We're Off!

Tomorrow morning we leave on survey. Everything is packed, our questionnaires and interviews are ready, and I’m just hanging out at home, spending some time with Katie and Tikvah and attending to some random to-dos.

On every survey we venture into the unknown. Back in my college days we’d venture into the mountains and enjoy the thrill of discovery, the challenge of navigation, the concern over the weather. Here in PNG we have all of the above, but it’s compounded by the cross-cultural and multi-lingual nature of our work. Plus we really want to be successful in answering our research questions! So you can imagine there’s always a bit of nerves with the anticipation.


The four of us going are myself, Janell (trip leader), Brian, and John G. I’ve gone on survey trips with all of them but not this particular combination; I think we’re going to have fun! We are bringing a Frisbee, so how could we not?

Below is a map that shows our approximate planned route. We’ll land by helicopter at the south end of the line in Dangal and proceed down the Watut River. We anticipate there being 12-15 villages that we’ll do work in; we plan to spend a night in each. We'll end up in Chivasing on the highlands highway and get driven from there back home sometime around the 24th.

As a wild guess, I’d saw our work in each village will amount to about 12 man hours. If you could show up in a village, get started right away, and work straight through all your tools this wouldn’t be much work for four people. But considering folks are often out in their gardens when you arrive and that it’s not always easy to knock them out one-two-three, it usually takes much more time. Of course we also have to factor sleeping, eating, and hiking (something like 70 km in all?) into all of that. Oh, and a wash in the river once in a while ; )

Well, I’m going to enjoy a last Western-style meal, a quiet evening, and a hot shower before we plunge into the PNG countryside. Lukim yu bihain!