Papua New Guinea roots

I’m reading a great book by Kira Salak called Four Corners. They are the stories of her as a solo traveler in Papua New Guinea. It’s interesting to read it from her point of view about the great dangers that exist. I read stuff and thought I “really” didn’t know that.

You see, our experiences were very different because she traveled alone, while I went there when I was two years old and had all the protection of my family, other missionary families and all the wonderful PNG wantoks (friends) we had. Since I lived there until I was thirteen years old, I feel like I am part PNG-ian.

I get excited when I can buy a bowl of vegetables or make myself some fish (canned mackerel) and rice. I recently saw a Facebook post from Books for Papua New Guinea. They are asking for books because they don’t even have textbooks or books to use in schools. I got so excited that I went through all my books and today I’m going to the post office. Because? Because I feel like I’m helping my own people.

I returned from New Guinea when I was thirteen years old and left my dear mother in a grave in the small town of Pabrabuk. My life was never the same after I lost my mother, but it hasn’t been the same since I lived in New Guinea either. When my family and I returned to PNG in 2007 (fourteen years after we left), we still returned to many wonderful wantoks that would take us everywhere and offer us huge feasts called muums: food cooked on the ground wrapped in banana leaves. and cooked with hot stones. Amazing! Pork, chicken, sweet potatoes, plantains and vegetables cooked to incredible perfection. In the Highlands, where we lived, that’s how it was cooked. The pork fat gave it flavor and moisture. In the Sepik region (the coastal areas) they do the same, but they are mixed with coconut milk which is also delicious.

So they celebrated us and gave us lots of bilums, which are homemade bags made of yarn and sometimes leather. We were very surprised to discover that even after fourteen years of absence, nothing has changed. It felt like we were walking back to the time period when we had left. People still lived in thatched huts in the villages, apart from Port Moresby, the capital to fly to, everything was just as we left it. It was amazing and wonderful at the same time.

However, what discouraged me was Pabrabuk, our small town where I grew up with missionaries and people from all over, and where my mother was buried, it was like a ghost town. There were a handful of people living in the houses and a few people going to the university we had started. However, the silence everywhere made me feel very lonely. I had thought that being able to go back to my mother’s grave would help me feel close to her, but all I felt was loneliness.

We couldn’t stay in the house we grew up in, but they put us in the guest house. The minute we walked in I wanted to leave and go to the nearest town which was Mt. Hagen an hour away. When you turned on the lights, the cockroaches would scatter everywhere. They were all over the kitchen walls. In the bathroom we had to cover our toothbrushes with plastic bags so the cockroaches wouldn’t crawl on them. In bed, I prayed that no cockroaches would crawl on me while I slept.

It was fun, our itinerary was to fly to Port Moresby and stay with our wontaks, then fly to Lae (the rainforest there is so beautiful) where another one of our old friends was. They took us to Goroka, where we had moved for the last three years we were there (and we lived with my stepmom, so I don’t have any fun memories), and then through the Highlands Highway, where I would always stop and buy a fresh flower. . crown, via Mt. Hagen to Pabrabuk.

We didn’t even know if we were going to be able to go to Pabrabuk because it was very dangerous. We had a police escort there. I was so excited, because that was the highlight of my trip. So my disappointment that what I most expected was the worst experience made me feel really down.

Besides the loneliness of flashbacks and filthy cockroaches, my ex-husband and I didn’t speak to each other and my father, a missionary and preacher, was upset with me for wearing pants. We had a fight and I won and he was still wearing my pants, even though my father told me that he was dishonoring my mother’s memory. However, it all made my dream trip the worst trip I’ve ever taken.

The only positive part of Pabrabuk was that we walked to a vine bridge, because my sister in law had never seen one and she had a glorious adventure. New Guineans are notorious for not worrying about the time as most of them don’t have clocks in their villages. Why would they? So if you ask them how long it will take them to get somewhere, they just shrug and say “not long, half an hour or an hour”. So, thinking that our trip to this vine bridge would only be an hour and a half at the most, we all set off without food or water, my brother, his wife and two children, my ex-husband who I wasn’t talking to, and myself. My father, of course, stayed in the village.

After several hours of walking in the sun, the children began to get hungry and my brother realized that we were nowhere near this place. Fortunately, the natives we passed gave the children some peanuts and we continued on. We finally got there after a couple of hours. We walked over the vine bridge, ate more peanuts and drank from the water below.

It was all very good, a nice little adventure, until we started to head back home and it started to get dark and then it started to get splashy. Walking in the dark through kunai grass (long, sharp blades of grass, which is why I wanted to wear pants) and over rocks that we couldn’t see very well now was very different from walking during the day.

The drive home seemed twice as long and we were never so glad to see the van waiting for us. We stopped to buy sandwiches for the children in a little store in the middle of nowhere. They told us to stay in the van because the men were drunk and it was not safe. My sister-in-law acted scared, but I wasn’t scared. Nothing bad had ever happened to us in Nueva Guinea. In fact, I was always disappointed growing up, that when there was a tribal war, or something bad happened that I wasn’t allowed to go see, but my brother was.

The next day we took it easy and walked twenty minutes to a waterfall and swam under it which was lovely but the most memorable waterfall was Goroka where we would always take our friends and slide down the waterfall and hang out we dived from the cliffs. I still love Papua New Guinea and feel like it’s a deep part of who I am, but I don’t know if I’ll ever go back.