Matsungan madness

When we visited Matsungan Island, it seemed like everyone was in a fun, silly mood, which made it a little bit frustrating for me doing my questionnaires, but they were great people. One time when I asked a question about who speaks certain languages, a voice piped up in reply, “Me too”. I looked over and saw a Malaysian man sitting there, which was funny. The whole crowd that was with me started laughing hysterically and it took a while to get back to business. Later on when I was walking around the island he saw me and we had a short chat. It seems like he is a bit of a joker.

Mariela was taking photos of kids and young people, and I went over to join her, and as I approached a teenage boy came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder and posed for Mariela to take a photo of me. I got into the spirit of things and look a bit crazy in this photo too.

It was actually a bit weird for a second having a young man put his arm around me, as that is not culturally appropriate behaviour for PNG. I think this guy might have been a bit high on betelnut and/or something else.

Here are some more photos of people being crazy in front of the camera at Matsungan. (Mariela took all of these except the last one, which I took).

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:

Stuck boat

There is a boat that is stuck on the reef off the west coast of Buka where we were travelling. It is quite a funny story. It’s a Malaysian boat, registered in Panama and its name is ‘Le Feng’. Anyway, they had engine problems so they were drifting and not able to control their movements, and the wind or a storm brought them to settle on the reef. I can’t quite figure out how it happened, the propeller is fully out of the water, as you can see in the photos. A lot of the boat that is usually under the water, is out of the water, so it is an unusual sight. In the photos, the whole area of the boat that is red is normally under the water, and it’s only the black part that you would normally see.

Anyway, it has been sitting there for 3 months or so now, and there are still some Malaysian staff on it, plus some police, to make sure that they don’t get off the boat as they don’t have visas. One of the men apparently wants to marry a woman (any woman) from Matsungan Island, presumably so that he could stay in Bougainville.

This is the boat as seen from Matsungan Island:

Scotland in Buka

There is a place on the west coast of Buka called Scotland! It was in the area that we were travelling in, but we didn’t visit it unfortunately. There is a health centre there that people use, and there used to be a school there, but it closed in the 1970’s.

The funny thing is that the place was not named after Scotland. It came about from a corruption of the name for the place in the local language. The people called it ‘chi kotolan’, and it seems that the early explorers had hearing difficulties and wound up thinking it was called ‘Scotland’. So now it has that name. The original name, ‘chi kotolan’, means ‘small beach’, because at its coast, there is only a small bit of sand.

Here’s a photo I took of Scotland from the boat as we were passing, you can see the small beach and a few buildings.

Survey team and work

The purpose of my trip to Buka this time was to be a part of a language survey team to find out about some languages and dialects on the west coast of Buka and on islands off the coast. The team consisted of myself, Bonnie (USA) and Mariela (Argentina). Here are the three of us travelling on a boat during the survey.

L to R: Bonnie, me, Mariela

Our work involved doing many questionnaires and taking a list of words in the local dialect everywhere we went for later comparison. We also had some recordings in local languages to see how the people could understand other dialects. We did questionnaires on the following topics: language use, contact patterns, church, school, community education levels, and culture. We each had certain jobs to do, and it was my responsibility to do the language use and contact patterns (eg. travel and movement outside of the language area) questionnaire. It was hard work, especially when I had to get the figures for immigration and emigration, as there was a lot of people who have moved to different areas or come in from somewhere else.

Here are some photos of me hard at work in the villages.

Having a bit of a laugh with the people

New Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG)

I was lucky enough to be in Buka for the swearing in ceremony of the new president and the second house of representatives for the ABG. It was far from boring! There were lots of song and dance items presented by the various language groups in the Bougainville region. The politicians’ speeches weren’t boring either, in fact I thought they were rather inspiring.

One of the cultural items:

At one stage when we were standing around watching the dances, the police shooed us away, saying ‘Hide, hide’. We didn’t do much other than just move along a little bit, then they told us all to sit down, which we did. The police were actually enforcing culturally appropriate respect for the next group who were coming out. There were some ‘born-chiefs’ in this group and they wear traditional ‘upe’ hats. They stay in their houses in the bush all the time and you would never see them walking around town. Women aren’t supposed to be near them and should show respect to them, so that is why we were told to hide and sit down. The men grow their hair and the hats are only held on by their hair inside it. I’m amazed that some of the ones that are on a bit of an angle don’t fall off!

Here are some of the men with the upe hats.

It was a really hot sunny day, and we wanted to be in the shade, but still see everything, so we ended up joining others who had crawled under a stage that the dignitaries were seated on. I turned around and took this photo of the people behind me under the stage:

The people of Bougainville are hoping that this new government will prepare Bougainville for independence. The earliest that they could gain independence is in five years, but it could be 15 years away at the latest. My friend Ailyne told me that three things need to be established before they gain independence: weapons disposal; economy; and good governance. Mining is Bougainville’s best option for economy, but that was what caused the civil war from 1988-2000. The new president, the honourable John Momis, is considering re-opening the mine however, in consultation with the landowners. The local newspaper recently said that independence for Bougainville is still a long way off.

Port Moresby adventures – Luxury Hotel

We were at the airport very early on a Saturday morning, all checked in, with our boarding passes, and I was having a doze while waiting to board our flight, when suddenly my doze was interrupted with an announcement that our flight to Buka had been cancelled and rescheduled to 4am on Sunday morning. They had already taken our luggage off us and everything, so we were told that we were to go to the arrivals area to pick up our luggage again.

Since we were only in transit in Port Moresby, we didn’t have a place to stay for the night (the previous two nights we knew we had to stay there and had bookings for accommodation), so we went to the Air Niugini customer service desk and spoke to them. They put us up in a hotel for the night, since it was their fault that we had to stay another night in Moresby.

Oh, it was so exciting! We got to stay in a fancy hotel and we were excited by everything, including the free toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, moisturiser and body wash). Air Niugini paid for our lunch and dinner there too. The three of us wanted to be together, rather than in separate rooms and requested that, but since Air Niugini was paying a certain amount for each of us, they added that up and gave us a room that was worth that value, so we got a really nice room. They called it a ‘suite’. It had a widescreen TV and cooking facilities. There was a sliding door that went out to the swimming pool area.

Here is the pool and dining area:

We really enjoyed our two meals there, and I was happy to be able to see the last quarter of a Geelong AFL game after dinner.

We had a HUGE double bed, plus they put in an extra bed too. The double bed was really more like a triple bed, as it fitted 3 pillows along the top. I had never seen a bed that big before. Here’s a picture of it.

This is Mariela and me relaxing on the couch, posing for the photo.

You can see the widescreen TV, lounge, dining table and kitchen in this photo.

This night in the hotel was a huge contrast to what our living situation in the villages over the next two weeks would be!