Pulling our canoe through the bush

Our canoe was being carved in the bush where the canoe-tree was felled. Since it was in the bush, it didn’t get worked on daily, but it got to the stage where enough had been carved and it was ready to be taken to Teop Island for further work.

We, and a bunch of men went to drag it out. They attached a rope to it, and everyone got on the end of the rope and pulled, with one man at the other end of the canoe pushing.

Here we are pulling the canoe. You can just see me near the front if you can recognise my clothes.

Some more photos of the men pulling the canoe after I stopped.

The men having a brief break – it’s exhausting work, running through the bush pulling a canoe!

Oops! I cut my leg

The people in the village are often reluctant to let me use a knife, telling me that I might cut my leg or arm, but I usually don’t listen and use them anyway. Then they tell me that I’m a rebel.

Well their prediction finally came true – I cut my leg. This is the story of how it happened…

We went to take our new canoe from the bush to the water, so that it could go across to the island and continue to be carved. It’s easier to drag the canoe over ground if you lay some sticks along the path to slide it over, so we were cutting branches to make runners.

Mostly we were cutting coconut branches that were lying on the ground and I was impressed with my accuracy, hitting the same spot regularly and not hitting it all over the place. One time we came across some thick green upright stalks which were going to make good runners, so we cut some of them, and when I did my second one, the swing of the knife continued towards my leg.

(A cluster of bush knives – mine is the shiny new looking one with a short blade. They tell me that if I had one with a long blade, I wouldn’t have cut my leg.)

It felt like it just brushed my leg, but it made a cut which started bleeding, so I told my village mum (Iaa) who was with me. She told me off for using the knife because she was concerned for me, and then she found a leaf in the bush, scrunched it up and put it on my cut. This leaf is good for stopping bleeding. Then I was horrified to see Iaa take her knife to her laplap (wrap around skirt) and cut off a strip, which she then used to tie around my cut to hold the leaf on and to put pressure on the cut to stop the bleeding.

Straight after that, the canoe was ready to be pulled. Iaa had told me, “Now you can’t pull the canoe because you’ve cut your leg.” But I was disobedient and pulled the canoe for the first 100 metres. Then my makeshift bandage fell to my ankle, so Iaa had to fix it up again and then I didn’t do any more pulling and we made our way back to the village.

Then I got the next bout of bush medicine – a shoot of wild taro, heated up on the fire and the hot liquid squeezed out of it and onto my cut. Ouch! It was to help dry up the cut and prevent infection.

Putting a brave face on:

And here’s a close-up of the cut – gaping open. (These two photos were of the second treatment with the wild taro shoot later in the day).

Then I realised that my whole body felt a bit weak and strange and I felt sleepy. I certainly didn’t feel normal for a while and I had a lie down. Maybe it was a very mild form of shock.

The next day, we got the nurse who lives in the village to have a look at my cut, and she made a butterfly strip from my medical tape and put it on. It really held the skin together a lot better, as it was gaping open. I also had a bit of an audience when the nurse came over – a 5 year old, a 7 year old, a 15 year old and a few others; I don’t mind that though.

Thanks to all the good, loving care that I and my cut received, the cut didn’t get infected and is now healing well.

Never leave a lantern alone

Well that was one lesson we learnt the EASY way! Thank goodness we didn’t learn the hard way!

We used to always just leave our lantern burning away by itself whenever we went to visit other parts of the village to chat to people at night. Then one night when we were at another house, the lantern had a bit of a funny turn and had big flames shooting out the top of it. Thankfully some of our village brothers were near and saw it. They took it down with a long stick and then threw some wet hessian bags over the top of it to put the fire out.

We were very lucky – if our brothers hadn’t been there to come to the rescue, it could very well have set the kitchen house on fire and burnt it down. That would have been a disaster! There is a black mark on the roof of the house now from the flames which is a permanent reminder to us that one should never leave a lantern alone, especially if it’s temperamental.

Now we have to babysit our lantern. If we go anywhere, it comes with us or we turn it off.

Some nights it gets cold

My sympathy goes to those of you suffering through the cold winter in Melbourne. Our weather never really gets very cold, but since we’re used to high temperatures of 30 degrees most of the time, when the temperature drops to 25 degrees or below, we feel it cold. That usually only happens after dark. I have a blanket which I use on these nights as one sheet is not enough. If it drops down to 21 degrees, I need to fold my blanket so that it is double thickness, but it doesn’t cover my legs then.

One day it was rainy and overcast all day, and when it was shower time in the afternoon, I couldn’t face having a shower with cold water, which wouldn’t have had the chill taken off it by the sun that day, so we heated up some water and mixed it with cold and I had a nice warm shower. So far, it’s only been once that we’ve needed to do that.

Here are some photos that were taken on that same day later in the evening, when they had started a fire for warmth. I too, heated myself up next to the fire.

Even the dogs felt cool and appreciated the warmth of the fire.

Yikes! Falling tree!

One day as I was showering, I heard this loud noise very near, which sounded like a tree cracking and falling. I was undressed and all wet and my greatest fear was that the tree would land on the shower walls, exposing me! It didn’t really cross my thoughts that if it came that close, being injured would probably be of greater concern!

It was a coconut tree that had been leaning across the road that fell. If I had looked up, I surely would have seen it, but I was just focused on the wall that might come crashing down. It fell in the direction it was leaning and was really of no great threat to me. But it was pretty scary – I could hear the sound, didn’t know where it was coming from, and couldn’t run!

The base of the tree was only about 3-5 metres away from our shower house. Here are some photos, our shower house is the metal structure with orange curtain.

Clearing the coconut tree off the road. They had the road cleared within half an hour, they were very quick at moving it.

Local food – “iobo” – Sea sausage?

We have this local seafood, which in Teop is called ‘iobo’, but we don’t really know what the proper English term for it is. We have heard it called a ‘sea sausage’, but I googled that and didn’t find anything that looked like iobo. It’s not a sea cucumber either. So if anyone out there reading this is a marine life specialist and knows what it is, please post a comment and let me know!

Here’s one that’s recently been caught. It is covered in sand, so you can’t really see it properly. Its mouth is at the end on the left.

Iobo is an invertebrate and it’s not a crustracean. It has no arms or legs, and it lives just under the sand. I haven’t been to catch iobo yet, so I can’t describe the process, but it is done at the reef when it is low tide.

They turn the iobo inside out to gut it, and it remains inside out when it is cooked and eaten. Here is some iobo on a plate.

So, what is iobo like to eat? Is it gross? No, it’s not that hard to eat. It has a bit of a fishy taste to it, as you would expect since it comes from the sea. It’s a bit rubbery like calamari, but it breaks down easily when you chew it (unlike calamari that hasn’t been cooked properly which you have to chew for ages).

I am quite happy to eat iobo and I don’t have an allergic reaction to it. It seems that some people do, as they have asked us, “When you ate it, did your skin get itchy?” and our answer is “No”, but obviously it does affect some people giving them itchy skin.

A plate of food which has one iobo going across it:

Catching car to Buka

This may be a thing of the past now, since our village now has its own car, but before then, to get to Buka, we had to wait for other cars travelling past and wave at them to get them to stop and take us.

It was usually quite a problem as by the time many of the cars from further south get to our village, they are already full, and we’d have a long wait, sometime up to two hours to find a car that had space for us.

There’s a bend in the road just before our village, so we only have a short bit of road to see cars coming:

Standing by the road waiting for a car:

Here’s our luggage:

Finally, here we are squeezed into the back of what they call a ’10 seater’. It’s a four wheel drive that has the seats in the back going along the side instead of the usual way.