The first thing I did this year*

As I lay in bed, sleeping in after supervising a bunch of teenagers on New Year's Eve, I heard the soft knock first and then the dog start barking to let me know I had company. I dragged myself upstairs to find one of my PNG friends on my porch. She came by to charge her and her brother's cell phones and because she wanted me to teach her how to make jello.

We plugged the first phone in and chatted for a few minutes, before making the jello and taking down the (artificial) Christmas tree. Then, in typical PNG fashion, we waited: waited for the first phone to charge, then the second (although after two hours she realized it wasn't plugged in)... waited for the jello to set. When I ran out of things to talk about, I put a movie on as we continued to wait.

The start of another year in PNG...

Happy New Year!

*When I woke up on the morning of January 1, 2010 - not the night before :-)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! We're almost halfway through Christmas day here.

Here's my Christmas tree this year - it's about three times as big as the one from last year. I'm glad that the people I'm house-sitting for left this tree for me to use :-) It adds some Christmas cheer to my house.
And outside, by the driveway, there is a giant poinsettia bush to add Christmas cheer all year round. This picture only shows a small part of the bush, since I was trying to take a picture of the small green bird in the middle of the picture (a New Guinea white-eye).

While poinsettias are small, potted plants to people in the US, here they are towering bushes that grow year round!

New Britain Survey: Parting Shots

It's almost Christmas, and I'm still milking my New Britain survey trip for blog posts. This is the last one; I promise. (Look for a Christmas post soon.)

Of the south coast villages we visited, we saw (and slept in) a variety of kinds of houses. Some people have houses built with sawn timber and sheet metal roofs; others have traditional-style houses with woven walls and grass roofs. (You can see both kinds in the picture below.) We saw some houses that were unusual - they had sheet metals for the walls and grass roofs!

In many places in PNG, pigs play an important role in traditional culture. While I've seen pigs in almost every village I've visited in PNG, I'd never seen them on the beach before! This struck me as really funny, so I thought I'd share it, but maybe it's more of one of those "you had to be there" moments...

Here's a pig eating (coconut shells) on the beach (above), and another just keeping cool in the sand (below). Hey, when a pig doesn't have mud to wallow in, he might as well use the next best thing... sand.

Papua New Guineans I've met on survey have always been very friendly and hospitable. I thought this sign, above a door at a house we stayed at said it well... (Well Come)

Last, but not least, is this image, taken in a PNG house we slept at:

A clock with no hands captures the essence of PNG so well! PNG culture is very relaxed and relationship (rather than time) oriented. People don't mind waiting or having plans changed. They are very flexible and unaware of time (in the Western sense), just like a clock with no hands.

New Britain Survey: Food

I'm getting close to the end of talking about my New Britain survey, but I just have to talk about the food. It's a question missionaries everywhere can be sure of being asked: what kind of weird food do you eat?

No, I didn't eat any bugs or lizards or anything on the survey; we actually ate really well. The most common food we ate was either rice or root veggies cooked in coconut cream, with a sauce over it, often made with leafy greens, fish, or canned meat (think Spam).

Here's a plate of coconut rice with cooked greens on top:

Along with our normal food, we also had some special treats, like this "tapiok cake" (I believe it's made from cassava plants). We got really excited when our hosts presented us with this delicious snack.

Women use shell scrapers to grate the hard cassava root, which they mix with coconut cream, wrap in banana leaves, and cook over a fire. (In the picture, the cassava cakes are sitting on the banana leaf they were cooked in.) It's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside!

Another special treat we had on the survey was good fruit. Laulau is similar to an apple, and the flavor ranges from quite tart to deliciously sweet. They range in size from about one to three inches across, most of them being on the small size. On one small island, I was given a bag of huge, sweet laulau (including the one pictured below) and enjoyed every bite!

(To "pick" laulau, someone climbs a laulau tree and shakes it. Lots of fruit shower down, and people pick up the best looking ones, leaving the small, unripe and bug-eaten ones on the ground.)

Ok, this last picture isn't of food. But it's of something that spends lots more time in peoples' mouths than any food does: betel nut. People of all ages crack open the small hard fruit with their teeth and chew the soft, bitter flesh. When mixed with lime powder (made from sea shells) and leaves from a peppery-tasting tree, the betel nut produces lots of bright red spit in peoples' mouths. Almost everywhere you go in PNG, you find betel nut spit stains like the one below on the ground.

New Britain Survey: Church

Sometimes surveys happen where there are no churches, but it's getting harder and harder to find places without a church. (That's a good thing!) The areas we visited in New Britain were no exception.

Every single village we visited has a church, and most of them were established around WWII! (Although new buildings have been built since then...) Here's the church on Melenglo Island:

And here's the inside of the church on Ayuvet Island...

Most of the churches are very well attended and people are very devout. They are all Catholics. Many people have images of Jesus and Mary, like the ones below, in their homes.

We were in New Britain during the "month of Mary." Every single day people held prayer services for Mary (sometimes twice a day, or all night long!), with singing and prayers. Each village also had shrines like the one you see below. In some villages, each family built their own shrine and the Mary statue would be moved to a different house every day in her procession.

At the end of the month, Mary's procession came to an end at the local parishes (church headquarters over a certain area). We were in Lulakivi village when the Mary from there traveled to Valanguo parish church. Almost every person in the village decorated their canoe with greenery (Mary had a specially decorated one) and paddled to Valanguo, loudly singing local language songs to Mary all the way.

It was quite a sight to see dozens of canoes headed for the island, and then see and hear dozens each from three other nearby villages all headed to the parish church with their Marys too!