I am an Australian working in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Bible translation and linguistics. Before I moved here I worked on traditional sailing ships doing sail training, and shared life with friends through our variation on intentional Christian community living.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinion of any of the organisations mentioned.
6 week POC participant, David, practising fire cooking
Fourteen weeks of POC is a long time to invest in a training course, but worthwhile forthose of us who plan on being long term in this region. For people who are here shorter term (and various other reasons) there is also a six week version of POC. For the first five weeks we all do the same things. In week six the short-term POCers go on a five day village stay and the rest of us start to focus more on preparing for our five week village stay.
On their return from the village the 6-weekers had all had a good experience of PNG life, as well as their share of challenges. They’d all been very well looked after, felt their Tok Pisin had improved and were glad for a hot shower and a familiar bed. Saying goodbye to them was sad, as they have very much been part of our community to this point. We feel their absence…particularly in the noise levels. The six weekers happened to include all the children aged under one, who are at a noisier age and stage.
Now that only the fourteen week POC participants remain, the focus has shifted to village preparations. We are dehydrating food to take with, planning and shopping for five weeks, and starting to wind down life at Nobnob. Just as we had settled into the POC routine, everything is set to change once again!
As a family we grew up going camping. Somehow, Mum and Dad would fit all seven of us plus tents, bedding, clothes, food etc into the van and we would head off to National Parks and other bush places. Campfires, pit toilets, sponge bathing and nights under a glorious display of stars were all part ofthis. Mum and Dad were not deliberately preparing me for POC and PNG, but going on an affordable holiday that explored our remarkable land. Yet, preparation it proves to have been.
As most others coming to PNG do not quite have so much camping experience, haus kuk weekends are part of the programme to prepare us for village living. Haus kuks are the name for outdoor kitchens that are standard in local villages. We have built our haus kuks out of bush poles, string and tarp, and although less sturdy than a local haus kuk, they provide us shelter in which to practice our campfire cooking skills and get an idea of what food we might like to take with to the village.
Thankfully, the point of building them was the cooking, not the building, as we have not had the most success in the building department. Our haus kuk stood up to the first tropical downpour and at least one earthquake, but two further tropical downpours flattened it. The work men had mercy on us and rebuilt it while we were in class one day and it is now much straighter and sturdier. Our version was slightly wonky and wobbly.
The cooking has been much more of a success and I’m enjoying pushing the boundaries of my campfire cooking ability. A pot oven and a heavy based roasting dish open up possibilities beyond the saucepan I’ve previously worked with. Dishes I am proud of so far include sticky date pudding, sour dough bread and pizza. We’ve also discovered that tinned corned beef can make surprisingly good meat balls and that well fried thin slices of tinned luncheon pork go well with scrambled eggs. There is an amusing cultural bias in our pancake toppings; peanut butter for the American in the team, maple syrup for the Canadian, sugar and lemon for me and our German team mate was wishing she had nutella. Okay, so she was not the only one wanting nutella…
I am very much enjoying haus kuk weekends as I find the pace slower. We organise meals when we want to and eat them in a small group. During the week meals are to a schedule and shared with fifty plus others. Other POCers find haus kuk weekends stressful, as campfire cooking is more of a chore and less of an adventure for them. I’m a kid who has gone camping in the back yard, they are parents trying to manage large families in a foreign land and all that entails. Hopefully though, it prepares us all for our five weeks in the village.
Language is a critical part of understanding and participating in culture as well as being critical to building relationships. As such, it is no surprise that learning Tok Pisin is an important part of POC.
Tok Pisin is one of the national languages of PNG. In a country with over 800 different languages, national languages facilitate communication between people groups. Tok Pisin started as a trade language that allowed early colonialists and plantation owners to communicate with their workers. It also allowed workers to communicate with each other across their own cultural and linguistic barriers.
Although Tok Pisin relies heavily on English for words, it is not just a simplified English. It uses words in its own distinct way, has its own grammar and its own idioms. Still a trade language in many places, it has also become a first language for some. This often occurs when parents are from different language groups and do not speak each other's language, but speak to each other in Tok Pisin.
Knowing English sometimes simplifies learning Tok Pisin, and other times complicates it. Simplification occurs when you try something using the English and it works. Complication comes when the English sounding word is a 'false friend' of the Tok Pisin. 'Mi laikim dispela samting' does not mean that you appreciate something, but that you want it and can mean you've requested that someone give you their possessions. Oops.
Another trap is the broad meanings of Tok Pisin words. The language has a small vocabulary, so each word has a wide semantic range. You may learn one meaning, then hear the same word in a different context and find the meaning quite different. 'Amamas' means happy, praise, gift, appreciate and probably more. 'Ananas' means pineapple, so be careful you get the word right!
We've been learning Tok Pisin using a variety of methods; songs, lectures, small groups, reading and storytelling. My teacher, Tisa Itbam, has been very patient at teaching us phrases, words and correcting us when we get stuck. Practising the language with our teacher as well as with our wasfemili (host family, more about that in another post) means that we have come a long way in not too long. Gaining confidence with the language gives me confidence to live and work here in PNG.
For over a month now, I’ve been at POC (Pacific Orientation Course) at Nobnob near Madang. POC is a fourteen week course designed to introduce us to life, culture and language in PNG. The goal is to give us an appreciation for the life of Papua New Guineans as well as skills to live, minister and thrive in this country.
To this end, the course has many facets which I hope to describe in a series of blog posts. As this is my first post in six weeks of POC and it is only a few weeks until we head to villages for a five week block, please be patient if the posts are somewhat delayed in arriving!
POC is certainly a full-on experience. The busy schedule is only a part of it; between 28 adult participants, their 20 kids (mostly pre-school aged) and staff families, everyday life is never dull. Shared meals, living in dorms around a common quadrangle, riding up and down the mountain in the POC truck…life is full and often tiring, but good.
I hope you enjoy my POC snapshots as I write them and post them. Maybe I’ll even manage to add some photos, but we’ll see.
Four months in PNG have passed quickly and gone well. Most of this time has been spent in Alotau, Milne Bay Province. I’ve often heard this called the peaceful province or the friendly province andI have found it to be both. This peaceful reputation means we currently have a collection of newly elected members of parliament visiting to meet, discuss and hopefully form a stable government through a coalition.
Alotau is a regional centre built between mountains and sea. It is generally less than a kilometre before the land rises steeply, blanketed in jungle. The harbour is the heart of Alotau. It is where the traffic of the province comes and goes from. People come and go, market goods arrive and store goods leave. There are also two commercial wharves for oil tankers and container ships.
Dinghies take passengers to many places, work boats go further afield. PMVs (Public Motor Vehicles) connect up land routes to East Cape, Awaiyama and other places. From there you can catch a dinghy onwards. There are always groups of people waiting with their things for a PMV or a dinghy.
There are also groups of people waiting…for I’m not sure what. Waiting for friends, waiting for family, waiting for something to happen, waiting to see what strange things the dimdims will do next. Town is rarely without a small crowd, which becomes a big crowd on pay fortnight.
The shopping strip in Alotau is maybe 200m long, with supermarkets, general stores, hardware, pharmacy, banks and post office on either side of the road. There is a second street of shops, but it is much quieter. The shops have most things, sometimes. Other times, the answer is ‘Sorry, no stock’. Apparently town ran out of sugar last week, but a new shipment has now arrived.
The fresh produce market varies daily for produce variety, quality and cost. Since I have been here pineapple have gone out of season, but guava and soursob have come in, fruits I’ve discovered I very much like. One end of the market is for fish; mostly smoked, some fresh. Behind the covered section of stalls is the market for betel nut, mustard and lime. It is also the largest section of the market. These three are chewed in combination as a mild stimulant. Although people joke about them as ‘PNG PK’ (chewing gum), they lead to gum disease and other problems.
We’ve been having patches of the town water or power supply being turned off. There are notices up in town that one of the pumps for the town water is broken and they are waiting for a new part to arrive. Other notices inform that power will be interrupted over the coming weeks. Mostly we have had reliable water and power, so these interruptions are not the norm, yet neither are they uncommon. Our centre is prepared for these intervals of interruptions with a supply of tank water and a generator to turn on and off as needed.
Milne Bay was part of the English colony of Papua and as such has continued to have English as its language of wider communication. Tok Pisin use is slowly increasing, as people migrate to here from other regions, but Milne Bay English remains much more common. This has made my life easier as I’ve not had to learn another language while learning another culture. I’ve been learning a lot about English dialects though, as Milne Bay has it’s variation, as do my colleagues from the USA or the variations of ESL from other colleagues.
On Friday (Aug 3) I move on from this region to attend POC (Pacific Orientation Course) near Madang. There I will be learning Tok Pisin as well as much more about the culture of this country. It will be interesting to see other areas of PNG and compare them to my experience here.
Even though we live in an age of ever increasing access to communication, human nature stops it always being instant or easy. Even in PNG access to mobile phones is increasing, but that does not always mean communication has improved.
On our recent trip to Ghayavi we sent a letter a month ahead of us with the dates of our trip. It arrived a few weeks before we did, but sat unopened on a desk. The owner of the desk were certain they had told the recipient the letter was there. The recipient was certain that they’d asked if there was any letter and been told no. Communication breakdown! Regardless, the community was very flexible in making time for us and the work we came to do, even though it was the end of campaign season and other work was underway.
A mobile tower has recently been established near Ghayavi. For months it was being turned on ’tomorrow’ and actually had been turned on the week before our visit. We collected mobile numbers for making contact in the future, but communication is still fragile. A phone needs to be charged. Some people have little solar panel chargers, others rely on someone else’s generator. This in turn requires them having the generator functioning and enough fuel to run it. Neither of these is a given. If people are to call us, they need credit, which requires money and someone to sell them credit. Once again, things which are not always available.
Here in the big smoke of Alotau, we have internet but it is slow and expensive. 3G is being turned on ‘tomorrow’ but we are not holding our breath. Slow internet, plus having the pictures turned off to save expense and time, takes the fun out of facebook, so I find myself using it less and less. Sorry if I’ve missed anyone’s important announcements, you’ll need to contact me personally.
I am a person with a foot in both e-mail and snail mail camps, seeking to balance the two. My thoughts do not flow as well at a computer, yet the instant communication is convenient. If anyone reading this blog thinks some things are very like a letter they received, that may well be the case. Often I’ve thought of things in letter writing that are then reshaped into a blog. The letter may take weeks to reach you, in which time you’ve already read the blog, but I said it personally first.
Balancing a postal budget has lead to my rediscovery of aerogrammes. These quaint pieces of paper which fold to become the envelope are much cheaper than sending a letter, but long enough to say a decent hello. You can send them from Australia too…
This blog is a good example of the balancing act I try to do, with not only fast and slow communication, but with personal and bulk communication. This blog is probably mostly read by friends and family, so I would like it to be a true reflection of who I am and how I am doing. At the same time it could be read by anyone, so I seek to protect my privacy somewhat. Sending out newsletters each quarter and prayer updates each month require similar balancing acts, although in each case the audience is smaller and more personal.
My favourite communication available to me at the moment is the occasional phone calls home. Hearing the voice of people you love makes them seem so much closer. The poor internet connection means video skype in not an option as much as I would love to see the faces of my family, especially as I have a brand new nephew.
Regardless of the method of communication, it can still get messy. What one person thinks they are expressing and what the other reads or hears can so easily be a mismatch. All of my correspondence (both incoming and outgoing) is best read with a patience filter. I try to read things in the best possible light and not respond immediately to things that upset me. Maybe on a second reading I can see them in a better light.
While I receive international sms about my nephew’s birth and wait impatiently for a parcel of photos I know is on the way, the other communication I enjoy is thousands of years old, yet still personal and relevant today; the Bible. People have not changed much in thousands of years. We still need to hear that we are loved. We still need someone to encourage and correct us. We still cry out in anger, grief and frustration as well as in wonder and joy. Like with other correspondence, we need to apply filters of culture and time and read critically, not taking texts out of context. There are fancy words for the complexities of these filters such hermeneutics and exegesis, but it is still a letter of love that speaks to us today. Of course, if we leave that letter just sitting on the desk unopened, there is a communication breakdown once again.
