Papua New Guinea - charity report

The first time our charity flew into Papua New Guinea, amateur bandits ambushed the car on the pot-holed road between Port Moresby International Airport and the centre of town. My trip in was smoother; there were no wild west stick ups. Just a landscape of curiously abandoned fences, pointlessly marking out a patchwork of scrub and ash.

My final destination was Faseu, a small village buried in jungle, on the edge of the highlands. I had come with two other members of my Auckland based charity - an emeritus professor of Engineering from Auckland University and a civil engineer from Watercare. Our previous trips had involved taking medical supplies and surveying sites; now we had come to complete a small hydro-electric dam which would power lights and electric tools for the villagers.

But before any engineering work, before any travel to remoter regions untainted by functioning road networks, I had to pass through PNG's international artery of Port Moresby. Several weeks earlier I had seen a news program which rated it the world's most dangerous city. It certainly seemed that way when I arrived. I was staying in one of the more up-market areas of town at an Australian ex-pat's place, who was helping our hydro-electric work. Four metre high walls topped with razor wire, barred windows, sentries at night, and guard dogs so vicious they couldn't be let off their chains at day all spoke volumes about the security situation in Port Moresby.

That first evening, as I watched scrub fires race along the parched hills across the valley, my host's beautiful indigenous wife Yusigao, explained it too me. You know, those fires are lit for no reason, she told me. Same as the violence outside, it is just Rascals, with nothing to do. I'd heard the Rascals of Papua New Guinea described as a gang. But describing them as a gang credits far too much coordination. There are gangs, sure, but Rascals refers to the impoverished, alienated individuals behind the opportunistic, relentless and shockingly violent crime in Papua New Guinea.

Cooperation between large groups of criminals for the perpetration of some of the world's highest incidences of rape and murder is made difficult by the near 600 tribal divisions that exist on the island. Tribal differences run deep, and each tribe has its own distinct language that is totally unrelated (think Maori and English) to the language spoken by the tribe in the neighbouring valley. Combined with insular cultural traditions and scarce resources, the outcome today is that mass cooperation of any sort can difficult in Papua New Guinea. Political corruption along tribal divisions is endemic. Seeking support from the PNG government for our charity’s projects was pointless - most government funds received by a bureaucrat would be siphoned off to their 'Onetoks' (literally, 'one talk' in PNG Pidgin, meaning those who speak the same tribal language). Sources of funding from the NZ government was have been restricted by the Government’s streamlining of the NZAID budget.

As we travelled north from Port Moresby to Lae, then to Finschaffen, then through a series of dusty towns which I can now only remember as rows of betelnuts and pineapples on sale, the neglect bred by the lack of political oversight was frustratingly obvious. The road was completely unusable, even for walking. Outside of the towns, the roads die a steady but spectacular death, gradually eaten up until they become monstrous ruts of clay burying themselves in the red earth. Small foot tracks which snake through the jungle, used by people and animals alike, become the only route.

It was on a track like this we completed most of our journey to Faseu. The further away we left the wild desperation of the urban centres of Port Moresby and Lae, the more the natural ruggedness of the country asserted itself. The jungle is dominated by huge hardwood trees, part of one of the largest remaining tracts of virgin rainforest in the world. The competition for space away from the path is intense; vines are draped like a huge net across everything. Water, never too far away in the wet climate, combines with the clay that makes up most of the landmass to form totally unreasonably amounts of mud.

Once we had arrived in Faseu, and begun work on the micro-hydro dam, this mud made its presence felt. It was impossible to avoid, caking work boots in an unwieldy circumference of earth that had to be removed. The locals refused to suffer the indignity of shoes, and after fruitless hours spent scraping earth from my boots I followed suit and went barefoot around the village. Our accommodation was basic, and like the other 50-odd inhabitants of Faseu, was a bush-crafted hut with palm fronds for the roof and walls and hewn hardwood boards for a floor. There was a fire pit in the centre of single room, no ventilation and hundreds of fleas and lice. The only permanent structure was a Lutheran Church, constructed by missionaries in a time when those spreading the Christian word talked louder. The rest of the huts in the village, including mine, would disintegrate into the humid, voracious jungle within a few years.

The Lutheran tradition, however, had not disintegrated and the entire village were extremely devout. Church every Sunday was a community event, and involved a healthy amount of singing and preaching. The curious blend of imported religion and indigenous beliefs in PNG is obvious, and the same breath that carried Christian fables from ancient towns on the other side of the world would tell me of fire sorcerers and water spirits living in the rivers that ran nearby.

Such indigenous beliefs are close to the surface, and serve as a reminder of the dramatically foreign cultural world that exists in PNG. Several months after we had left Faseu there was an outbreak of sorcery in the area during which contact became impossible. Sorcerers are blamed for a number of things, but usually it is the familiar themes of sickness and death. These outbreaks often have unpleasant resolutions, with alleged sorcerers (almost always women) being buried alive, in standing graves to prevent their spirits from returning to haunt the living.

But such violent acts were far from the spectrum of emotion I encountered in Faseu. The villagers were hard working farmers, subsisting on jungle crops of taro, yams, cucumbers, bananas and passionfruit. There was little time for play and the hard life quickly makes men of teenagers. But the warmth and inquisitive kindness of the locals was irrepressible. Fair-skinned visitors to the village were rare, and the whispering audience that accompanied me seemed to find almost inappropriate interest in every detail of my activities. And it was with delight that after so much preparation we were able to complete the micro-hydro dam and run power to the village meeting house on one of the last nights I was there. The village also now had a street light (although no streets), and many of the locals stayed up all night under its glow when it was installed.

With a goodbye that failed to do justice to the affection I felt for the locals behind me, our charity has continued to support trips to the Faseu region. Contact remains difficult, although as with many parts of the world cell phones have become prolific (if not reliable). Recently much of the dam we completed has been washed away by one of the flash floods common to the area. One of our main local construction leaders was bedridden with malaria for three months. The local electrician disappeared. Anyway, repairs are needed and in 2012 our charity is heading back to repair the damage. There are still no roads, still no political support, and I am sure that the Rascals and the jungle and the mud are still waiting.

ENDS

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