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email from papua new guinea

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ephidryn

Nov 27, 2009 17:58

Read 243 times, Dig?

Today was a good day. I woke up with a bit of a hang over after drinking
too much home brew coconut-shine. Pondo was at the boat with some bread
fruit early in the morning. Cooked bread fruit really does taste like
rye bread. Pondo does a lot of nice things but something about him seems
insincere. After I stood around starring at crap for a few minutes and
answering in pre-coffee grunts he excused himself and came back later
with "loose". I put off making a coffee because I had no cigarettes to
go with it. Drinking a coffee would have just made me fiend..Fortunately
Pondo decided that I needed some pall malls which are pretty much the
only prefabs that any one here smokes. People grow tobacco in their
jungle gardens. The women pick it in between doing all the other work
and they hand it off to the men in these strange interactions that seem
almost like high school drug deals. The men call it "bruce" and they
roll the tobacco in old newspaper and smoke it. There's also something
called spear with I think it just prefab "bruce" with fake newsprint on
the paper so that you still fit in with your buddies even if you had to
buy a pack of smokes cause your family pig ate the tobacco crop and died
of nic poisoning. no smokes or dowry FROWNY FACE.

Pondo left 3 "loose" which are just pall malls that they sell one at a
time. In Papua New Guinea they have a system called wantok or wontok
which basically means that anyone that speaks your language is in your
tribe and therefore shares everything with you and you share everything
with them. The social differences that exists due to this one simple
rule are really fucking interesting and the fact that there are well
over 800 distinct languages in Papua New Guinea heightens the contrast..
No one in the states would ever, in their right mind, buy a packet of
cigarettes if everyone in the town in which they lived had the right to
bum as many as they could smoke before the owner finished the pack. So
instead they sell them loose and they call them "loose" which sounds an
awful lot like "bruce" (which is the jungle garden variety.

Kombi's son was on the boat. I heard his voice over the sound of the air
compressor that was filling the dive tanks of the marine scientists. He
wants to go to the maritime academy in Madang and become a captain. we
split a coffee and smoked the last of my "bruce" with no newspaper. Just
tobacco rolled up in tobacco leaves like little cigars. He said binder
paper would kill us.

Patrick, a transplanted school teacher from West Sepik (aka almost
Indo), had left a giant lizard in a bag on the boat the day before. He
caught it on one of his trips up to get more coco-shine and brought it
to the boat. They eat the meat and make drums with the skins. When
there's no lizard skins they use nylon rice bags as drum tops. I had
been wanting to go find a pair of flip flops that this girl had stolen
off the boat and Cleo the vegetarian was getting weirded out by the
lizard in the bag so I took it an got a canoe ride over to the
freshwater spring where our orange plastic kayak was tied up..

The spring comes out of the base of a cliff and its use is divided up by
daylight. During the day the water comes out warm and the spring is used
only by the women for washing clothes and themselves, and fetching
drinking and cooking water. During the night the water comes out cold
and only men are allowed. I haven't been over there during the night for
a number of reasons but mainly the women don't mind my presence and I
enjoy bathing in warm water surrounded by beautiful black ladies.

This time I didn't bathe or fill any water containers. I just headed
straight up the cliff over the roots and rocks towards the village of
Mater. They pronounce it with a bit of a French accent and more like
"Matier". That's where Patrick's lizard was being delivered and also
where the thieving bitch that stole my flops lived. Ho.

I met some girls along the way. They were each carrying about 20 liters
of water which is 20kg of weight which is about 44.4lbs and these girls
are like 17 or 18 *and* they carry this weight up the same steep incline
which I just gingerly negotiated to arrive at the top of the cliff. It
was Christina and Claudia and they told me that Wendy was down at the
spring. As I had only seen Wendy in photos I thanked them for the
information and then asked where Patrick lived. They escorted me down
the tarmac road towards his place and pointed me off in the right
direction..

Patrick lives in the teacher housing just near Mater Primary School. All
the teachers are pretty cool but I am closest with Patrick and James. I
met one of their neighbors and asked where Patrick lived explaining that
I had a present for him. He pointed me in right direction and I asked if
he wanted to see the present. He said yes and I opened the bag wide. The
green reusable shopping bag had gotten doused with sea water on the way
over in the canoe and I new that the lizard would be cold and lethargic
after all the evaporation action..

The young man peered into the bag and I could hear the perplexion
squirting out his eyebrows until a loud feminine noise escaped from his
mouth and he jumped back. I instinctively laughed and walked away at the
same time. As I came back to being present a compunctious feeling of
remorse overcame me. I had been mean and cruel. I made some more jokes
with the neighbor to get to know him and let him know me.

Patrick thanked me for bringing the lizard back to him and he agreed to
accompany to Mina's house to help recover my jandals. Along the tarmac
road we came upon a boy sitting down next to a burning piece of wood. As
I walked up on him I recognized him but his name wasn't anywhere within
my reach. He was rolling up a "bruce" and Patrick proudly introduced him
as "Ali the Captain of the School". Name and title out of the way we all
went walking together after Ali lit his "bruce" with the burning piece
of wood.

Some younger boys and children began following us and then another gang
of raskals until it was a veritable posse of slipper vigilantes. We
walked up the hill past the school and the western side of Mater to the
meeting spot under a big mango tree where I was instructed to wait while
Ali went to Mina's house to recover the shoes. As I sat there under the
tree I wondered what type of reaction would come from the house. I
imagined the worst aggression that I could and somehow felt glad that I
happened to sit with my back towards the direction of the house and
wouldn't see anything coming if it did.

Ali returned a few minutes later and sat down next to me. I looked at
him expectantly and he kicked off his shoes in the dirt under the mango
tree. I looked at the blue foam base and the neon green strap that holds
it to the foot. I recognized them as the $3 flip flops that I had been
wearing since I had lost mine after a drunken night in Ghizo. I smiled
really big and thanked him for his help.

There was an ongoing volleyball tournament happening in Marangis and
everyone seemed to be on a team. My flip flop recup posse was on a team
named "B.B. Mates" and they all had to be at a game in a bit so we
started walking down the tarmac road back towards Marangis. The pavement
was really heating up in the noontime sun and I was glad to have some
shoes to wear.

As we were walking an old lady that seemed to recognize me offered me
some beetle nut which I accepted graciously. Beetle Nut has a mild
amphetamine which I can only equate to nicotine. You bite open the shell
with your canines and pull out a moist nut that resembles a brain and
then you chew it. They take a spicy fruit that they call mustard and dip
it in lime that the women make by grinding up reef and masticate the
entire mash into a vibrant red mush that gives you a bit of a head spin.
Aside from giving you a red mouth and tons of shit stuck in your teeth
there's also the dirty unhygienic aspect of chewing uncooked organic
matter that other people have had near their spit or in their pockets.
Hepatitis, Typhoid, and TB being the most nasty.

The locals get a real kick out of it when a white guy chews the stuff
and I did enjoy it once or twice a day while on land. I learned a lot of
words from the local language "Waskia" and every time I said one it
incited cheers and laughter from the group of people that were following
me around. Chew beetle nut then we go volly. "Kaikai muri den yumi go
volly".

Some guy climbed straight up a coconut tree and we had some coconuts
before heading down to Marangis. I was dehydrated but a bit high from
the beetle nut and bruce so I just felt elated by the time we arrived at
the volley ball field in the mid day sun. I played a bit of volley ball
on Ali's team but I was interrupted by Chris and Cleo who were on their
way to bills house to meet up with Alison for some reverse potluck
action. Every Saturday someone in the community cooks loads of food and
everyone buys plates of it for a couple of kina (about 60 cents)..

We went to Bill's house on the beach and he laid an old synthetic carpet
out on the black sand and we drank more coconuts before a lunch of rice
and chicken. There were maybe three little pieces on chicken and I
scored the neck. I never ate a chicken neck before and they're not all
that bad. I'm not sure why they always get tossed after they're boiled.
Perhaps the bones are dangerous.

- From there we headed up to a meeting in Mater where the big men met
under a mango tree and they were presented with the plan that Chris,
Alison, and Cleo had devised to create a Marine Protected Area (MPA). My
main contribution to these meetings is presence as my position in the
group allows me more freedom to be real and make friends with anyone and
everyone, including chief type people.

The sun started going down and we all headed back to the beach that
wraps around the bay that the boat is anchored in. I saw one of the
local girls that I recognized from one of the days when we had 20 people
on the boat. I reckon she's about 18 or 19 so I was joking when I asked
her if she was married. She said no and I told her that I wasn't married
either. Her friends all screamed and laughed and I figured they would
talk about it for at least a week.

We got back to the boat and the other three went to fill up water
containers at the spring. When they came back they mentioned that the
news around the spring was that I had asked Wendy to marry her and she
said yes. The spring is in the opposite direction from the way that
Wendy was walking so I'm not sure how the news traveled backwards so fast.

Bill makes the lightning.

l,g

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This story was written by ephidryn and has been brought you you by the letters O and U.

writings.:-

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