Sweet tea

I usually drink my tea with milk and no sugar, but the people of PNG like it to be sugar laden. When they say they have two spoons of sugar in their tea, they are talking about dessertspoons, not teaspoons!

When I’m in the village, I drink this sweet tea too and I quite like it. It’s totally different to white tea with no sugar though. I call it my ‘village drink’ because it’s not really what I call ‘tea’. I drank lots of cups of this sweet tea on our west Buka survey trip. Here are a couple of photos of me drinking my sweet tea.

Too much sugar all the time can cause diabetes, and in Tok Pisin it is called ‘sik suga’. I mentioned in an old blog post (here) how Sugaman welcomes you to Bougainville at the airport. This time I managed to get a photo of the sign and here he is:

When you feel cold, have a cold shower to make you feel warm

This is a strange bit of logic that the people up the mountain at Namatoa (where it's a bit cooler) were telling me. It basically went like this: "If you feel cold, wash in the cold water, it will was the cold off your skin and you will feel warm". That really doesn't make sense to me, but the people seem to think it works. They say things like "I'm feeling cold, so I'm going to have a cold shower to make me feel warm". Of course, having a hot shower isn't an option since they don't have hot water services. I would think of having a hot shower when I am cold to heat me up, rather than a cold shower.

Another strange thing is: at Buka airport, there is a sign that says 'Sugaman welcomes you to Bougainville' (Sugaman = Sugarman) and then underneath that, it says something like 'Avoid sik suga' (ie. avoid diabetes). So here we have the Sugarman welcoming us to Bougainville and then we are told that we need to avoid getting the sugar sickness (diabetes). I can't quite figure out the logic in that either. I would think of the Sugarman as being a nice man who gives you sugar which could lead to diabetes (given that you have the other risk factors too), so why would he be telling you to avoid diabetes? Maybe he's nice enough to withold sugar from you too, if you are at risk of diabetes.

Anyway, early next week I will be without a computer for a few days and once I am set up again with my computer, I will put up some more posts about my time at Teop and in Bougainville.