Hi from PNG

Hi All,
I just got back from the village on Monday afternoon, so there is much to fill you in on. I missed everyone over the holidays…almost as much as I missed eating cheese. I have rectified this inconsistency now, and now friends and family are the thing I miss most. The thing I miss second-most is yogurt, which they do not seem to sell at the Foodmart in Lae.
Sadly I have no photos to contribute today. The internet connection is so slow, my head would probably explode if I tried to load any…so all you get are words. They are pretty interesting words so I hope you will read on. I promise to post photos when I get to Aus in early March. They will be great because I have taken great pictures of great things. You will just have to wait!
Where to start? I guess at the beginning. I managed to find my new co-worker Chris at the airport. I determined his identity by looking around the passenger waiting area at the Air Nuigini gate in Brisbane for some guy wearing shoes a biologist would wear and something that would indicate they might be British. The hi-tech boots and map of the Tube (London’s subway type thing) gave him away. He is great, animated even without having slept more than a wink over the 40 hours or whatever it took him to get to Brisbane. He also slept overnight in the airport! Our flights went quick because we had much to talk about and we both like to talk.
We arrived in Port Moresby about 30 minutes before our flight to Lae was scheduled to leave. We were delayed everywhere. The customs guy wanted to see my beads, he thought they were pills in the x-ray. He didn’t seem to mind that Chris was carrying a big f-off knife and a saw in his baggage. Ah PNG! We wondered why no one was in a hurry, then we discovered our flight was not yet delayed but everyone expected it would be, because it usually was, and ours was no different.
When we got to Lae, we met up with Jeff (the jefe man). He seemed very happy to see us. Turns out it had been 2 months since he had seen any of his country folk and he really didn’t expect us to make it. So many people try to come work in PNG, but because the government is extraordinarily crap about giving any one a visa who wants to do something good for the country or its people, most people never come. Chris had waited 7 months for his visa and I had waited 4 months. We gave up and came on tourist visas instead.
Lae is Papua New Guinea’s second most crap city. There is a lot of criminal activity – we saw a fight in the street on our first morning which looked to involve about 20 people. Only 5 of them really seemed to want to beat the crap out of each other. Guards broke it up. It is mostly safe during the day, however. We hit the usual stops: internet, grocery store, post office (where Jeff successfully retrieved a package from his mum! A Christmas miracle!). I discovered on my visit to the internet that a job that I very much wanted to apply for was being offered at the FW office in Arcata, but damn these PNG computers, the internet died before I could complete the application. I had to write it off. I hope whoever gets that job, really enjoys it. They have my envy. Also in Lae we met up with a herd of x-pats for dinner. Great people! Several of them work for doctors without borders, one is a business man, one a facilitator, and one an engineering lecturer at the university. Most of them were Canadians and Australians. I was the only yank present. In fact I am the only yank around. We had a great night of chatting and sharing various stories. I can’t wait to meet up with them again as I am suffering from some cultural confusion which you will understand as you read on.
We headed down to the Waria Valley on the 5th with one additional person, Michael, a PNG guy who had recently graduated in biology from some university in Port Moresby. It takes about 6 hours in a dinghy with an outboard motor (5.5 hours down the coast, 0.5 hours up the filthy murky Waria River, with one stop to pee and four stops to re-fuel the engine in open water. The village consists of about 60 two-storey houses made of beetle nut wood with palm frond roofs. Ours is in a little hamlet with 8 such houses just outside the main village. Oddly enough, our house is actually nicer than many of the places I rented during college and has the added bonus that I happen to not be allergic to the dust mites etc. living therein. These houses are really pretty amazing because they are made with all local material, cost about 200 bucks if you want someone to build you one, and the roof is surprisingly water proof even in the strong deluges we have been having. The only downside to it is that there are numerous cockroaches that live in the room and rain tiny turd pellets on everything. I especially hate when they fall in my tea!
We did week-long surveys of two sites before the holidays. Both were in primary forest, but one was on a garden edge, and the other was on a splendidly clean river. We usually camp out at a survey site in enclosed hammocks. Our cook, March, and her daughters come with us and keep us well fed. In general our surveys work like this: Day 1: set up and bait mammal trap lines (2 x 20 sherman traps), pitfall traps with drift fence, and mist nets. Days 2, 3, &4: get up early and search for birds – compile lists of 10, check pitfall and mammal traps, measure and weigh the skinks, rats, and whatever was in the traps, do timed visual searches for butterflies and herps, bait mammal traps, deploy mist nets in the afternoon for birds and leave them up till 9 or 10pm to catch bats. Day 5: pack up and hike home. The butterfly work is great fun and my skills of sneaking up on butterflies to photograph them have really paid off. The bat work is by far the most entertaining though. Bats get very pissed off when they get caught in a mist net, they make great noises and look endearingly like demented monsters. We have gotten quite a variety of both insectivorous and fruit bats. We even got a mum with a baby hanging on. I’ve got pictures to show for later.
Unfortunately our two week holiday break involved some drama. Michael (who was largely useless because he didn’t take initiative for things that obviously needed to be done, and he was deathly afraid of the bats) left after only two weeks – apparently to go get married. This was frustrating because Coral Cay (the NGO) had paid for his flights from Port Moresby to Lae so that he could come volunteer. He failed to mention, till about 2 days before he left, that he would need to go to the highlands to get married over the holidays. He promised to come back, but I doubt he will. It is about $70 bucks each way to take the boat down to the valley not to mention the additional $30 to take a public van from Goroka to Lae. This unfortunate waste of money was little drama though compared to what else we discovered when we returned to our hamlet for the holidays.
We got robbed!While we were out at the second field site. Someone went in the house (it is pretty easy to climb into despite having a lockable door) who knew their way around, and stole the lock box that the project money is kept in. This is money to pay the wages of people in the village that work on the project (the cook, the night watchman, and our guides). Fortunately the crook did not go into Chris’ or my room and take anything. This sort of thing had happened before – every time a certain Rueben Kaui (one of the sons from the neighboring house across the dirt patch) was in the village. He used to be a security guy for Coral Cay when he was suspected of having stolen about $70. A few months later $150 was stolen out of Jeff’s room and Rueben left town in a hurry to party it up in town with all the money he had gotten. At that same time he stole about $300 from his own father who was holding it as collections for the church. He hadn’t been back to town till just before the holidays, while we were out at the field site. When we came back, about $800 was gone and we tried to get him and his family to give us back the money, but Rueben claimed he hadn’t stolen it. Apparently in PNG, when someone is suspected of having done something wrong, people will ask them if they did what they have been accused of. If they say ‘no’, people look for someone else to blame. The frustrating part is that the hamlet community made very little effort to try to get the money back, even though this is their wages, not any of our personal money. They didn’t seem to understand that letting a thief get away with something like this would probably be the sort of situation that would make people less than keen to come work in their village in the future. We had lots of meetings with big men about this problem but nothing happened. They all looked for people to blame, decided to blame the guy with the key to the house, even though I can climb into the house in less than 5 seconds. It is sad, but I don’t think the villagers really care that much. They just figure we can hit up a machine somewhere and more magic money will appear. Jeff decided that if the family would do nothing to stop their thieving son, then they would all have to work for free till the end of the project to cover the loss. We are also going to the police while we are here in Lae.
The most unfortunate thing about the robbery is that this is now a community based conservation project that appears to be lacking in sufficient community support. If it was not so close to the end of two years of surveys, I think the NGO would pull out. If I were here in PNG longer, I would seek work elsewhere. Unfortunately, my visa only gives me 3 months and I am half the way there, so I am just going to hang in and finish my time and help get the survey work done. At least we will get some biological data out of it. However, I don’t really think I will be inclined to bring people I know to the village in the future.
Despite the dramas, we had pretty good holidays. I have read several books, kept a journal, played heaps of cards (I remain unbeaten at gin rummy), eaten a good although monotonous diet of rice and sweet potato, and Jeff’s mum sent out Christmas cake and Cadburys hot chocolate mix. The company is good too.
My health has been a little crap. I have had a lot of diarrhoea and Jeff reckons I got malaria around new years. I took some Antemether and am doing fine now. The malaria strains here are basically like a bad flu.
We did one more survey after the holidays before coming back to Lae. It is good to have internet and dairy products again, but Lae is really crap. I am looking forward to a few more weeks in the rainforest. We’ve been seeing heaps of good stuff: Lots of excellent butterflies and some good birds. Chris saw the world’s smallest parrots the other day. We’ve got a pet golden orb spider by our toilet that we catch insects for. She is huge!!! I have been helping Chris with a bit of insect collecting for the London Natural History Museum which has been great fun. We are going to try to get some moths when we go back. I think we will try to rig some fish nets as well so we can identify some of the local fish. A co-worker of one of my friends in Humboldt sent me a book on the freshwater fish of PNG so we have been identifying a few things with it. We tried catching fish with a contraption I made out of mosquito netting, but I need bigger mesh.
I better wrap this up now. I will be in the Valley till Feb 24th, then heading to Madang for a few days of relaxing and snorkelling with Chris before I return to Australia on March 1. I am working out plans to go to Nepal to hike the Anapurna circuit with friends from Brisbane, so I will head to Nepal around March 25th. If anyone would like to join, please do. It is a three week walk.
Take care and I will talk to you soon!
-Cara