Ukarumpa life

I have been at Ukarumpa for a week and a half now. There’s not a lot of exciting news to report from here at the moment, so I will be continuing to share about my time in the village in future posts.

We have had a few days of orientation and I have had several meals at other people’s houses. There is not a lot of work that I can do yet as I am waiting to have a meeting with a supervisor, and also because of the time of year - my department closes from 24 Dec to 2 Jan.

I am staying in a 3 bedroom unit, sharing with another single, but she will be moving out on 30th December. I would like to keep sharing with another person, either in this unit or another one, so that I can keep expenses down. I need to find someone else to share with myself.

Here is the unit I am staying in – my bedroom window is the small one on the left.

Harvesting cocoa

One day when I was in the village, I went out with our family to the garden to harvest cocoa. Cocoa is one of the cash crops in PNG – the people grow it and sell it to businesses who produce things like chocolate from it.

I had a pretty easy job when we harvested the cocoa. Papa took the cocoa pods down from the tree, our sister Rachel cut them open, and then I dug my fingers into them and pulled the beans out and put them in a big bag. It was really easy, but there was a seemingly never-ending supply of cocoa pods, so after several hours, my skin was beginning to get a bit thin. I was thankful when they insisted that I stop and rest. I think I probably did about 40kg worth of beans.

So next time you each chocolate, you can think of me helping to make it!!

Rachel cutting a pod open:

An open cocoa pod ready for me to remove the beans:

The cocoa beans that I removed (half-way through the day – I pretty much filled the bag all the way to the top!).

Some people also dry the cocoa beans in their village. At one village they had some that had been dried and we were able to eat a bean. It tasted bitter, sweet and alcoholic at the same time! I would describe it as tasting like chocolate wine, if there were such a thing.

The 'Solar'

We had mobile phone reception in the village, so I took my mobile phone with me. I realised that I wouldn’t have electricity to charge it, so I took a solar charger, which we simply referred to as ‘the solar’. It is funny to think that you can be in a village and have mobile phone reception but no electricity!

The solar went out in the sun every day. In the morning it was on a table near the path that goes past the village, then we moved it closer to the house in the afternoon and often put it on the roof of our family’s kitchen house.

The people were always very concerned about it. They were worried about it getting stolen when it was near the path, and then it started to rain and we mentioned that it was still outside, they would panic and run quickly to get it and bring it inside!

People also saw my ‘solar’ as a good way of charging their own phones for free. I didn’t mind doing that, but it was just so hard to get enough charge in the solar to keep my phone charged, never mind charging anyone else’s, so I was only able to help them out a couple of times. If they went to the local Health Centre, which has a generator, they could pay two kina to charge their phones. I didn’t have my normal charger in the village, so I couldn’t use that anyway.

Here’s my solar charging in the sun:

Hook fishing

Twice I went fishing with a rod and hook when I was in the village. I used a small rod with a short fishing wire and a hook attached. For bait I put little pieces of shrimp onto the hook, but first I had to remove the tail and skin. My hands got all covered in yucky stuff!!

The river goes into the sea and I could fish either in the river or in the sea, but I preferred the river. To fish, I just stood at the shore and waved the rod around to throw the bait into the water and then waited for a fish to bite.

Sometimes I would get a bite and the bait would be gone, but a fish didn’t come when I pulled the hook out of the water. Other times I didn’t feel anything and the bait disappeared. Occasionally I would catch a little fish! On each of the times I went fishing, I caught two fish. The people were so happy about that and said to me, “You win!”

Here are some kids doing the sort of fishing I did:

The fish I caught:

Me with my dead fish:



Yes, they are ridiculously small and certainly nothing to brag about, but that is the kind of fish they are expecting to catch and they cook them and eat them.

I’m not experienced with cooking fish, so I gave my fish to our foster mum to cook for me. Here is the meal that she brought me with one of my fish on top.


I think the villagers eat them bones and all, but that’s not for me. I just ate the little bit of meat in the middle of the fish and gave the rest to our resident cat!!

Oh, mango!!

“Oh, mango!” was a frequent sigh in the village. There were several mango trees in the village and the mangoes were ripe and fell down randomly. Often children would run and get the mango that they heard fall down. One time when I was washing my clothes one fell and hit me on the back! It hurt for a few minutes and I later ate the mango that hit me!

One time we had an outdoor church gathering under mango trees in the neighbouring village, and it was quite amusing to watch the local grown men duck and cover their heads when they heard a mango break off a tree above them.

It was nice having mangoes to eat whenever I wanted to though. Usually I share a third of a mango with my parents in Australia, but in the village I could eat a whole mango all to myself, and I could even eat two a day if I wanted to.

Here are some pictures of the ground covered in mangoes at the neighbouring village.

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.

Back from village living

We have left our villages now and are back at POC. I had a great time in the village, I absolutely loved it and would be happy to stay there all the time. There is so much I could tell you about my time in the village that it would make one very long blog post!! So I’ll share a little bit now and add more posts about village living over the next few weeks.

Some of the highlights were: making sago, harvesting cocoa, going for a trip up a mountain, making a bilum and being given a local name – Mogom.

In the mornings, I had a bit of a routine of having breakfast then washing my clothes at the tap, then washing the dishes at the tap too. It was an interesting affair – I often had a crowd of children standing watching me. It didn’t really bother me. Lately I had a little girl about 5 years old helping me, which was really sweet.

Washing clothes:


Washing dishes:


Every day was different, so there was only a regular routine in the morning and later afternoon.

At about 4-5pm we washed in the river which is right next to the sea, with a sand bar in between. It was very public – sometimes there would be a man sitting on the shore nearby doing something, or other times, a group of little children would come with us and play in the water around us. I was fully covered when I bathed, so I didn’t mind it at all. In fact, I can’t really think of anything that bothered me when I was in the village.

Here I am about to bathe, fully covered up.


This picture shows me bathing with a bit of the background of where I was:

And with the kids:

After we bathed, we made our dinner using our kerosene stove (Primus). Then after eating dinner sitting on the verandah, some of our ‘family’ came and sat with us and we talked for a little while or made our bilums and then went to bed.