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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