberately tuning out.

In the village I can sometimes access facebook on my phone and have found that their messenger programme is one of my more reliable forms of communication. In theory this means I could be chatting away with anywhere, yet that is not what I do. I find that I message with the people who know the context I am in, my fellow workers in Gulf Province. It does not matter if these friends are in their Gulf locations, or home in the UK and NZ, they understand where I am, so are the people that I contact. When dealing with all the cultural stresses surround me, cutting down my communication to ‘those who get it’ makes a big difference.

  The view from where I sit to check facebook 

in the late afternoon. (H.Schulz)

I still scan facebook regularly and am touched by outward events, but I rarely ‘like’ or comment. Part of this is the frustratingly limited internet, where even achieving a ‘like’ is a minor miracle. Most of it is that looking at the outside world, but not joining in with it, is a balance that I can maintain. Similarly, I read my emails (when they can be convinced to download), but leave the bulk of them for when I am out of the village, where I have better internet and clearer head space.

When I am in Australia, I find myself doing the reverse. I am happy to talk about life in PNG for so long and to share my pictures, but then I reach a limit where I prefer to focus on where I am and who I am with. The gap between my worlds is so big that I can only bridge it for a limited length of time before I need to be in just one place. I suspect the same is true in reverse, that my friends can only engage with my strange life for so long before they too need to return to familiar conversational territory.

Compentmartalising life works well for me… most of the time. These boundaries all fell apart when the YWAM medical ship came to visit the area near my village. I am thankful for their visits and the work they do, but I also struggle with cultural clash of life aboard and day trips to villages. The ship is comfortable, air conditioned, has fresh veggies, cheese, lots of people from a similar cultural and linguistic background to me…it is basically a floating outpost of Australian life and culture, which can be a lot of fun. By day though, people visit villages, to a life I am familiar with and usually live in full time, but we only stay for a few hours before returning to the floating hotel. This coming and going so swiftly between worlds was a challenge and I was tired most of the time.

 Two worlds, watching each other, and I belong in both.
(photo: ywamships.org.au)

As I prepare to return to Australia for four months of furlough, I find myself wondering about what this compartmentalisation will mean once I am home. I will need to find good ways to share my story with those who are interested, but still to engage with the life and culture in Australia that is becoming increasingly foreign to me. Compartmentalisation is a survival skill for me, so we will see what it means in a different context.

PS I realise that I just admitted to being contactable in the village, but I also admitted to mostly choosing to limit that contact to a small network. Do not be surprised if you message me when I’m in the village and I don’t write back!

Village English

In the area of Papua New Guinea that was the British and then Australian ‘Territory of Papua’, English is mostly used as a language of wider communication (LWC). Tok Pisin was the main LWC in the Territory of New Guinea and is slowly gaining in use in the Papuan area. Hiri Motu is also a traditional LWC in my area, although it is being used less often these days.

English as the LWC can be deceptive though, as ESL (English as your sixth language) English is different to mother tongue English. I cannot think ‘Oh, people here know English, I can just speak as normal’, or they will not understand much of what I say.

 Is that when the kid behind you in class cuts
your hair when you’re not looking?!

Village English is slower, simpler, and uses few idioms or passive clauses. Changing my natural way of speaking, to another dialect of my own language, can be quite challenging at times. It can also be quite amusing, as village English has developed in different ways to the English I am most familiar with, and the contrasts can be amusing and confusing.

‘Already’ in used liberally as a marker of an event that has been completed (perfective aspect). Although this is similar to how I grew up using the word, it is used with noticeable frequency in village English. What I am learning from this is when to use the equivalent structure (‘tauo ….VERB ROOT ….maka’) in Kope. How people use English reflects their own language, so can be helpful in learning language.

‘Maybe’ is used to mark uncertainty (irrealis mode) and is a very handy word. It is a helpful way of expressing possibilities without being committed. I’m still working out how to say the same in Kope though.

 What if I have two?

There are the words that are fossilised from another era of English, the era when Australian and British teachers ran the school system. I always smile when told to look out for ‘faeces’ on the path, or that the canoe has pulled over to the riverbank so that someone can go behind a bush to ‘pass urine’. These are legitimate English expressions, just not the ones I’d normally use.

Many people have expressed a desire for more overseas teachers to help train and improve the education system here, a return to the days when they learnt to say ‘faeces’. I agreed the day I asked a grade eight after his English exam how the exam went, and he stared at me blankly. I guessed from that response that he did not do very well, an assumption justified when he later failed to pass grade eight. Considering English has been the language of instruction for him at school, it saddened me that he still struggled with it so much.

There are surprising uses of words in village English, where at first I take the wrong meaning. I thought someone in a story was being executed, when in fact they were executing (carrying out) some action or other. There are other things I wish I had written down, but it was not appropriate to do so at the time.

 Defenestration Prohibited.
I like the literal description of a door for the wind to enter by.

One word that I am often unsure of is what it means to ‘beat’ something. In my English I have a range of words to express the intensity with which I hit something, from a smack all the way to a beating. To me, beating something is a violent, damaging act, but I think in village English that it is often used the cover the whole range of intensities of hitting. What does it mean then, when a woman says her husband ‘beat’ her, or when she then says her child ‘beat’ her. Having seen the toddler smack her in anger, I know what she means, but I did not see what the husband did, and neither do I see any bruises. How I am supposed to take it when people say that the police arrested someone and gave him a ‘good and proper beating’? Is this as intense as it sounds? What do I make of the fact the speaker is satisfied that the police did this, that they are expressing it as the appropriate course for justice to take? They are using English, but the meaning can be quite different.

 Beauty, just ‘cause.

Another challenge can be written English, where the dreadful non-phonetic nature of our spelling can lead to interesting interpretations by those used to more logical spelling systems. When the programme for an event list ‘reborn cut’ I was imaging some strange baptism-meets-circumcision ceremony. Thankfully when someone else read the programme aloud, I discovered it was a ribbon that was to be cut.

Using English to communicate while I am in the process of learning Kope is extremely helpful, but it is both challenging and amusing. I need to keep slowing my speech down and simplifying how I say things. I am someone who plays scrabble and does cryptic crosswords for entertainment, so playing with words comes naturally to me, while making them simple is hard work.

Surreal Moments

Travelling by dugout (H.Schulz)

There are some days I pause, look at my own life, and wonder if I have stepped into a movie.

Tablet: I bought my tablet in a multi-story technology mall in Kuala Lumpur while on holidays. I use it in a PNG swamp village to share photos and show the Jesus Film. Was it really me in both places?!

Private jets and dugout canoes: Flying to the village I sit in the co-pilots seat of a Kodiak plane. It is one of four owned by our organisation and the pilot is a friend. Although very much needed work transport, my imagination has me flying about in a private jet. From the plane I finish my journey to the village in a dugout canoe. It was carved from a single log by one of our translation team. Which is less normal, to travel by private jet or dugout canoe?!

One of our Kodiak planes (A.Evers)

Animals: Walking back from a friend’s house one day I realised I was being followed by a cassowary. It was a tame one, being raised for a feast one day, but they still have a nasty kick and it was chased away to keep me safe. The next day I was sitting with another friend, giving their baby cuscus a cuddle. He too was being raised for a feast. Followed by a cassowary, cuddling a cuscus, and trying not to think about their dinner-plate destiny. It almost makes me believe that children ride kangaroos to school in Australia.

Bananas: Lying in bed for my afternoon nap, I can see two bunches of bananas ripening on the tree outside. Above me is a roof made of palm leaves. Somedays these views are normal, other days I am reminded that I really do live with in a PNG village, in a bush house.

View from my bedroom window
(H.Schulz)

Facebook: When the phone tower is in a good mood, I can download facebook posts on my phone, but the normality of life outside my village bubble is such a contrast to my local reality. I download things to read later, because reading with a crowd is awkward when I never know at what point a friend will have a culturally inappropriate photo that is difficult to explain in my current context. Australian beach wear and Christians drinking alcohol are just two examples of normal at home that makes no sense here. Hardest is getting a snippet of news, but not being able to follow it up and find out the real story. My heartstrings are being pulled from far away, but I am here and only hearing echoes of the truth.

City streets: Having got used to PNG, being back in Australia is always surreal in a different way. A busy city street, full of people in a rush to be somewhere else, with all the glittering shops and places to eat is now sometimes also a surreal experience.