The mothers at the Mt Hagen Handicraft Group weaving bilums

A very rough and ready, unedited, video of the women of the Mt Hagen Handicraft Group hard at work weaving bilums.

Held up on the Highway

Firstly let me say a big thank you to everybody who contacted me after my "Some days are harder than others" post. It was great to receive so many supportive messages and encouragement. from my wonderful friends. Thank you, am feeling much better now.

This weekend I was expecting visitors. Two VSOs from Kundiawa, about two hours away, were planning to come and stay for the weekend. They phoned earlier today to cancel because of trouble on the Highlands Highway. Don't be misled by the use of the word Highway! Its an atrocious road often blocked by flood damage or landslides and a surface that puts great demands on even the most robust 4x4. People who live along the highway will occasionally "repair" the road and then demand payment from passing drivers.

The tribe from one of the villages along the highway between Kundiawa and Hagen had set up a roadblock and were forcing pmv (bus) drivers to pay a "toll". These requests being backed up with bush knives and other weapons. One pmv driver took exception to being held up in this way and he & his crew kidnapped one of the children from the offending village. Nobody knows what happened to the kidnapped child but the child's clan was so outraged that they are now stoning every pmv that drives along the Highway! It will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better - particularly if the kidnapped child has been hurt.

Since my two friends were planning to travel by PMV they decided that they didn't fancy running the gauntlet of furious, rock throwing, knife wielding tribesmen so they will wait for things to calm down - they should be here in a couple of weeks, just before I leave.

I'm afraid this is not an unusual event and is one of the reasons why travel around PNG is so difficult.

What's it like where you work?

I'm often asked what my workplace is like so here's a few photos.


The Handicraft Group Workshop is in the centre of Hagen just behind the Highlands Bakery. The bakery has a Kai Bar attached (a sort of PNG fast food joint where you can get a pretty filling meal for a few Kina)

Handicraft Group Front Door

My desk - pretty well equipped here

Highlands Bakery

Highlands Bakery Front Entrance

Highlands Bakery Kai Bar and customers

Highlands Bakery - main counter  (High security grills are a common site in Hagen)

The street outside our workshop

Street outside

The view opposite

Some days are harder than others

Let me start by saying that I enjoy being in Hagen. However there are times when I feel like I'm living in a benevolent open prison. I am released during the day and go off to work for 8 hours which is enjoyable and sociable (particularly when the mothers come in to weave the bilums). There are people to talk to, its interesting and fun. Then in the evenings I come back to the Baptist Union compound and lock myself in my cell and spend the next 16 hours in solitary confinement - I read (I've lost count of the number of books I've read), listen to music, cook, maybe watch a dvd on my pc, write to friends and do some Facebook. Sometimes I can borrow a guitar and play.

The security situation in Hagen is such that most people simply do not venture out after dark. Without a vehicle it would be plain stupid to risk such a thing and even with a vehicle I would never drive through Hagen at night on my own.

This means there is little or no social activity in the evenings. The exception is Friday night when my friends and neighbours, Ray & Trish Bartell, invite me over for pizza ( and very good pizzas they are too) and I play tennis with them for a couple of hours each Saturday.

Normally I cope pretty well on my own. Maybe its because I can see the finishing line (only four weeks left before I leave Hagen) but I am finding this isolation more difficult to cope with. Have not yet started talking to myself ( well no more than normal!) but I suspect its only a matter of time.

Think I would find it very difficult to do more than 6 months here on my own. Messages and emails from home are really important - so please keep writing!

A beautiful morning

A really heavy storm last night seemed to have washed all the mist and haze out of the atmosphere around the town. This morning was spectacularly clear with none of the usual early morning mist - the whole scene had a crystalline sharpness as if the Wahgi valley had just been freshly made.


Mt Hagen itself (the extinct volcano from which the town takes its name) had shed its usual cloak of cloud and stood out bold and sharp against a perfect blue sky. It somehow gave the impression of being much closer to the town. Shame my camera isn't really up to the job of capturing this remarkable sight, so I borrowed an image from Flickr just to give you an idea.


Reminds me that I'm fortunate to be in such incredibly beautiful, if savage, surroundings.

Mt Hagen from across the valley

PNG trivia

A cultural step too far?
It is of course important and good manners to appreciate and understand the cultural norms of the society in which I'm living. I try pretty hard to keep up with the PNG way of doing things and I've made a real effort to try and learn Tok Pisin so I can tok stori with the mothers at the Handicraft Group and with lots of other people I meet. Sadly there are two things that I just can't get used to - no matter how hard I try. Firstly I hate chewing betel nut (kaikai buai) just too awful (see earlier post). Secondly I can't get used to holding hands with men (sorry to all my gay friends but decades of conditioning can't be undone in a few months!). Its common to see women holding hands with women and men holding hands with men (NEVER men holding hands with women). Its just a natural thing that friends do over here. I try, I honestly do, but whenever a bloke holds my hand I get all awkward and embarassed. Pathetic really - but its something I struggle with

Outrageous theft
The water supply for the houses in the Baptist Union compound comes from the rain water that is collected off the roof of each building. It is stored in a large tank at the rear of each of building with an electric pump for each property providing the power to lift the water into showers, taps etc inside.
One of my neighbours returned from leave the other day (complete with newly adopted 3 month old baby) to discover that his water pump had been stolen! Thieves had got into the compound (so much for our so called security) unbolted the pump from its concrete base, undone the pipe connections and driven off with it!
His poor wife is now carrying buckets of water whilst coping with her new baby - men don't carry water.

Eric the driver
This week has been rather different. Robert, my driver, is away from work at a "haus krai" following the death of his brother. Its a lengthy period of mourning which follows a death - a very emotional time with extreme displays of grief (women quite literally pull their hair out). Whilst Robert is away I have taken over the role of Baptist Union driver. So instead of looking at a computer screen all day I have been driving various employees of the Baptist Union all over town. Its been great fun, certainly better than looking at a computer screen for hours at a time and I've been to parts of Hagen and surrounding districts that I would never normally get to see.

My House
Keeping up the attempt to write about everyday stuff instead of just the special or unusual aspects of life in Hagen so here's a couple pictures of where I live.

My place

My neighbours

More neighbours and the lawn where all the kids play

Neighbours

Next door neighbour

My place - ground floor in front of the 4 x 4

My Back Yard

My Porch

Caught in the firing line

It had to happen - the day after I posted a blog entry about all the good things in Hagen.

"You don't have to be the target to get caught up in the violence"


This advice was given to me by my PNG hosts when I first arrived in Hagen. Over the months that I've been here I have seen many scuffles/street fights from a safe distance and heard about many more violent incidents from people directly involved. However I have never felt as if I was in any personal danger.


That all changed today at Hagen market.

I have no idea what triggered the fighting but one minute I was happily shopping for fruit and veg with two PNG friends when the world around me suddenly erupted. Within seconds the market was filled with terrified screaming, shouting and a stampede of people running in panic. Most unusually for PNG they were running AWAY from the centre of the trouble - normally the crowds run towards the fight. It soon became clear what they were running from. Crazed young men were rampaging through the market with sticks and clubs attacking anyone in their path and smashing the market stalls to pieces. Amongst the chaos and the screaming there was the unmistakable sound of gunfire.

 I stuck close to Jacob (my personal security guard) - we scrambled over the market stalls to get out of the way (forget all that stuff about not stepping over food!) and crouched low behind the wall and kept our heads down. Fortunately the main focus of the fighting passed us by but within minutes security guards and police, armed with pump action shotguns, were in the market and the risk of being caught in cross fire or a stray round was high indeed.



My two friends and the market stall holders took it upon themselves to give me special protection. They surrounded me and, in spite of my protests, put themselves in front of me as a sort of human shield. They seemed more concerned about me than they did about themselves! After some time (it must have only been 10 minutes but it felt like an hour) the police managed to restore order and the three of us left the market at some speed.

No doubt I will find out tomorrow from my colleagues at the Handicraft Group what caused the trouble.

 Fortunately I had nearly finished my shopping when the trouble broke out - so I got to enjoy my fresh asparagus and strawberries for dinner but Hagen market will never feel the same.

The Good Side of Hagen

Tennis was rained off today, a massive early afternoon storm turned the courts into a muddy swamp.

When I got home I found that the laundry I had hung out earlier in the day had been rescued from the deluge and placed neatly on a chair out of the rain on my porch. I don't know which of my neighbours did this but its typical of the many small acts of kindness and thoughtfulness I've encountered here in Hagen.

Earlier in the morning my boss, Michael, and his wife Barbara had called round to see if everything was okay and that I was safely back from Madang. Yesterday another neighbour had driven out to the airport to pick me up when I flew back in.

I am constantly receiving small gifts of fruit and veg from neighbours and the women at the Handicraft Group.

All these kindnesses make me think that Hagen sometimes suffers from a bad Press! Yes its a frontier town and it can be violent (very violent at times) but the other side of that coin is very rarely shown to the outside world. The Highlands around Hagen are beautiful, the Wahgi valley is astonishingly fertile and the people here are generous, thoughtful and don't ask for much from life. When I asked one of the Handicraft Group mothers what her dream was she told me she would love to have a tin roof on her house instead of thatch. Puts my own life into some sort of perspective.

Hagen is treating me very well - I enjoy it here. Can feel a bit isolated at times but the work is good and, if what I'm doing is successful, then it will make a significant difference to the lives of some very brave women.

I enjoy being amongst these friendly, generous people. There is something here which we have lost in our English lives.

A non typical PNG weekend

A very different weekend this week. A sort of "Non PNG" experience in PNG.


Friday night - pizza, nachos, beer and wine on the deck outside the Bartell family house ( my neighbours in the compound here at the Baptist Union). A collection of Aussies, Kiwis and myself representing the Brits. Good night and lots of fun with good company.
Saturday morning and its off to the Hagen Club to play tennis for a couple of hours. Great to be hitting a tennis ball again even though my game would best be described as rusty (if you were being polite). Courts are not too bad - the occasional bizarre bounce off the uneven surface or the odd weed growing on the court - but I've played on worse municipal courts in the UK. Wonderful morning but by 1 o clock its too hot for me to rush about a tennis court. Three broken strings on my only raquet and I'm not optimistic about finding a restringing service out here!!!!!! One of my friends here is off to Oz on Monday so he may take the raquet - get it restrung and send it back to me in Hagen. Hopefully it will be back soon.


A couple of beers and a fish & chips lunch at the club after tennis and then back to watch Australian Rules Football on the TV (not in my place - I don't have a TV). . Its a good job there were plenty people there to explain the rules of this uniquely antipodean sport - otherwise it would have felt like watching a semi organised brawl! We were provided with beer, cheese and pickles during the match - the pickles being supplied by yours truly who has been pickling local veg for the last few weeks! Very tasty.


In the evening I sat at home and watched Episode 1 of "The Wire" having copied the whole series onto the hard drive of my laptop - courtesy of a friend in Madang.

To round it all off I splashed out and bought some very expensive bacon from the Best Buy supermarket - bacon and eggs for Sunday brunch!  So, all in all, a weekend that was as far removed from a normal PNG experience as it is possible to be.

I'm off to Madang on Monday for the VSO PNG national volunteers conference. Be good to catch up with all the other Volunteers out here - see how they're getting on in this weird and wonderful country!



Lukim yu

A troubled week

Kompiam Hospital
On Tuesday evening two 4x4s drove into the compound outside my house. An Australian family, two student medics and various other staff from Kompiam hospital had evacuated the hospital and sought safety in Hagen after a dispute with a former employee had escalated to threats with a loaded gun and an axe. Faced with such threats of violence they had no option but to protect themselves and get out.


How long it will be before its safe to return is anybody's guess but it could be months. Meanwhile the hospital has no medical staff at all.

 Steven's armed escort
Next door to the Handicraft Group workshop is a small technology business run by a lovely PNG national called Steven. He normally arrives at work on his own driving a flat bed 4x4. On Monday this week when he arrived there were six hefty guys sitting in the back of his truck. I made some joke about him running a bus service and he told me that the guys in the back were his bodyguards - his wontoks - and they were armed. Trouble had broken out between Steven's clan and another local tribe and things were very dangerous. People had already been shot on both sides. These disputes are not resolved with bows and arrows any more - the protaganists all have automatic weapons. It wasn't safe for him to drive from his village on his own so his wontoks were there to take care of him


A fatal trip to the liklik haus
One of my colleagues was a few hours late in to work on Tuesday. He explained that he had been consoling a neighbour who's son had been shot dead the night before. Another inter clan dispute that was being resolved in the traditional way - no recourse to authority - they sort it out themselves with guns. The boy had gone to the toilet (liklik haus) outside his house late at night and the enemy clan were lying in wait. They shot him dead.


All these are true stories and they all happened in the first two days of this week. It illustrates clearly how, despite a superficial veneer of calm and order, there is, very close to the surface , an extremely violent tradition. It has been the Highlands way for centuries. It is not going to change quickly. In many parts of the Highlands there is no police service, no government office, no communication and no judicial process. Its not surprising that people resolve problems in their own way.

Mt Hagen Market - update

Went to the market yesterday and found fresh asparagus! Also aubergine, courgettes and strawberries on a stick.


To top it all I even found some fresh parsley too!

Strawberries on a stick - 1 Kina (about 25p)

Mt Hagen Market

In an earlier post I suggested that I was beginning to accept the unusual as the norm. Things that were unusual when I first encountered them are now part of everyday life and as such are in danger of being overlooked and eventually forgotten. I thought I'd record a few of these .

This is a great slideshow of photos of Hagen Market. Not my photos but much better than anything I could do!





So here's a few tips if ever you go to Hagen Market..

Set aside enough time - a trip to the market is a social event. Lots of the women from the Handicrafts Group also have stalls in the market so we will always stop and tok stori.

Market is open every day except Sunday - Saturday is the big day but its busy all the time. It was even open on Christmas Day.

The market in Hagen is probably one of the best in the country for fresh produce. Hagen is in the Wahgi valley a major centre of agriculture for thousands of years. Produce comes direct from the gardens around Hagen - its all organic, fresh as it possibly could be and cheap! You can expect to find potatoes, sweet potatoes (kaukau), spring onions, garlic, cabbage, sweet corn, capsicums, cucumber, shallots, onions, dried beans, chillis, carrots, beans, kumu (green leaves -think spinach), peas, tomatoes, oranges, limes, bananas of all shapes and sizes (green to cook & yellow to eat), pineapple, strawberries (all year round!), guava, mango, tomato fruit (not to be confused with tomatoes!), passion fruit and a lot of other stuff that I don't know the name of. You can buy a massive amount of fresh produce for about 20Kina

No Haggling - the price is the price and they don't try to cheat the whitepelas!


You must never step over food in the market (particularly important for women not to do this) - it is considered incredibly rude and unhygienic. You are likely to be stopped and made to buy the food because nobody else will want it once you've stepped over it.

There are lots of boys in the market - about 7-12 yrs old - who will offer to carry your shopping. They are incredibly persistent but most of them are good kids just trying to earn a bit of cash. So its always best to employ one and then the others leave you alone. Give the boy a couple of Kina (about 50p)


Always make sure you have lots of small change and certainly nothing bigger than a 5 Kina note. market traders are not able to change large notes.


You can buy a really good shopping bag made from a recycled rice sack for 1Kina


The best way to make friends is to stop and chat and buy something.


Always use the side entrance! The main entrance is surrounded by pickpockets and guys selling knocked off car radios, dvd players etc. Best avoided.


Never take anything of value with you - I never take a wallet and I leave my phone at home.


If you are going to take an expensive camera with you its a good idea to have a few PNG friends standing near you when take it out of your bag. ALWAYS ask for permission before you take a picture and, if you have a digital camera, ALWAYS show the subject the photo.


Ask the men who sell tobacco leaves to show you how they roll their own bush cigars (definitely not in the Cuban style!)


Buy a chicken. it will be the freshest chicken you can get - still clucking.


Buy peanuts and a chunk of fresh pineapple to eat as you walk round the market.


Buy PNG coffee beans if you see them.


Buy some "bush fern" - its used to cook with the chicken - wrap the chicken in the bush fern and then cook it. You get green roast chicken (honest) but it tastes great.


The one thing you won't find is fresh herbs - PNG food is incredibly bland, but you can buy dried herbs in the supermarket (at a price!)


In TokPisin there is only one word for green leafy vegetables - Kumu. Try as many different types of kumu as you can - there may only be one word but there are many tastes!


Apart from the food you can also buy some really nice jewellery, baskets and bilums - again don't expect to haggle

A Web of Compromises

This post is probably far too detailed for the casual reader but some of my web producer/designer friends may find it interesting.


Construction of the website for the Handicrafts Group is nearly complete, just waiting for a little more copy and the final product photo shoot to be arranged and once those images are uploaded we will be finished.


You can see it at www.hagenhandicrafts.com.

So its a good time to reflect on the process and review what we've achieved.


Essentially the whole design/build process has been a series of trade offs and compromises between what we would really like to do and what was actually possible given the constraints under which we operate here in Hagen.


The first few weeks were spent reviewing the available organisation and technology resources. It became apparent very early on that trying to build an online store with e-commerce capability was a none starter. Technically it would have been a piece of cake to build but distributing individual sales of bilums around the world from Mt Hagen was a logistical nightmare - the distribution/transport infrastructure here simply wouldn't support it. The idea of handling lots of small online sales with a dodgy dial up connection filled me with dread. The banking system and the limited staffing resources here at the Handicraft Group would have made a difficult situation nearly impossible. So no e-commerce.


We developed a strategy based on growing a network of international distributors and supplying them wholesale. Some of our potential international partners would have online stores and we would feature those stores on our website - so anybody visiting the site would still have the opportunity to buy online even though they couldn't buy directly from the Handicraft Group. (This area of the website is a bit thin at the moment since we only have one international distributor with an online store and that's in German! However its a start.)


So at this stage we knew what sort of website we had to build. We then did all the usual web producer stuff:


Clear definition of the Website Objectives


Identified all the stakeholders


Created a PID (Project Initiation Document)


Prepared a time based plan and a budget


Developed the Information Architecture & Wire Frames


Produced various options for Art Direction


Created a detailed Functional Spec.


Created a fully dressed prototype


Some of my professional colleagues will find all the above very difficult to believe since I normally have a strong aversion to all this stuff!


Now we knew what sort of website we wanted, what it would look like and what functionality it would possess. The question was how to build it? We had to accept the fact that all we had to work with was a slow dial up connection and that once I left the project there would be no web development capability in the organisation. So it had to be developed in such a way that basic site maintenance (pricing, new products, new distributor links etc) could be handled by a non web specialist with some training but that major structural changes to the architecture of the site would not be possible.


We also had to find a way of handling lots of photos of our products and ensuring that future photos uploaded after I left would fit in with the layout and design.


So - we have built a basic site using Yola (the main strength of Yola is its simplicity and the quality of the support they provide for non technical people), we use Flickr to host the photo images and Yola has a great Widget which displays them on the site (takes care of spacing, sizing, presentation etc) so all the folk at the Handicrafts Group have to do is upload the photo to Flickr, tag it with the correct tags and hey presto it appears on the website in the right place, in the correct format, mounted on a nice frame and appropriately sized etc etc.


We also use the Flickr slideshow which works well - gives full screen images of our products and is very easy to maintain - just upload photos to Flickr, arrange them in sets and create slideshow from set.

I produced two silent videos using my very ordinary digital camera on "video mode" and edited them with Windows movie editor (!) May be able to add a commentary once I'm back in th UK but not possible to do here. The videos are hosted on You Tube with the embed code on our site.


We use Jotform for all the online forms (contact us, order form, new distributor enquiry) - the back office management of all the form data is done really well on Jotform


We have a Facebook Page and a Blog. Thought about Twitter but that was a step too far I felt.


I have indexed the site map with Google and have included appropriate Google Analytics tracking code within the site.


All of this is free/open source (except Yola which only cost about $40/year including mail and domain name registration)


We produced a beta version of the site before Christmas - send it out into the world for user testing and took notice of the feedback we received.

At the end of all this we have a site which works well, provides sensible user journeys, has the functionality we need and can be maintained by very inexperience people once I have gone. Its even pretty good on the accessibility critera too!


All this was done in about 12 weeks which is something of a miracle here in PNG.


Now we move on to Phase Two - promoting and marketing our site. All suggestions welcome!