Elisabeth Hesse’s Blog

2-8-09: A taste of PNG culture

Again, no blog entry for yesterday­sorry.  Not
much happened; my only venture away from the
house (due to lack of things to do, not sickness
this time) was for a fruitless search for greens in the market.  No luck.

Today Dr. Manar and I set out to Babaguna, a
village not far downstream from Kikori where
Robbie Petterson, a Bible translator from New
Zealand, had been running an adult literacy
workshop for the past week.  He had twelve
students in this workshop, and the main point had
been to write stories in both their native
language and English, with set assignments for
each day (write a short story about life in the
village, write a longer one about something that
has happened in your life, write a poem,
etc).  They also worked on a picture dictionary
in English and their language, as well as
translated some of the health education posters
that seem to be everywhere.  The picture
dictionary and the stories will eventually be
compiled into a book, with the printing costs
covered by Australian-New Zealand aid (ANZAid?  I
don’t remember the name) and distributed to the
schools in the area that speaks that language,
and will be available for sale (for about 2K,
which about 70 cents) to parents, so they can use
these to help teach their kids to read.

So today was the graduation ceremony for the
workshop, and everything seemed to be running on
standard PNG punctuality (in other words, no
punctuality at all) and nobody seemed sure of
when anything was happening.  As Manar and I
thought that we were leaving around 8 (the dingy
came to pick us up at 10:30), I had a fairly
early breakfast, so I was getting pretty
hungry.  They did feed us green (young) coconuts
to tide us over until the big meal, which didn’t happen until 2:30.

And it was quite a feast.  They had prepared a
number of traditional PNG foods, such as turtle
meat wrapped in sago (good), shellfish wrapped in
sago (not so good), greens with boiled bananas
and fish (fairly standard­pretty good), some sort
of red fruit, which was more of a pulp (not so
good), fried clams (my mother’s boiled clams are
better), some other things I wasn’t brave enough
to try, and bananas and cake (“cake” meaning more
of a pound-cake type texture, not birthday cake)
for dessert.  In all, it was quite the
experience, and I was rather full at the end.

The graduation ceremony came after that, which
was fairly straightforward­Robbie explained the
workshop and its goals, and then distributed
certificates and said something about what each
of the men had done well with his writing (good
spelling, neat handwriting, a good story,
etc).  Then we loaded the dingy back up and
headed back to Kikori, just in time for the power
to come back on (one of my favorite times in the day).

As I’m getting closer to going home, I find
myself looking forward to it more and more.  It
has been quite the experience in PNG, but I think
I’m ready to resume my normal life, with
electricity and internet and roads and an oven
that works and a washer and dryer and grocery
stores…  I guess I never realized how spoiled I
was until I didn’t have those things.