Toilet frogs

These are the frogs (toads perhaps, to be more accurate) that welcome anyone who visits the toilet. Someone in Australia asked me if they were cane toads. I don’t know my frog/toad species well enough to say, so now you can see them and decide for yourself what kind of amphibian they are!

Toilet guests

Have you ever gone to the toilet and there’s a fly in the room? I’m sure you know what that’s like. Where might that fly land? Fortunately, we don’t seem to have flies in our village toilet very often, but we have some other toilet guests whom I will now introduce to you.

Spiders: These are the guests I don’t mind so much, they just stay in their little corner and keep to themselves. They don’t run and attack me.

Toads: They often guard the entrance to the toilet and might randomly jump and hit my leg as I walk past, which freaks me out and I squeal!

Crabs: Some crabs dig their holes inside our toilet house. Usually they run away deep down inside their hole when I come near, but there have been a couple of times where I’ve seen a crab on the ground and worried that it might attack my leg.

Cockroaches: Never a pretty sight, especially when they’re scuttling around near the toilet seat! Thankfully, they are afraid of people and never accidentally touch you!

A mother hen: Stupid hen! I was not at all impressed when she decided that our toilet house was a good place for her and her chick to rest for the night. Especially when my foot got a little too close to the hen and she attacked my foot! She got a good telling off in Teop for that.

Most of these toilet guests are only around in the evening (except for the spiders), so most of the time, there isn’t really a problem. I’ve probably made it sound worse than it is! Going to the toilet where we live is not an unpleasant experience. There are much worse village toilets in other parts of PNG!

Living at Teop Island

Sorry it’s been a while between blog posts. I hope you had a good Christmas and wish you all the best for the new year.

We lived at Teop Island for four weeks and we were comfortable there – after our toilet was finished. The first week without a toilet was a challenge! They did build us a very nice toilet though. Here it is:

We stayed in a lovely couple’s house. They are Christians whose faith and love for the Lord is very evident in their speech and actions. Here are some photos of the house:

I did our cooking up on the verandah – I felt a bit like a TV chef on a stage!

This is the back of the house:

The Teop people also built us a nice shower house:

We stood on this concrete inside the shower so that our feet didn’t get muddy.

Our humble toilet

When we stayed at Hiovabon village previously, we went to the mangroves to do our ‘business’ as the village didn’t have a toilet. Now since we are living with them for a while, they built us a proper village toilet. It is built near the mangroves and it has a seat for us to use. They did a good job.

Here is a picture of the toilet close up. We are comfortable with its privacy level, people would not be able to see anything because there is a curtain and wall that provide sufficient cover.

Here is a photo of the toilet in the context of its surroundings. Now you can see why it needs to have a good level of privacy!

The basics of life

Food, shelter, a toilet, and a place to wash are some of the basics of life which we relied on other people to provide for us when we were on the survey trip. I’ve already talked about the food, so now for the other three.

Our living arrangements were very varied. Sometimes we stayed in a house that was made out of modern materials and was fully screened, so we didn’t need to use our mosquito nets. Other times we stayed in a traditional bush material house.

We stayed in bush houses similar to this one in some villages:

The toilets in most places had been provided by World Vision, and were little huts, with a concrete floor, and a ceramic toilet bowl with plastic seat and lid, over a pit. Thank you to World Vision and everyone who donates to them. Not only does their work benefit the locals, it benefits the foreign visitors too! Two places we stayed had even better toilets – one was a fully functioning flush toilet, and the other one was similar, but you just had to fill the cistern manually.

Here’s the inside of a western style house:

We didn’t have any showers with hot water on the survey, but the best shower was like a normal shower, just that it was only cold water that came out of the shower head. Everywhere else, we had a bucket filled with cold water, and a dish to pour the water over ourselves. The shower rooms had varying degrees of privacy – from full privacy, to fully open (no shower room). A lot of the places had just a simple, small square frame with tarp around it as the walls. I have a skirt that I can wear to cover myself while bathing, which means I don’t need to worry if we don’t have a fully private shower room.

This is the house that had the flush toilet and normal shower:

Good, clean drinking water was available too – also thanks to World Vision who provided water tanks for the villages. I shouldn’t give all the credit to World Vision however because Care International, Red Cross, Caritas and Ausaid are some of the other aid organisations that work in the area too and have probably also provided water tanks and toilets.

Village – Our humble abode (post by Bill & Liz)

We stayed in the village for 5 nights. In the photo below is the house we stayed in. It was newly built for when Julie did her orientation course and stayed in the village for 5 weeks. The family have lived in the house since then and generously shared it with us while we visited.

This is a picture of our bedroom. You can’t see much of it because of our mosquito net.

Here is the toilet, which we shared with many nocturnal creatures.

Here is our open air bathroom. We bathed in the river, which is in the foreground. The sea is on the other side of the sandbank. The water in the river is amazingly warm, it feels like you’re hopping into a nice warm bath.

Namatoa – An amazing villageǃ

While we spent most of our time in the Teop area in one village at the coast, one time we travelled up the mountain and stayed in Namatoa village for two nights. It took us 4 hours to walk up the mountain, but apparently the Namatoa villagers can do it in 1½-2 hoursǃ

Namatoa is a fairly big village in seemingly the middle of nowhere. It does have a road that goes up the mountain to it, but it is in terrible condition. We walked along the road, and its condition even made walking difficult, but they still somehow manage to get vehicles up there when it's not too wetǃ

Namatoa has spectacular ocean views. In this photo, the land that you can see in the distance is Buka Island:

Another view from Namatoa, with some closer land in sight:

The views aren't the most amazing thing about Namatoa though. The most amazing thing is that it has a plumbed water supplyǃ The toilet we used flushed like normal, with the press of a button, and there was even a little sink for washing your hands in the toilet outhouse. There were also showers where you turn a tap on and water comes down from above. It was really nice to have a normal shower, rather than tipping water from a bucket over me. Here's a photo of the shower we used, hope you can see the pipe clearly.

On the other hand, the floor of the shower wasn't all that spectacular...

At one stage, the village must have been even more amazing, with an electricity supply. There are electricity poles and wires going throughout the village, but they have not been functioning for a very long time. In this photo you can see some of the village houses and an electricity pole and wire.

Cold toilets!!

I am back in Melbourne now and the big shock was how cold the toilet seats are! Wow!! They are so cold! I haven't felt that in over a year and it was a surprise to me how cold they are.

Anyway, yesterday I went to the Geelong vs Western Bulldogs final in the AFL yesterday with Dad and was happy to see Geelong win. This afternoon I am going away on holiday with my Mum and Dad to Kyneton (in Victoria) for a few days. I'll be back at the end of the week.

Here's a picture of me and Dad at the football:

Hakö visit

I visited the Hakö area on the weekend, staying there on Saturday and Sunday nights. It was nice, the people were very friendly and the language was definitely strong and being used a lot. Two very cute kids are pictured in a couple of the photos above.

I stayed in a modern style house which was wired for electricity but not connected. You can see it in one of the photos above. I was sharing it with the men who were working on the mobile phone tower. I had two local teenage girls sleeping in the room with me as security, and the rooms had doors with locks in the handles, so the girls locked the door when we went to sleep.

The toilet was really nice. It was the best village toilet I've been to in PNG so far and better than some public toilets in Australia. It was in a little hut that you would probably describe as a shack, not very flash looking, but inside there was a regular toilet seat with water in it. It didn't have a cistern for flushing, so we had to get a bucket of water and pour it down to flush it. It was very nice and didn't have a toilet smell to it at all.

On our first night we had mud crab for dinner, which was very nice. They gave us a crab each, you can see the size of them in one of the photos above. The one I ate was a little bit smaller than the one in the picture. I'm sure these would be very expensive to buy in Australia, so it was a real treat and although my mouth enjoyed the crab, it seems that my stomach didn't, as I had stomach pain during the night and the next day, and also diarrhoea. That was a shame. Next time I'll have to only eat a little bit of crab and not a whole big one.

The main mobile phone company is building a new tower in the village that we were staying in. It is nearly finished and will be active in a week or two. There's a picture of it in one of the photos above. These towers are popping up everywhere. There are also devices available which enable you to access the Internet using the mobile service, so if I end up working in a village with mobile reception, I will be able to access email and Internet in the village. I think that would be wonderful!

Well, there you go, that's my trip to the Hakö language area in a nutshell.

A few days in paradise

My visit to the Teop language group was like a few days at a tropical paradise, and in comparison to other villages, it was luxury too! We had a modern house to live in and a room each with a foam mattress, pillows and mosquito nets provided. There was tables and chairs to sit at too, so it was very comfortable and we had million dollar views. (Our house is shown in one of the pictures above).
 
We were staying on the mainland of Bougainville, but one day we went and visited the island across from us, where there is also a village. We were able to walk across during a low tide, and in the afternoon we took a canoe back. (See one of the pictures above for a view of the mainland from the island).
 
People from the island go to their gardens or school on the mainland during the day, and they return to their village via canoe in the afternoon, so this was a good time to go for a walk along the beach to the 'canoe terminus' and socialise with the people. I enjoyed spending time with the people showing them my photos and learning some of the Teop language. (One of the photos above is of me with some of these people. They are so dark that for their faces to look good in a photo, the camera has to over-expose my face. I am not really as white as the photo shows!).
 
Our toilet didn't smell because it wasn't a pit, it was the ocean! We went into the mangroves when the water was low, but you had to watch for the bits sticking up from the ground. Overnight the tide came in and washed everything away. (See one of the pictures above which shows our toilet spot).The only concern was privacy, there was no little hut to hide you!
 
The people were very nice and the language was very strong, which was encouraging. The little children spoke the language a lot and parents spoke to their children in Teop too. In some parts of PNG, parents are using Tok Pisin to speak to their children, so the children grow up speaking Tok Pisin and the language gradually disappears.
 
I cannot yet say whether I will be working with the Teop language group. It all depends on what what God's will is and also the thoughts of my future team-mate. I think it would be a good option though.

The toilet

The toilet was not our favourite place in the village. They had pit toilets, but the pit was not very deep. The surface was so close that if you dropped something valuable down there, you could retrieve it (not that you would really want to though!!). So with the shallowness of it all, it meant that the bugs (cockroaches, flies, maggots) were near the top and there was a very strong odor (I hope you're not eating while you're reading this!).

One time I was going to the toilet and as I stepped over the hole, a whole swarm of flies flew out and I made a quick exit! As I was walking back to the house, a young girl asked me, 'Yu pekpek pinis?' ('Did you already finish in the toilet?'). She asked because she had seen me go there and I came back so quickly, so I had to tell her that I saw all the flies and ran away. They must have thought, 'If it's that bad that they don't even do their business, we'd better do something' because later that day, the girl's father gave Correna the last of their fly spray for us to use when there was a lot of flies.

Another time I went after dark and there was a frog in the toilet hut…maybe you can ask me about that story. It doesn't seem right writing about it, too much detail that I feel strange about writing about on the Internet! Anyway, I generally avoided going to the toilet after dark, and maintained a constant state of under-hydration just so that I didn't have to go very often!