Village – Roof making (post by Bill & Liz)

Traditionally village houses have a roof made from sago leaves woven together. Julie’s village brother, Sake, is building a new house and he was making some of the roof material while we were there.


Sake invited Bill to have a go at it.


I hope this is not the part of the roof that leaks!

The traditional roof material lasts for about 5 years before needing replaced, so many people prefer to use corrugated iron as it lasts 20 years. But we found that under corrugated iron roofs, it got extremely hot compared to the traditional roof. We even saw some houses with metal walls as well as roofs, so we can’t imagine how hot it would be in there!

People in PNG are eager to try new technology, such as the metal roofs and mobile phones, which are everywhere, even if at times, reception and recharging options are limited.

Village – Sago (post by Bill & Liz)

Sago is used as a supplement to the villagers’ regular diet. They grow the sago trees in their jungle gardens and chop down the tree whenever required. Once a tree is chopped down, the men pound into the soft wood to make a rough woody pulp.


Here’s Bill having a go at it. All his toes were still intact afterwards!


The wood pulp is collected and carried to a nearby river and washed through hessian bags and the residue is caught in containers beneath them. The sago settles in the bottom of the bowls and the water is poured off later.

Here is Liz trying her hand at washing sago.


We were served sago for breakfast the next day and it was not our favourite meal. It looked like a brown jellyfish!

Making sago

When I was in the village, two days in a row we went to the bush, next to the river, to make sago. Firstly the men cut down a sago tree and then they smashed the inside of it to make a pulp a bit like wood chips or sawdust.

Next it is the women’s work to process it all to make sago flour. Firstly we put the sago pulp into a pot and add water. Then we squeezed the water out of the pulp and put the pulp in another bowl, and keep the water which is now orange from the sago pulp and repeat the process two more times with the same batch of pulp.

Next we poured the water over a piece of hessian and rubbed the hessian to make the sago flour go through to the basin below.

Here I am rubbing the hessian – it is easy work, but your skin starts to wear out after doing lots of it. There was so much pulp from one tree!

We ended up with a basin full of orange water, but the sago flour settles at the bottom of the basin.

They empty the water and allow the flour to dry out. Here is a photo of the completed product that they gave us.

There are so many different ways of cooking sago. You can mix it with banana or with coconut and fry it or boil it or cook it on the fire or make soup out of it. I had a lot of fun experimenting with it and I haven’t mastered cooking it yet. I hope to play with it a bit more and see if I can make anything really wonderful.

The various kinds of cooked sago that I ate were nice. It is a bit gelatinous (or ‘gooey’) and chewy, but it was definitely edible and not repulsive at all.

Here are two things made out of sago that our family gave us. I tried making the kind that is on the right one time.