This is a quick slide show illustrating how the women in the Highlands
make "Bush Rope" which they use to weave their fibre bilums.
Wednesday 24 November 2010
Internet Woes
In theory there are two ways in which I can access the internet here in PNG
Firstly I have a dial up connection with GlobalNet as the ISP. I haven't been able to make a connection to this service for about 11 days. Phone calls to GlobalNet have produced the information that there is nothing wrong with their access system - however they tell me there is a problem at the Mt Hagen telephone exchange and currently nobody in Hagen can connect to GlobalNet's internet service. PNG Telikom are aware of the problem and are apparently working on it - for 11 days! It may come back at some point but I'm not holding my breath.
My second option is a wireless modem (a dongle) provided by PNG Telikom. This entire network was out of service for almost a week and came back last Saturday. Its a pre pay service - you buy a prepaid card to the value of 50Kina , scratch to reveal the card number, phone 1255 and add the credit to your internet account. All well and good except that, although the broadband network has returned the 1255 top up service is not working!
I can do lots of development work locally and the website can be built and tested, to a large extent, on my own PC but until we get a decent internet connection it can't be uploaded to the web. There is an internet cafe in Hagen, in the Telikom office. Apparently they have their own satellite connection so, even though its expensive, I may have to move my office over there for a while.
Or I could put it all on a DVD, send it over to England and let one of you guys put it on the web for me!
Obviously one of these internet options is now working otherwise I couldn't have posted this!
Firstly I have a dial up connection with GlobalNet as the ISP. I haven't been able to make a connection to this service for about 11 days. Phone calls to GlobalNet have produced the information that there is nothing wrong with their access system - however they tell me there is a problem at the Mt Hagen telephone exchange and currently nobody in Hagen can connect to GlobalNet's internet service. PNG Telikom are aware of the problem and are apparently working on it - for 11 days! It may come back at some point but I'm not holding my breath.
My second option is a wireless modem (a dongle) provided by PNG Telikom. This entire network was out of service for almost a week and came back last Saturday. Its a pre pay service - you buy a prepaid card to the value of 50Kina , scratch to reveal the card number, phone 1255 and add the credit to your internet account. All well and good except that, although the broadband network has returned the 1255 top up service is not working!
I can do lots of development work locally and the website can be built and tested, to a large extent, on my own PC but until we get a decent internet connection it can't be uploaded to the web. There is an internet cafe in Hagen, in the Telikom office. Apparently they have their own satellite connection so, even though its expensive, I may have to move my office over there for a while.
Or I could put it all on a DVD, send it over to England and let one of you guys put it on the web for me!
Obviously one of these internet options is now working otherwise I couldn't have posted this!
Friday 19 November 2010
Marie Jean buys me some fruit
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| Marie Jean |
Currently I'm working on a video production of the making of a bilum. It takes several weeks to weave a bilum so one of the handicraft mothers, Marie Jean, comes in every two days or so and we do a few minutes filming each time. Every time she comes the bilum has got a little bit bigger and in a few weeks I will have all the footage I need to edit down to 2-3min web piece.
Whenever Marie Jean comes in for her filming sessions she brings me a few bananas, some cucumbers and maybe an orange - as a gift. I had assumed they came from her garden. Today I learned that Marie Jean doesn't have a garden, she buys the fruit at the market . You may think that there's nothing remarkable about that, until you learn a little more about her life.
She lives in one of the settlements (shanty towns) surrounding Hagen. The settlements are dangerous, lawless, often violent and extremely unpleasant - overcrowded, dirty, unsanitory with no real water supply or sewage systems. She lives there in what we would call a shack . Her husband left some time ago, her son in law died from AIDS and Marie Jean is now looking after her own daughter who is HIV positive.
She survives. She sews clothes to sell at the market in Hagen (with the sewing skills she learnt at the Handicraft Group) and she makes some money from her bilums.
This woman, who has next to nothing, is spending her own money in the market to buy fruit gifts for me.
It is a humbling experience.
Very.
A trip to Baiyer District
On my recent photographic expedition out into the Baiyer District of the Highlands I learnt how the women make the "bush rope" from which they weave the fibre bilums. Its an astonishingly time consuming and painstaking process which I will describe fully on the website. Basically it involves collecting the fibrous part of a particular tree branch (the layer just below the bark) teasing it apart into fine strands of fibre and rolling these strands together to form the string and using different plants and roots as natural dye. On close examination the finished string looks as if it came out of a machine its so uniform and neat - all done by hand.
I also learnt that short speeches are regarded as rude and off hand! It is a sign of respect to talk at length and the welcome speeches from the villages senior women could last for twenty minutes. Not everybody listens to every word, the village would chat quietly during the speech but apparently that is okay. Its not the quality but rather the length of the speech that matters. It would be incredibly rude to speak for just a couple of minutes, a sign of great disrepect. My tok pisin does not enable me to sustain that length of speech so I spoke in English and one of my colleagues translated - and, I suspect that in order to save me from any embarrassment, he added an extra 5 minutes on my behalf!
In the UK on entering or leaving a gathering of fourty or so people we would probably make a general acknowledgement/greeting to the whole group. Not here. Individual handshakes and a few words to each person are considered polite and proper. Not short handshakes either! taking your hand away too soon is rude and quite often you will be holding hands for thirty seconds or a minute (try it - its a long time for a handshake). Feels strange to me of course but its really important not to appear stand offish or to disregard local traditions and etiquette - nobody likes a rude guest!
Watch out when I get home! a brief encounter could last a lot longer than you bargained for.
I also learnt that short speeches are regarded as rude and off hand! It is a sign of respect to talk at length and the welcome speeches from the villages senior women could last for twenty minutes. Not everybody listens to every word, the village would chat quietly during the speech but apparently that is okay. Its not the quality but rather the length of the speech that matters. It would be incredibly rude to speak for just a couple of minutes, a sign of great disrepect. My tok pisin does not enable me to sustain that length of speech so I spoke in English and one of my colleagues translated - and, I suspect that in order to save me from any embarrassment, he added an extra 5 minutes on my behalf!
In the UK on entering or leaving a gathering of fourty or so people we would probably make a general acknowledgement/greeting to the whole group. Not here. Individual handshakes and a few words to each person are considered polite and proper. Not short handshakes either! taking your hand away too soon is rude and quite often you will be holding hands for thirty seconds or a minute (try it - its a long time for a handshake). Feels strange to me of course but its really important not to appear stand offish or to disregard local traditions and etiquette - nobody likes a rude guest!
Watch out when I get home! a brief encounter could last a lot longer than you bargained for.
Thursday 11 November 2010
Tuesday 9 November 2010
Some of the women who weave our bilums
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| Wendy |
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| Akumle |
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| Christina |
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| Kaipame |
|
| MarieJean |
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| Martha |
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| Missie |
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| Ramanu |
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| Mone |
Recycling Pays
In a previous post I had mentioned Alphonse (the Coke can collector) and his recycling efforts in the Handicraft Office compound. It isn't just Alphonse, there are about 4 guys involved in this operation. Today was a big day.
All the cans were collected up and crushed as flat as possible with a great piece of steel fence post and put in sacks. They get 90 toea for a kilo of coke cans (thats about 20 pence for a kilo of cans - thats a LOT of cans). They had sacks full! and at the end of the day they reckoned they had made about 20 Kina (approx five pounds).
It had taken them weeks and weeks and the 20 kina would be shared between them but they were all very satisfied with the result.
Things go better with Coke?
All the cans were collected up and crushed as flat as possible with a great piece of steel fence post and put in sacks. They get 90 toea for a kilo of coke cans (thats about 20 pence for a kilo of cans - thats a LOT of cans). They had sacks full! and at the end of the day they reckoned they had made about 20 Kina (approx five pounds).
It had taken them weeks and weeks and the 20 kina would be shared between them but they were all very satisfied with the result.
Things go better with Coke?
Singing Home
In Hagen today I came across an open top truck driving round town with thirty or so people crammed onto the back all singing beautifully at the tops of their voices. As they passed the crowds on the street stopped for a while and watched the truck go by in silence.
It was explained to me that someone had died and his family were singing him home. The deceased had died in the hospital in Hagen the extended family came into to town to pick up the body, which was on the truck with them, and took him home to his village to be buried, loudly singing his praises all the way.
It was a strangley moving experience and seemed a glorious way to say goodbye to a loved family member.
It was explained to me that someone had died and his family were singing him home. The deceased had died in the hospital in Hagen the extended family came into to town to pick up the body, which was on the truck with them, and took him home to his village to be buried, loudly singing his praises all the way.
It was a strangley moving experience and seemed a glorious way to say goodbye to a loved family member.
Wednesday 3 November 2010
Cricket, Corned Beef and Communion
On Sundays I have no vehicle and no driver and any suggestion from me that I might use the local bus or walk to town is met with much alarm and expressions of concern from my hosts. So on Sundays I stay pretty close to home.
Sunday mornings are taken up with church. I am by no means a regular church goer back in the UK but here it is a great way to meet people and to become a little more closely involved with the community.
Its a Baptist church and since I have never been to any Baptist service before it may be that my description is unique to PNG or it may apply more broadly across the Baptist world, I don't know. Compared to my own experience of the Anglican Church the services here differ in many ways - firstly they are much, much longer. Two and a half hours is the norm with the Pastor delivering a sermon (in Tok Pisin) of at least an hour! I'm pretty sure that any CoE vicar who felt the need to lecture his congregation for 60 minutes would very soon find himself with an empty church! The service is also much livelier and more enthusiastic than the Anglican tradition with lots of upbeat music, clapping, raised arms and shouts of "God is good" and "Hallelujah" - strange to me but the congregation are happy and enjoy the occasion. The biggest difference is the way that communion is celebrated . Celebrants don't queue at the rail instead they remain in their seats and senior members of the church walk round with a basket of bread which is passed along the rows, the Pastor says a few words and everyone eats the bread. Then the communion wine, in tiny, thimble sized plastic cups held on wooden trays, is passed around. Again the Pastor says a few words and the wine is drunk. Except, to my amazement, its not communion wine but a fruit juice cordial!
My last Sunday lunch was home made corned beef pie (my boys would recognise it as a family staple!) only here I make it with sweet potatoes. I mention it because Corned Beef seems to have a very special status out here in PNG. Its not confined to half a shelf in the shops,the local Best Buy supermarket has acres of space devoted to the stuff! Row after row, pyramids of it, different sizes, different brands, corned lamb (?), flavoured and spiced corned beef, square tins, round tins an altogether astonishing cornucopia of corned meat. I spent five minutes just looking before I even took a can off the shelf. I'm not quite sure what the PNG nationals do with all this corned beef but I bet they're not making corned beef pie.
In the afternoon I was sitting on the porch at the front of my house when I heard the distinct sound of cricket bat on ball and shouts of encouragement and appreciation coming from the far side of the compound boundary fence. The fence is much too high for me to see over but after listening for few more minutes I was convinced there was a cricket match in progress and I determined to set off in search of it. The Hagen Secondary school is behind my place and I was pretty sure that was where the sound was coming from. So off I went (out of the compound unescorted!) to walk the ten minutes to the school sportsground. When I arrived there was quite a crowd who greeted me warmly,made me sit with them and told me enthusiastically that this was the first year they had played cricket in Hagen. One of the big banks (BSP) is running a nationwide scheme to promote the game and has sent coaches out to remote areas to encourage the game. The wicket was a concrete strip and the outfield grass was a foot high with a somewhat indefinable boundary.
On this surface they played with a hard ball, no pads, no box (!) and, in some cases no shoes just flip flops! The bowling was furiously erratic! A stream of wides, bouncers, beamers all hurled down the wicket as fast as possible - the Highlands way! all aggression and no technique! All this to the accompaniment of much ribald comment and vocal encouragement from the assembled crowd. Great people and a fun afternoon. Cricket PNG style - certainly different.
Sometime in a future blog I must write about Highland Darts - like our own pub darts but oh so different!
Sport, religion and food - strange how they can bring people together.
Sunday mornings are taken up with church. I am by no means a regular church goer back in the UK but here it is a great way to meet people and to become a little more closely involved with the community.
Its a Baptist church and since I have never been to any Baptist service before it may be that my description is unique to PNG or it may apply more broadly across the Baptist world, I don't know. Compared to my own experience of the Anglican Church the services here differ in many ways - firstly they are much, much longer. Two and a half hours is the norm with the Pastor delivering a sermon (in Tok Pisin) of at least an hour! I'm pretty sure that any CoE vicar who felt the need to lecture his congregation for 60 minutes would very soon find himself with an empty church! The service is also much livelier and more enthusiastic than the Anglican tradition with lots of upbeat music, clapping, raised arms and shouts of "God is good" and "Hallelujah" - strange to me but the congregation are happy and enjoy the occasion. The biggest difference is the way that communion is celebrated . Celebrants don't queue at the rail instead they remain in their seats and senior members of the church walk round with a basket of bread which is passed along the rows, the Pastor says a few words and everyone eats the bread. Then the communion wine, in tiny, thimble sized plastic cups held on wooden trays, is passed around. Again the Pastor says a few words and the wine is drunk. Except, to my amazement, its not communion wine but a fruit juice cordial!
My last Sunday lunch was home made corned beef pie (my boys would recognise it as a family staple!) only here I make it with sweet potatoes. I mention it because Corned Beef seems to have a very special status out here in PNG. Its not confined to half a shelf in the shops,the local Best Buy supermarket has acres of space devoted to the stuff! Row after row, pyramids of it, different sizes, different brands, corned lamb (?), flavoured and spiced corned beef, square tins, round tins an altogether astonishing cornucopia of corned meat. I spent five minutes just looking before I even took a can off the shelf. I'm not quite sure what the PNG nationals do with all this corned beef but I bet they're not making corned beef pie.
In the afternoon I was sitting on the porch at the front of my house when I heard the distinct sound of cricket bat on ball and shouts of encouragement and appreciation coming from the far side of the compound boundary fence. The fence is much too high for me to see over but after listening for few more minutes I was convinced there was a cricket match in progress and I determined to set off in search of it. The Hagen Secondary school is behind my place and I was pretty sure that was where the sound was coming from. So off I went (out of the compound unescorted!) to walk the ten minutes to the school sportsground. When I arrived there was quite a crowd who greeted me warmly,made me sit with them and told me enthusiastically that this was the first year they had played cricket in Hagen. One of the big banks (BSP) is running a nationwide scheme to promote the game and has sent coaches out to remote areas to encourage the game. The wicket was a concrete strip and the outfield grass was a foot high with a somewhat indefinable boundary.
On this surface they played with a hard ball, no pads, no box (!) and, in some cases no shoes just flip flops! The bowling was furiously erratic! A stream of wides, bouncers, beamers all hurled down the wicket as fast as possible - the Highlands way! all aggression and no technique! All this to the accompaniment of much ribald comment and vocal encouragement from the assembled crowd. Great people and a fun afternoon. Cricket PNG style - certainly different.
Sometime in a future blog I must write about Highland Darts - like our own pub darts but oh so different!
Sport, religion and food - strange how they can bring people together.
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