A Tropical Storm

It is 5 a.m., and this time we have not been woken up by a rooster; there is a huge tropical rainstorm blowing across the campus! The rain is torrential, and the wind is so strong I can see trees flailing, struggling to stay upright. Occasionally a crack of lightning illuminates the scene behind our room, and so far, we can see that our haus kuk is still standing. A huge branch has fallen just in front of it, but luckily it avoided falling right on top.

Thunder rumbles overhead, and continues rolling for several seconds. Sometimes we hear things falling from the trees and hitting the side of our room. Medium-sized nuts mostly, no coconuts thankfully. Suddenly, a loud crack wakes anyone who has not woken up already because of the raging storm. Later when it was light enough, we discovered that two trees behind our dorm had cracked and fallen over. One fell right on top of two haus kuks and rested on the dorm roof. Thankfully, the dorm structures had just been reinforced last year!

At 6 a.m., Eric and I had to go to the kitchen for morning breakfast duty. By that time, all of the haus kuks but two had fallen over. Ours was not one of the survivors. There was no light in the kitchen because the power had gone out and the generator had not been turned on yet. We lit a fire, cut up bananas, and washed tables in the dark with two flashlights before the generator came on.

Unfortunately, because it is so wet, the person on fire duty to heat the showers wasn’t able to get one started. It’s cold showers today!

Life in the Village

It is probably around 4 a.m. when we are startled awake by a sickly-sounding rooster crowing right underneath us. Underneath us?? Yes; we are spending the night with our wasfamili in the village, and like most people here, they live in a house that is raised off the ground. I think the rooster was hiding this week, because last time we spent the night in the village, our waspapa shooed the rooster away early in the morning because it was being so noisy.

Even though our waspapa is in his 70’s, he still sits on the floor and sleeps on the floor. So we sit on the floor and sleep on the floor, too, when we stay with our wasfamili. “Sleep” is a relative term, because we actually haven’t been able to sleep much on our camping pads on a bamboo floor, especially with roosters crowing beneath us!

When we eat dinner at our wasfamili’s, all of the serving dishes are placed on the floor, and we are always told to serve ourselves first. There is usually a huge bowl of rice, a bowl of cooked greens and meat, and a bowl of sweet potatoes (kaukau). After we eat, tea is served. Our wasmama disappears when we’re done eating to do the dishes. I went out with her and discovered that she does the dishes the same way I do them in our haus kuk; in a bowl of water on the ground (with the only difference being that I use soap!).

Our wasfamili usually does not talk much while we are eating, and if they do, it’s mostly in hushed whispers. After the food is cleared away, though, we talk again about some of the things that are common in their lives. One event they told us about is a singsing, which is an old tradition that they still carry out every year for school graduations. Men and women participate wearing traditional costumes, and my wasmama brought out her grass skirt for me to try on.

Later in the evening, our waspapa brought out his Tok Pisin Bible, and he and Eric read from it. Then he opened his tok ples (local language) songbook, and we sang from it together. Some of the songs are English hymns that have been translated, and even if I don’t know the song, I can usually pick up on the melody fairly well. Some of the songs, though, are traditional Nobnob (the area we live in) melodies, which are different enough from music I am used to that I have not been able to sing along with him.

Before bed we visit the liklik haus (literally “little house”). Can you guess what that is? It is about a 50-yard walk from the house to the liklik haus, which is shared between several houses. There is a curtain hanging over the door, but right next to it is a window with no covering! Bring a flashlight, since there’s no electricity in the liklik haus…I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that you can’t see what other creatures are sharing the space with you!

Too Much Fruit

Between our first and second haus kuk weekends (cooking entirely over the fire), we made a trip into town to shop at the grocery stores for four more haus kuk weekends. Shopping in Madang is similar to shopping in the US in that there are aisles with food which you walk through pushing a grocery cart. That is pretty much where the similarities end. To enter or exit the store, you walk through a gate manned by a security guard. We have been told we may be asked to check our bags at the front if we have items from another store, but we have not had that experience yet. We’ve also been told that if we see something we want, it’s best to buy it right away because it may not be available again for months!

We have a cookbook with simple recipes for cooking on the fire from POC, as well as a “More with Less” cookbook with basic recipes. Still, it was a challenge to find everything we needed in the stores we visited! We found almost everything essential to lentil stew, Mexican chili beans, refried lentils, and a few other similar recipes, but chili powder eluded us at every store. To compensate, I bought a bottle of Tabasco sauce. We’ll see how essential chili powder turns out to be!

Now that we have more experience shopping for greens at the market and cooking over a fire, we are making a bit more complex meals. We had some ham that I had won in a competition to guess the score of the Super Bowl (frozen in the kitchen freezer), and we fried that with some tulip for lunch on Saturday. Tulip is an edible leaf from a tree, literally meaning “two leaves.” Next weekend we will try our hand at preparing and cooking snake beans!

We also bought a native fruit whose name I can never remember. It has a red, spiky outer shell that you squeeze open and eat the gelatinous fruit inside (the spikes are soft). The lady selling them at the market had them spread out on a blanket with a small cardboard sign stating their cost. Eric thought it said 70 toea (compare to cents) for a group of two, so he handed the woman 1 kina 40 for two groups. The lady then scooped up several handfuls and loaded up a whole bag with the fruit. Eric was confused about why he had gotten so much fruit…as it turns out, it was only 10 toea! We will have our fill of this delicious fruit this weekend.

Eating tulip

No morning bell beckons us to breakfast today, because it is day one of “haus kuk weekend.” The dining room and kitchen are locked, and we are left with a fire and whatever food we purchased at the POC store on Friday. Since we can’t buy vegetables or fruit at our store here, we walked to the Saturday morning market just up the hill from us to purchase produce straight from local gardens. The women who are selling food sit on blankets or mats on the ground with their products spread out in front of them.

 As we began to look around for the vegetables we wanted to purchase, I realized that I know almost nothing about the vegetables native to PNG! We have been eating them at our meals made by the kitchen staff, but I didn’t know which vegetables were which, or how to prepare any of them myself. It is a small market, and there was not much variety available on Saturday, but we purchased one familiar food: green beans. They are different than the green beans you get in the States, though, so we weren’t actually sure that was what we had bought! Eric also got some cucumbers, which are pretty much the same as they are in the US. Some of the other greens that are available here are tulip (not the flower), ibica, and pitpit.

 Just as we were ready to leave, a woman arrived with a load of pineapples. Immediately a line of POC students formed in front of her, eager to purchase pineapples from the only person who had them available. We bought one and headed back home. There I stumbled upon another dilemma. I’ve never cut up a pineapple without a pineapple corer! After three attempts, I’ve now gotten much better at cutting up a pineapple with just a knife, but it is a much slower process than using a corer!

 Each time we wanted to cook, we had to start a fire and keep it going as we cooked. Making things difficult is the fact that this is rainy season, so dry wood is hard to procure. After two days of cooking over a fire, we were glad to be back in the dining room for breakfast on Monday. How incredible it is to us that many families in PNG do all of their cooking over the fire—rainy or “dry” season!

Singing in a New Language

The scene is familiar to us now: sweat dripping down our faces, sun beating down on us, temperatures and humidity soaring. Only this time, we have added a new variable. Fire. For the next four weekends, all of our cooking will be done over a fire, so we practiced making and cooking with fires this week. Unfortunately, all of the wood we were given to practice with was wet, so eventually our waspapa (adopted PNG “dad” who works at POC) had to come start our fire for us since we couldn’t get it going.

Later in the week, we visited our wasfamili in their home. Shortly after we got there, one of the grandkids asked me if we had a card game they could play. We got out the cards we used last time for our version of Go Fish (Yu Gat Dispela?), and they enjoyed playing until we ate. We are going to look for a new card game when we go to town this week so they don’t get bored with Yu Gat Dispela! In addition to the rice and stew we brought, our wasmama cooked some sweet potato, pumpkin, and native greens, all of which were from her garden.

After we ate, our waspapa brought out his songbook, which was written in his tok ples (local language—Nobnob in this case). I asked him if he wanted to sing, so he sat down next to me and opened to a song he knew…as it turns out, I knew it too! The sounds of Nobnob were close enough to Tok Pisin that I could sing along with him to the tune of “Rock of Ages.” When we finished singing, he translated each line into Tok Pisin for me. We sang a few more after that, including “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Silent Night.”

Soon our waspapa said it was time for the kids to go to bed since they had school the next morning, so he and two of the grandkids walked us home (about a five minute walk from their house). They kept our pots and pans with the leftovers from dinner in them, but they showed up here the next morning, all clean. Good thing, because today we need them to start our weekend of cooking over the fire!

Building buildings, building relationships

The sun is beating down, but we are sheltered under our blue tarp. A welcome breeze occasionally finds its way to us, but sweat still floods our faces as we work to finish constructing our bamboo table. It is haus kuk building weekend, and we have spent the last day building a cooking shelter and picnic table of sorts. The national workers here at POC (Pacific Orientation Course) demonstrated building a haus kuk and table for us in just over one hour, and then turned us loose to build our own. We have all spent hours and hours since then working on our own!

In addition to the tent-like structure and table, we will have to build a fire pit for cooking in our haus kuk. Next weekend, we will have to cook all of our meals here. Eventually we are going to host our wasfamili for dinner in our haus kuk. Each family at POC has a local wasfamili that is like our adopted PNG family while we are here. Was literally means “guardian,” and wasmama and waspapa mean foster mother and father.

On Thursday, we met our wasfamili for the first time, although our waspapa works at POC (mostly chopping wood and other maintenance things), so we had met him once before. He has worked at POC since it began! In addition to our wasmama and papa, they brought three of their grandchildren with them. Everyone in our POC group sat with their wasfamili (on the floor) in our big meeting room, and we were served dinner: rice, sweet potato stew, and bread, followed by tea and what they called “cake” (which to us was banana bread).

Communicating with our famili was tricky because our Tok Pisin isn’t very strong yet, and our vocabulary is limited. We talked about where they are from, what kinds of food they like, where we are from, our family, and some other basic things. We had some cards with us from a game called Bohnanza, which was too difficult to teach them with limited language, but we made up a Go Fish-type game to play with the kids. About two hours before the families were due to show up, it started downpouring and never let up. It rains almost every night here (it’s rainy season), usually turning into beautiful, sunny days, but sometimes we get rain during the day, too. We were glad for no rain while building our haus kuk, but now we are ready for it to come cool down the temperature!

Walking and Talking

The primary means of transportation for most Papua New Guineans is walking, so part of our training at POC is physical, to help our bodies adjust to a tropical climate—and to be able to keep up with Papua New Guineans! We took a two-hour hike up and down the hills of this mountainous area to several surrounding villages on Monday. Going uphill in the heat and humidity was difficult at times, and since it’s rainy season here, some of the paths were muddy and slick. We were very sweaty by the end, but it got easier as we went. Toward the end, some local villagers offered us kulau, which is a young coconut. Its milk restores electrolytes—like Gatorade, but all natural!

Another part of our training is language learning. One of the struggles for me so far is not to substitute French for words I don’t know in Tok Pisin! Since Tok Pisin was originally a trade language, it has a very limited vocabulary; about 2,000 words. To compensate, many things are said by creating a “word picture.” We learned the word tromoi recently, which means to throw, or to throw away. Then our tisa (teacher) told us to tromoi han, or literally, throw away your hands. We all looked around confused and slightly aghast—then he told us tromoi han means to wave!

Our orientation group is quite diverse, with families from the US, New Zealand, Trinidad, the Netherlands, Norway, and Finland. In addition to learning about the culture of PNG, we are learning about each other’s cultures. In Norway, paying taxes is considered a positive thing! They are very invested in their country and are happy to give back to it. In New Zealand, you would not introduce a speaker by listing their accomplishments or degrees. That would be considered making too much of yourself, and people would wonder why your work couldn’t speak for itself!