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Monday, 13 August 2007

Journey to the highlands...

DAY 6 - 9: Mt Hagen

The knocking comes again and the manager goes over to the door but does not release the latch. The voice outside says it wants accommodation. The manager explains that the doors are shut promptly at 7.30pm and not opened unitl morning. He relents after futher discussion, a man enters and the doors firmly latched again. In the opinion of the manager, guests are better inside and raskols outside after dark.

"I prefer to stay at the mission guest house", says Tom as we drive into Mt Hagen. "They do not allow alcohol and it is quiet". He could have added that it is clean and there is hot water too. For 50 kina a day we get a plain but more than adequate dinner, a comfortable bed and a too-large breakfast of cereal, hard boiled egg, four slices of toast and all the coffee you want.

The place is managed by a dour American missionary couple with four young, blond children. The family seems quintessentially middle-America, small town variety. Perhaps it is their brand of Christianity that accounts for their being uncommunicative, unsmiling and disinterested in their guests. They seem to want to keep to themselves and rely on local staff to do the cleaning and cooking. It is like they have been in-country too long and are biding their time until they go home.

Tales of pigs and missionary adventure

"I met a highland man. His daughter died of starvation in the drought", the missionary woman tells me. "But he still owned pigs that he could have eaten or sold to buy food. In some places, the priority for men is land and pigs... and only then women".

She has blonde hair and is friendly though distant. I had spent last night talking with this missionary, whose husband runs the accommodation house, and a man from the Southern Highlands. The missionary's story confirmed what I already knew about the value of pigs in PNG culture, that they are signifiers of wealth, are highly valued and bring status to their owners.

We had finished our meal and were sitting in the common room, a large, plain space equipped with armchairs and a modest library of mainly religious titles. Near the door was a radio where, each morning, one of the staff maintained a watch, tuning into the region's HF radio network. Radio is the main means of communicating news and of keeping in touch with missionaries in outlying villages.

As often happens when strangers are forced together, our discussion moved to what we were doing in-country. The woman went on. "Our mission is self-supporting. My husband works with a local construction company. My family spent the early 1980s and early 1990s in PNG. Now we are thinking that it might be time to go home".

The Southern Highlands man spoke good English. "I live in an isolated village. It is reachable only by MAF aircraft", he tells us. The Mission Air Fellowship (MAF) links isolated villages through its light aircraft service operating from Mt Hagen airport. "I was educated at a bible college in Tasmania, Australia, where I spent two years".

He had a keen sense of the importance of community development. "Where I live I built a tourist lodge near a large waterfall. It attracts Europeans... the US ambassador stayed there... but few Australians come.

"I also helped build a school that educates from grade one to six. I found a couple volunteers to teach and eventually succeeded in getting the government to supply a teacher", he said.

This energetic, middle aged man was also responsible for the construction of an airstrip. He told us that his village still uses kerosene as an energy source and he was interested in the micro-hydroelectric system I told him that I was here to discuss with the people from Wabag.

It was here I learned about the unofficial division of PNG between American and Australian missionaries, sort of a demarkation of territory which, I suppose, avoids territorial disputes between godly sects. The Highlands are noted for inter-tribal clashes, but inter-sect conflict between missionary clans offers little by way of advancement but more by way of entertainment.

Downtown

There are people everywhere... people walking around, standing on the footpath, talking. Women walk past, their colourful bilums supported on the forehead and draped down their back. People wander into the few fast food shops selling greasy snacks, shops that would be more at home in a downmarket suburb in some Western city. There are lines five, six and more deep outside the post office where people wait their turn for the public phones. Who do they call, I wonder?

Mt Hagen, a town of 28 000 or so, is the major settlement of PNG's Central Highlands. The place has a frontier feel about it, a feeling enhanced when Tom points out where the most recent bank robbery took place. That was only a few weeks before.

As I walk around I pick up an edginess, a restlessness, a tension. Today is payday for those who work in town and It is the day that people come in from the surrounding villages. I wonder whether this has something to do with the strange energy of the place or whether that is simply due to my being in an unfamiliar town. I learn later that payday is when trouble is most likely to occur.

One of the reasons why people are in town today is to take their cut of the wages of their working relatives, their wantoks (literally, 'one talk' - people of the same language group who are considered to be related). PNG's is a 'sharing' culture based on family lines.

I see the wantok system in action when Tom and I visit a relative of his who manages the town's industrial gas depot. As we drive through the gates I see people waiting by the chainlink fence outside the yard. Tom explains that they are the wantoks of those who work inside and they expect a share of their pay. Tom, a highlander, has escaped the wantok culture by living in Lae. It is the way he talks about it that gives me the impression that he lost patience with the system some time ago.

Hagen town centre is not all that big. The place is laid out on a grid and consists for the most part of one and two-storey buildings. I wander down to the town market, curious about the range of produce that might be available and interested in finding out whether the drought has reduced food availability and pushed up prices. Today, though, is not market day. The market has only a handful of fruit and vegetable sellers. So much for my hopes of photographing tables stacked with produce.

There are unfamiliar vegetables and fruit here. What is that half-metre long thing that looks like a corn cob with red kernels? Or that mandarin-like fruit with green skin and the bundles of black seeds like large pawpaw seed? More familiar are the mangos.

I notice a few tables with women selling bilums, the traditional string bags that today, more often than not, are woven of synthetic, brightly-coloured polyester. The 'authentic' bilums, those woven of natural fibre, I later discover at the airport.

A strange sport

Tom talks to his waste metal collector and throws a few bags of aluminium cans into the vehicle. I open the door, get out and stand watching. This really is a wierd sight.

"Darts is a very popular sport here", Tom says.

There, in front of us, forty or more dart boards are set up in a line and a crowd of men stand waiting their turn to throw their projectiles. Darts is a quaint game I associate with placid English pubs. But here, isolated in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, are all these wild-looking, bearded Highlanders partaking enthusiastically of the game. I wonder how, were they to be transplanted to some rural English pub, they would go against the locals.

Waiting, waiting

Patience is a virtue in aid work and people in the Pacific Islands operate to a different timetable than we in the West, but when they do not turn up at all it is a real bummer.

One of the reasons I am in Hagen is to meet with a group of village decision-makers from a community in the Wabag Valley. Wabag is some distance to the west, further along the Hilans Hiway. I anticipate making the journey there with them and staying a few days to check out their request for a micro-hydroelectric system to bring power to the village. There are reportedly some works for an earlier scheme that was never completed and I want to assess whether these might be useful for a new system. Some months before my visit, the villagers had made contact with APACE, the NGO I work for in Sydney, and expressed interest in obtaining a micro-hydroelectric turbine. They had learned that APACE had installed turbines in a number of Solomon Island villages and at Aguan in PNG. The Sydney office arranged for the Wabag people to meet me at Mt Hagen airport. From there I am to go with them to the Wabag Valley.

Tom and I drive out to the airport in the morning and wait... and wait some more. A couple passenger aircraft land and leave. With each flight, Tom asks people if they are the Wabag group. No luck. An MAF Cessna touches down gently and taxis to a stop but no one disemabarks except the pilot.

We hang around inside the terminal building... we sit outside... we sit in the vehicle... we are becoming more pessimistic about the Wabag delegation as time goes on. We quaff a Coke or two to and throw the empty cans into Tom's ute, an addition to his growing collection of waste metal that will eventually end up in a Brisbane recycling facility.

Tom is a patient man but I can see that he is becoming impatient. We are puzzled about the group's failure to turn up. After some hours go back into town and try to phone and fax the numbers we have as a contact for the Wabag people. We are puzzled that they fail to answer and discover that the lines are down or that something else has preventing our messages getting through though the cause is never quite clear.

Last day too late

Afternoon, and I make another attempt to get a message through to the Wabag contact number. We have faxed the address of the guest house where we are staying in Hagen so they can find us. Although my schedule has a little flexibility, time is running out.

Morning. I decide to stay at the guest house just in case the Wabag people come. Tom goes out to collect waste metal. I persist because the NGO is eager to have another project in PNG and my visit to Wabag will be crucial in getting it started. On my report will ride a funding application to AusAID and a visit by engineers from the NGO to fully measure the hydro-electric potential of the site and devise a works plan.

Morning drifts into afternoon, afternoon to evening. A mission guest house is not the most lively venue in which to await visitors. It is quiet during the day, much as it is in the evening. Not much happens. I pass the time reading a title from the house's limited range of literature, the biography of an Australian missionary, and writing up my own notes. Still no sign of the Wabag people. I know that time is measured differently in Melanesia but this is ridiculous. I begin to suspect that the Wabag people are not merely late, that they are not coming at all.

Evening. Tom has not returned. Aware of the difficulty the man who turned up after the 7.30 kerfew had in getting admission on our first night here, I stay up late waiting but there is no sign of Tom. Nor is there the next morning. By now I am concerned that he has run into raskols again.

I am due to fly out to Port Moresby this afternoon and contemplate getting a ride to the airport on a public transport vehicle when, just a couple hours before my flight is due to leave, Tom walks in. No, he had not run into a raskol gang. He has been out collecting waste metal and spent the night with friends.

There is still no sign of the Wabag group. Tom says it is time to go. He drops me at the airport to catch my flight to Moresby then makes a journey further west along the Hilans Hiway. I buy another string bilum for Lisa, my co-worker in Sydney who already has a collection. The women array their bilums for sale on the airport's chainlink fence, hoping to catch the occasional tourist, of which there seems to be very few. Close by, a Russian helicopter crew practices lifting logs on the end of a long cable suspended from the aircraft's belly. There are two Russian helicopters, a stubby one with two counter-rotating rotors and twin tail fins and a larger type with single rotor and clamshell doors at the rear. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, ex-military crews acquired aircraft and now offer their services to the logging industry for whom they lift logs from inaccessible country.

A large, four engined propeller-driven passenger aircraft lands and, with a tremenouus noise, departs for one of the big islands off the PNG north coast. The disembarked passengers depart and only a few people remain in the terminal building. More passengers turn up just before our flight lands.

Mt Hagen is a blotch of settlement amid green fields as we climb up and into cloud. Below passes a wonderful landscape of mountains and winding rivers.

I do not know how far west Tom went along the Hilans Hiway. The road winds on to Mendi, then to Tari, but it has a bad reputation for holdups by raskols. After I return to Sydney I learn that Tom collected even more waste metal and returned to Lae, his utility full.

LAter, back in Sydney, I am told that the village delegation claims it did turn up while I was in Hagen. Tom and I spent hours in search of them. I spent more hours waiting. If they were there they were certainly elusive. I doubt they were there at all.