How to open a coconut

There is an old garden right in front of my veranda that still has sweet potatoes growing. Some of my cargo of carrots from the mainland didn't survive the journey, so I put them in the garden to make compost. A couple of the workmen came and started weeding my garden this morning. I'm not sure if it's their garden, or they saw my poor rotting carrots, thought “that's not how you grow carrots! This woman sure needs some help with her gardening!”

My new students came to help me decorate the schoolroom today. We have one room for “serious work” and a second room with two sofas that we have called “the library”.

Yesterday I collected a couple of coconuts from underneath a tree in the garden, but realized there was no way I could open them! I had to ask one of the workmen to get the thick, stringy husk off the nut. In the garden, there is a lean-to with a fire pit where some of the workmen sleep. I took the kids to translate into Pigin for me and one of them happily produced an enormous spike especially designed for the job. Now I just have to work out how to open the nut, how to grate the flesh, how to turn it into coconut milk and then simply add it to the curry I'm planning to make tonight. No problem! Or I could have bought coconut power from the shop in town. Maybe I'll learn my lesson next time.

The kids speak a strange mixture of English, German and Pigin. Since I understand two out of three, I can usually make out what they are saying. They know we only speak English in the schoolroom though. Part of the reason I'm here is to improve the children's English so they will be ready for boarding school and (hopefully) University in Australia.

Settling In

It's rather poetic when your “shopping” becomes “cargo”. Visions of the “cargo cult” of the Pacific Islands spring to mind. After two days of wandering the supermarkets in town with food prices that would make your eyes water ($10 for a box of Corn Flakes!!!), we finally set off for the island.

Usually the family has their own speed boat, but it has sprung a leak, so we made our journey on the local banana boat. After wending our way on a potholed road through the jungle for about an hour, we came to the “port” consisting of a bunch of people sitting on the roots of huge trees on the waters edge and three or four banana boats (a little bigger than a dingy and made of fibre glass) ties to the roots. My suitcase and some other small cargo was loaded onto a shipping palette at the center of the boat. The family, three other passengers and the two boatsmen scrambled on and I got pride of place at the front of the boat, sitting on the pallet. The volcanic island loomed in front of us and after a butt bruising hour on rough seas, we scrambled ashore on the black sand beach.

There is one, semi-paved road running around the outside of the island. We drove to the plantation through countless tiny villages made up of grass huts and the occasional market. It makes sense to build houses out of grass since the rainfall is around 2,500mm a year. Everything rots, so you might as well make your house out of something you can rebuild and repair without great expense.

The plantations that surround the island are made up of massively tall coconut trees with cocoa cultivated underneath. As we drove along the coast with the kids and the cargo in the back of the pick-up truck, everyone we passed waved and smiled. A bunch of kids playing soccer. Women with naked babies on their backs. Men carrying bamboo and bales on their heads. People outside huts cooking over open fires. Coconut trees and jungle everywhere.

We finally got to the plantation just as it was starting to get dark and I finally saw my new home. The teachers house/school house is brand new. I'm the first person to live in it. It's a three bedroom bungalow with a huge veranda overlooking the coastal cliffs. It has been built to catch the breezes with louvered and screened windows. The trees on the cliff in front of my house are full of bananas and papayas (but I'm not sure how to get them without falling down the cliff). The view is spectacular.

The kids gave me a tour of the garden the next day. I returned with an armful of fruit from the trees. There is a patch of pineapple, a patch of watermelon, starfruit, passionfruit, a lime tree, not to mention the ubiquitous coconuts, bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes. There is a set of stairs that leads down to a beautiful, shaded, black sand beach with translucent water and coral just off shore.

We also went to see the copra processing plant and the storerooms where the copra is dried. The family runs a supplies store nearby where you can get staples like flour, sugar, rice, tinned tuna and coca cola. Because there is so much theft, the store is behind a barricade. You have to walk up to the counter and ask for what you want. You can't wander the shop and take things off the shelf. I was introduced to everyone there so they would know I belonged to the plantation and wasn't just some lost white woman.

The local brand of tinned tuna is called “Diana”. I think it's hilarious. It feels like I've fallen victim to a very sophisticated new type of cannibal with their own processing plant. Strangely the locals don't go out and catch their own tuna (which is abundant in these waters). They all eat tinned tuna.

Arriving

I made it!!! My plane had been delayed an hour and it was pitch dark and raining buckets as I stepped off the plane at the tiny airport on the coast. An airline employee stood at the bottom of the stairs of the prop plane and handed me a very large umbrella. I found the whole family waiting for me in the shed that passes for an airport arrivals lounge. They greeted me with a lai of fresh frangipani from the island and a hug.

I had spent nearly 4 hours at Port Moresby airport waiting for my connecting plane. I got talking with a young, Papuan guy with a heavy Australian accent, wearing an electricians uniform. As the only solo woman (and conspicuously blonde in an airport where 95% of the people were locals) he seemed to have pegged me as a potential damsel in distress. While extolling the beauty of PNG, he didn't gloss over the dangers (especially for a conspicuously blonde solo woman). He told me to trust my instincts and never walk around towns alone. He gave me his card and the name of his company's rep near the town where I'll be staying and vehemently urged me to get in contact if I ever “got in trouble or felt the need to flee”. He would make sure I was taken care of. I was genuinely touched.

Of course, I'm not wandering around PNG, blonde and alone. As soon as I walked off the plane, I became part of the household and community of the family that has hired me to teach their kids. The family patriarch and owner of the plantation had been here 50 years and had married a local woman (actually, a couple of local women). My new students are a gorgeous mix of English, Papuan and German.

They checked me into a room at the resort hotel in town. A sprawling place with seven swimming pools overlooking the bay. Of course it was still pitch dark and pouring with rain as we sat in the posh dining room having dinner. It wasn't until morning when the clouds lifted and the sun came out that I finally got my first breathtaking look at the coast. Sometimes you can see the island from here, but not today. It's still a little too misty. It's a shame, because the view could really use an active volcano island floating in the azure sea to add an extra sense of danger and wonder and the feeling of being at the edge of the world.

The strange sense of foreboding seemed to lift as I partook in a lavish complimentary breakfast buffet.

The Island of No Return

After months of planning and paperwork, I'm finally on my way to PNG.

The anticipation has been killing me. I've been googling the heck out of everything associated with the island, the plantation and the nearby town. From what I gathered, the locals refer to their home as “The Island of No Return” which could mean one of two things.

A) it's so nice, once you go there, you'll never want to leave.

Or

B) watch out for the enormous volcano, the malarial mosquitoes, the treacherous ocean passage on a tiny boat and certainly beware of the two major social evils on the island (as quoted on a blog by a local islander). Beware of marijuana and sorcery.  

Time for a new chapter

I have a new job as a teacher on a copra plantation in PNG.  I'm flying there tomorrow.  Stay tuned!!!

Painting, a movie and a great big cake

There was a movie called “Bran Nue Dae” filmed in Broome a few years ago.  It was based on a musical comedy theatre production that ran for many years in Australia and is about a local Broome boy who is sent to boarding school in Perth but runs away.  It’s about his long road trip to get home to Broome.  We had a film night with the interpreters last night.  It was a perfect audience to watch it with.  Half the people in the film were related to people in the room.  They were singing along to all the corny songs and laughing really loud at jokes that you can only understand properly if you come from here (and are an aboriginal).  The folks sitting on the floor working on huge aboriginal art canvases just added to the atmosphere.  And there was a nice cake involved.  So very fun evening really.

The wall painting is almost ready.  It represents people from many different campfires coming together at a big campfire.  Basically, it's a record of the gathering of people at the interpreters conference.

Biting the Bullet

We took a whole convoy of SUVs down the river fishing yesterday. We were delayed at first while someone jumped out of a car to kill a goanna (“barney” is the traditional term for a goanna around here). Then everyone needed their photo taken with the goanna.

Then some of the old bush women decided they had brought bad weather because they hadn't gotten here in time for the traditional smoking ceremony.

So we had to smoke them before we went to the river. Then we had to cook the goanna. Then noone caught a fish. Then we stopped to gather firewood into a trailer. On the way home and the wheel came off the trailer.


I was offered a piece of the goanna, but I had heard that eating the fat from the goanna gives you dreadful BO. Of course you’d have to eat a lot of it. Still I wasn’t too keen to sweat pungent goanna oder.

Over dinner of salt beef and damper tonight, one of the interpreters “bit the bullet”. We were tucking into beef from the cow that Uncle Ernie had shot a couple of weeks ago. Lucky she didn’t break her teeth!

There has been much debate over the best way to cook damper. The folks from the APY lands use a camp oven. The East Kimberley folks fry it like a big pancake. Either way, it needs a lot of butter and honey.

The interpreters have officially gone through 400 tea bags in 4 days. That’s quite a haul for only 20 people. There is a widespread belief in Australia that aboriginal people have a problem with alcohol. Well, I can tell you, their real addiction is tea.