Scampi, the new village dog

Meet Scampi, the relatively new dog in our village. The poor thing is not doing too well. He has a sore on his head, which isn’t healing and he is losing a lot of his fur which makes him look ugly and less loveable.

Scampi came to our village with his pregnant female owner who stayed in our village to be near the Health Centre to give birth there, and he never went home with her when she left. (Maybe gets treated slightly better in our village).

He was very afraid of people and wouldn’t let us get near to pat him for a while. We gradually won his trust and he lets us come close now, but he’s still a bit cautious, so we have a bit of work yet until he becomes confident around us. The poor thing, he wants to play, but then when we make playful movements, he gets frightened and runs away! He is quite a fearful dog, afraid of other things too, not just people.

In this picture he’s not looking too confident. Hopefully one day we can get a photo of him looking happy, and perhaps also with his coat in better condition.

Lighthouse at Irue

Since Irue is near the point of land that juts out, it could cause problems for ships at night, especially since there is also reef surrounding the land. Because of this, many years ago a lighthouse was built there. During the Bougainville crisis, the solar panels for powering the light were stolen and the lighthouse hasn’t been operating since then, so it’s not helping ships these days!

Anyway, when we were visiting Irue, we went for a walk to the point and saw the lighthouse. It’s not like the usual brick lighthouses that you usually picture. It’s just a tall steel structure with a light and whatever else at the top.

Some of the young people who walked with us enjoyed climbing up the lighthouse.

“Light for safe navigation Stay away”. Clearly this sign isn’t heeded. I guess it doesn’t matter since the lighthouse isn’t operational these days, although certainly there's safety issues with climbing it!

Climbing back down the ladder:

Lighthouse as seen from a bit further away:

Our new village cat

We used to have a cat in the village, and then one day we noticed that it hadn’t been around for a while, and it never returned. Something must have happened to it. Since the cat wasn’t around anymore, rats began to become a problem in the house again, so Rebekah and I were wanting a new cat to keep the rats away. Thankfully a litter of kittens was born in a nearby village and when they were old enough, we took one back to the village with us.

First day in the village:

We think the cat’s a ‘she’. She doesn’t really belong to Rebekah and I, and we don’t take her travelling with us when we go to Buka, so she’s Joyce’s responsibility to feed mainly, but we’ll give her some of our leftover food if it’s suitable too.

A good lookout spot:

We named the cat ‘Kitokitoi’ which means ‘Firefly’ in Teop. She likes to receive pats, but I am allergic to cats and one time when I succumbed to her cuteness and gave her some pats, I suffered for it afterwards, with hayfever. She needs to be in the house to keep the rats away, so I hope that her presence inside doesn’t affect me too much.

Playing with a coconut husk:

Village views

Irue, the village I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, is always in view from Hiovabon (unless there are thick clouds). Here is a photo which shows the stretch of land that Irue is on, leading to ‘the point’. To give you a sense of distance, it took only 9 minutes to get there by motor boat.

From Hiovabon, we don’t have a very big view of open ocean to watch ships sailing past, only a small bit between the point and Teop Island (on the right in the photo below).

We could see Hiovabon from Irue too. In the photos below, Hiovabon is circled, with an arrow pointing to it (in case you can’t see the circle).

Teop Island is the land mass on the left in this photo.

We have TV in our village!

One of the recent changes to our village was the arrival of a satellite dish. It was put up next to a very basic bush material house.

There’s also a TV that connects to the satellite dish and I enjoyed watching one of the ‘Millionaire’ spin-off game shows and ACA one night, but I haven’t really looked at the TV very often.

NRL games are what really draw the crowds. In the next few photos, the people are watching an NRL game:

People were allowed to come and watch the regular NRL games for free, but when the State of Origin came around, the men built a fenced in area and charged for admission to watch the game.

Part of the fence:

This is the fenced in area. After I took this photo, they put curtains up at the front, to completely block the view and prevent anyone from trying to watch it for free.

The satellite dish receives PNG’s free-to-air TV channel, EmTV, which has a partnership with Channel 9, so it airs some Channel 9 programs including the NRL games. NRL is really popular in PNG, but I’m not interested in it. I wish that AFL was popular and that I could see some AFL games in the village. We don’t even get the Grand Final on EmTV!

First visit to a distant village!

The Teop language is spoken by many villages on mainland Bougainville, not just Teop Island. The village we live in, Hiovabon, is one of those villages and we are able to walk to and visit many of the other villages, but some are too far away and we haven’t been able to visit them and develop many relationships in those places.

Irue beach:

We wanted to personally meet pastors to invite them to the church leaders meeting that we had in May, so we arranged a trip to Irue, where we had never been before, to see some people there. We travelled there by boat from our village.

Irue beach:

One of the local traditional customs is when a person goes to a village for the first time, the local people pour water over their feet and this happened to us at Irue. It wasn’t as soon as we got off the boat; we had been there for several hours before they did it. I don’t know what the meaning behind the foot washing is however.

Irue village:

Shortly after we arrived, we went for a walk along the beach to the ‘point’ (the end of the peninsula) and we saw the lighthouse. I will post about the lighthouse later, but here’s a picture of us walking along the beach.

ABG day cultural items – Part Two

Some more photos of cultural performances from ABG day 2011.

Modern-day bamboo band, PVC pipes instead of bamboo. It still sounds good!

Performance by Carterets Islanders:

The men from the Mortlock Atoll do a performance that is quite different from all the rest, and because of that it is very popular with the crowds (which you can see have come closer in the background of these photos). It’s hard to describe what it’s like, but when the beat gets quicker, they move faster. Maybe you can get the idea from these two photos.

Finally, a photo of the faithful late-afternoon crowd after many people had gone home.