Papua New Guinea Roots

I’m reading a great book by Kira Salak called Four Corners. They are the stories of her as a lonely traveler in Papua New Guinea. It is interesting to read it from her point of view about the great dangers that exist. I read stuff and thought “I really” didn’t know that.

You see, our experiences were very different because she traveled alone, whereas I went there when I was two years old and had all the protection of my family, other missionary families, and all the wonderful PNG wantoks (friends) that we had. Ever since I lived there until I was thirteen, I feel like I’m part PNG-ian.

I get excited when I can buy a bowl of vegetables or make myself some fish (canned mackerel) and rice. I recently saw a Facebook post from Books for Papua New Guinea. They are asking for books because they don’t even have textbooks or books to use in schools. I got so excited that I went through all my books and today I’m going to the post office. Why? Because I feel like I’m helping my own people.

I came back from New Guinea when I was thirteen years old and left my dear mother in a grave in the small town of Pabrabuk. My life was never the same after losing my mother, but it hasn’t been the same since I lived in New Guinea. When my family and I returned to PNG in 2007 (fourteen years after we left), we still returned to many wonderful wantoks who took us everywhere and gave us great feasts called muums: food cooked on the ground wrapped in banana leaves. and cooked with hot stones. Amazing! Pork, chicken, sweet potatoes, plantains and vegetables cooked to incredible perfection. In the Highlands, where we lived, that’s how it was cooked. The pork fat gave it the flavor and the moisture. In the Sepik region (the coastal areas) they do the same, but they mix it with coconut milk which is also delicious.

So they celebrated us and gave us a lot of bilums, which are homemade bags made of yarn and sometimes leather. We were very surprised to discover that even after fourteen years of absence, nothing has changed. It felt like we were walking back to the time period when we had left. People still lived in thatched huts in the villages, apart from Port Moresby, the capital you have to fly to, everything was just as we left it. It was amazing and wonderful at the same time.

However, what discouraged me was Pabrabuk, our small town where I grew up with missionaries and people from all over, and where my mother was buried, it was like a ghost town. There were a handful of people living in the houses and a few people going to the university that we had started. However, the silence everywhere made me feel very alone. I had thought that being able to return to my mother’s grave would help me feel close to her, but all I felt was loneliness.

We couldn’t stay in the house we grew up in, but they put us in the guest house. The moment we walked in, I wanted to leave and go to the nearest town which was Mt. Hagen, about an hour away. When you turned on the lights, cockroaches would scatter everywhere. They were all over the kitchen walls. In the bathroom we had to cover our toothbrushes with plastic bags so cockroaches wouldn’t crawl on them. In bed, I prayed that no cockroaches crawled on me while I slept.

It was fun, our itinerary was to fly to Port Moresby and stay with our wontaks, then fly to Lae (the rainforest there is so beautiful) where another one of our old friends was. They took us to Goroka, where we had moved for the last three years we were there (and lived with my stepmom, so no fun memories), and then through the Highlands Highway, where I always stopped and bought a fresh flower. . crown, via Mt. Hagen to Pabrabuk.

We didn’t even know if we were going to be able to go to Pabrabuk because it was so dangerous. We had a police escort there. I was so excited, because that was the highlight of my trip. So my disappointment that what I most expected was the worst experience made me feel really depressed.

In addition to the loneliness of past memories and disgusting cockroaches, my ex-husband and I weren’t speaking and my father, a missionary and preacher, was upset with me because I was wearing pants. We had a fight and I won and he was still wearing my pants, even though my father told me that he was dishonoring my mother’s memory. However, it all made my dream trip the worst trip I’ve ever taken.

The only positive part of Pabrabuk was that we walked to a vine bridge, because my sister in law had never seen one and had a glorious adventure. New Guineans are famous for not caring about the time as most do not have clocks in their towns. Why would they? So if you ask them how long it will take them to get somewhere, they just shrug their shoulders and say “not long, half an hour or an hour”. So, thinking that our trip to this vine bridge would only be an hour and a half at most, we all set off without food or water, my brother, his wife and two children, my ex-husband who I wasn’t talking to, and myself. My father, of course, stayed in the village.

After several hours of walking in the sun, the children began to get hungry and my brother realized that we were nowhere near this place. Fortunately, the natives we passed gave the children some peanuts and we continued on. We finally got there after a couple of hours. We walked over the vine bridge, ate more peanuts and drank from the water below.

It was all very good, a nice little adventure, until we started to head back home and it started to get dark and then it started to splash us. Walking in the dark through kunai grass (long, sharp blades of grass, which is why I wanted to wear pants) and over rocks that we couldn’t see very well now was very different from walking during the day.

The drive home seemed twice as long and we were never so glad to see the van waiting for us. We stopped to buy snacks for the kids at a little store in the middle of nowhere. They told us to stay in the van because the men were drunk and it was not safe. My sister-in-law acted scared, but I wasn’t scared. Nothing bad had ever happened to us in New Guinea. In fact, I was always disappointed growing up, that when there was a tribal war, or something bad happened that I wasn’t allowed to go see, but my brother was.

The next day we took it easy and walked twenty minutes to a waterfall and swam under it which was lovely but the most memorable waterfall was Goroka where we would always take our friends and slide down the waterfall and We dived from the cliffs. I still love Papua New Guinea and feel like it’s a deep part of who I am, but I don’t know if I’ll ever go back.