What joy only $5 can bring

Our village mum and main translator, Joyce, has been walking everywhere recently with bare feet because she has no shoes. Even though her feet are tough and used to walking without shoes, there are times that she would like to wear shoes, like when walking for over an hour on a stony dirt road.

Today, Rebekah and I bought a pair of thongs and gave them to Joyce and she was so thrilled to receive them. Although we blessed her by giving her a pair of thongs, we were also blessed by just seeing her reaction and how grateful she was.

The thongs cost K12, which is about $5, and Rebekah and I split the cost, so it was really only $2.50 each – less than a cup of coffee in Australia! Thank you to all those who support me and make it possible for me to be here and be able to bless people like this too.

Now for a short update on my movements: We just had four great weeks in the village, and we are now back in Buka, with Joyce and her daughter Ailyne to attend a computer course which runs for three weeks. We will be going to Ukarumpa after that for a month, and then we will return to Buka on 12 April, and back to the village shortly after that.

Trip to the vegie garden

Going to the garden is a daily part of life for the local women, and it’s not just as easy as a half minute walk to the vegie patch your back yard like we do in Australia! For us, it’s a five minute walk along the road to the path that goes into the bush, and then it’s a further 25 minutes till we get to the garden.

We have only been to the garden twice, but hopefully we will go more often in the future.

Here’s Joyce and me walking along the road to get to the garden path:

We used the hoe to make many mounds of dirt to plant new sweet potato shoots into:

Here are some newly planted sweet potato shoots:

We also dug up some sweet potato and insisted on carrying them back to the village on my back, so here’s a photo of me carrying the sweet potato. The Bougainville tradition is to make a pack that you can carry like a backpack, over two shoulder, while in much of mainland PNG, they use ‘bilums’ (string bags) that they hang from their head down their back.

Special occasional food

“Menaga” is the Teop word for a local dish that they make for special meals, like Sunday lunch or other special occasions. It can be made with taro, cassava or cooking bananas. Rebekah and I bought some taro and made some menaga. It is basically mashed taro, rolled into balls and coated in coconut cream. Here is a photo-story of the process…

First, we have to grate the coconut to get its flesh:

Then we put the coconut flesh into a press and squeeze out the cream:

We also boil the taro:

When the taro is cooked, we mash it in a big mortar and pestle:

We take the mashed taro out on the end of the pestle…

…and give it to the man who rolls it into balls – that’s traditionally a man’s job.

While he’s doing that, we go back to the coconut cream and boil it until it thickens:

Then we put the mashed taro balls into the coconut cream and mix well:

Now we can eat and enjoy it!

Local netball

One day Rebekah and I were out visiting villages and we came across a large group of women who were sitting down. We chatted to them about our photos and found out that they were sitting having a break from playing netball. When it was time for them to play again, we sat and watched for a while and I took some photos. The ladies said that they were practicing for a competition in a few weeks’ time.

“Who will I throw it to?”

Shooting for goal

End of year school graduation ceremony

At the end of the 2010 school year, the local schools have a special graduation ceremony where students are awarded academic achievement certificates, and the year 8 students graduate from the school and if they got high enough marks, they will be able to go on to high school (in PNG, Grade 8 is the last year of primary school).

We went to the ceremony at the school at Kekesu mission station, which is about a 40 minute walk from our village as most of the kids in our village go to that school. We had a long wait for the rain to stop before any proceedings could get started.

There was a bit of a parade where the younger students made two lines and the graduating year 8 students walked between them and continued on to their seats. You can see the grade 8 students who are wearing blue in this picture.

The children had to sit under these shelters for a few hours while all the certificates were given out and several speeches were made.

These are the parents and relatives of the students, watching the proceedings.

After all the certificates were given out, it was time for people to eat lunch with their families. Rebekah and I hadn’t brought anything, but our village aunts and our village Mum looked after us and we ended up with two plates of food each! (We are not going to lose weight in the village!)

After lunch, there was time for people to perform items. There was one drama performance, and several dances to Western music. Here’s a group of children performing a dance.

Women’s Christmas fellowship lunch

Before Christmas, we joined the local women’s fellowship for a lunch time gathering. In the picture below, you can see everyone sitting at the beach, and the table with

The ladies had organised a ‘Secret Santa’ or ‘Kris Kringle’ type thing a few weeks earlier, and today was the day that they gave their gift to the person whose name they had drawn previously. We hadn’t been involved in this (next time maybe!), but it was fun seeing the ladies’ joy as they gave and received gifts. The smiles in these pictures say it all:

No metho in town! What will we do?

When you’re living in a village that doesn’t have electricity, you need some alternative lighting for the evenings, so Rebekah and I bought a Coleman lantern. The conventional way of lighting these lanterns is to fill the dish with methylated spirits and light it to heat up the metal rod before the whole lantern lights up.

When we were first going out to the village, we searched all over town for methylated spirits, going from one place to another following people’s suggestions, but to no avail – we couldn’t find any anywhere. So we went off to the village with our Coleman lantern and no way of lighting it – or so we thought. Local people also own Coleman lanterns and they have a way of lighting them, so they taught it to us (Rebekah really, it’s her job to look after the lantern).

What we have to do is: first remove the lid and glass part, then soak some cotton wool in kerosene (which is the fuel in the bottom of the lantern) and put it in the dish, light the cotton wool, replace the glass part and the lid and proceed as you usually would to light it.

Here are some pictures of the process…

Cotton wool burning and heating the rod:

Still heating the rod, with the glass part and lid replaced:

Finally, here is our evening hang-out spot all light up: