Day Two - Stairs Anyone?

The pigs did keep it down… till 6am, apparently their feeding time. Then they went crazy, and we opened our eyelids to a gray morning.

If we’d have known what this day would hold, would any of us have rolled out of bed? Perhaps not. We may have waited in Dangal until teleportation was invented.

Before the trip I’d studied the maps of the area. None had great detail, but they showed high ridges around the river valley. We assumed, though, that people traveled from village to village, and that there were trails along the river. Both of these assumptions proved false.

We left Dangal at 8:10am, intending to go to ‘Gumots.’ I say ‘Gumots,’ because it turned out this was the name of an area, not a village, and because we never actually made it there. Our revised target, on discovering this, was Wawas, but even still our one day trip turned into two days of extreme hiking and a third day in a canoe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.


On this day, the 11th of February, we found ourselves crossing slippery rocks that sloped down into the roiling, brown Watut River. It was hazardous stuff. A slip could easily send a person into the water, and with a heavy pack on…? These rocks didn’t last long – thankfully – but we found ourselves facing another challenge: vertical hills.

Our guide explained that the trail we followed was built by the Australians in 1942, during WWII. This area was an important supply route for the intense fighting that happened around Lae. Australian troops would have had PNG’an carriers tote the supplies over this trail. An interesting book by Peter Ryan, Fear Drive My Feet, tells of war efforts in the area. I need to pick it up again to see if he was in the Watut Valley, but if memory serves, I believe he was one valley to the east near Wau.

Take a look at the elevation profile at the top of this page. The section from Dangal to Sumaris Mining Camp is the portion we hiked today. The GPS says we only did 6.35km that day, but that includes 806m (2,644ft) of elevation gain. I’ve done more than that in a day in the Canadian Rockies, but never in as vertical a fashion as we did this day. It felt like going up very steep stairs, and then down very steep stairs. Then up very steep stairs. And down again. Oh, and did I mention that it’s all quite slippery, so that every muscle is straining just to keep from sliding off the trail? An additional hazard was homicidal trees; one leaning over the trail cracked and gave John G quite a whack on the head as he passed under it.

We stopped at a hamlet along the way, one of the locations John G had been the previous day in his epic Walkabout Questionnaire. This was the hamlet where the council – the village-level government authority – lived. On the previous day we’d been unable to get consent from the people who participated in our work. Consent for what?

Well, in the research world it is considered unethical to run around collecting all kinds of research, then publicize it without getting the consent of the people to do so. We as a survey team have discussed what consent means in the PNG context. After all, the vast majority are unfamiliar with academic writing and the like. So what we do is 1) carefully explain who we are and what we’re about, 2) explain the purpose of our research, 3) describe the particular papers we write, and 4) who we want to share them with. Then we ask them whether they agree to us doing so or not. Generally, after being clear on our purposes and values, they agree.

Thankfully, though the council had left, apparently looking for us, there were some other community elders who said, “Yes, you may use and publish your research.” So we went on our way.

Our guide, a Dangal man named Lazarus, as well as two or three teenagers accompanied us. In true PNG fashion, they each carried a small bag with virtually nothing in it. Thankfully one of them was willing to carry one of our packs when a team member found himself more weary than anticipated. Who wouldn’t be? By about noon we descended/slid down yet another precipitous hillside and found ourselves at a lovely little waterfall. Our clothes were completely drenched from sweat, so we had no hesitation about jumping in and cooling off. We each ate a little bit, knowing we had one final ascent to Sumaris Mining Camp.

You may remember that our original intention was to go to Gumots, later revised to Wawas. We knew Sumaris was less than half of the way there, but by the time we reached the waterfall, we knew we could go no farther than Sumaris, at least uphill. My quads were beginning to cramp even before that final ascent. We had our fingers crossed that the “American” who was “learning our vernacular” – the boss of the mining camp – would extend us hospitality. We were at the end of our physical abilities for that day.

Up that final, interminable ridge we climbed. And climbed. And climbed. John G requested that I shout out our elevation at regular 10m intervals. Just so we could feel like we were getting somewhere. We each made a guess at the elevation we’d find the camp… unfortunately Brian’s guess, the highest one, still fell short. We finally saw pole structures covered in brightly covered plastic sheeting above us, and knew we’d made it.


What followed caused us to dub the camp the “Watut Hilton.” The boss, actually an Australian who didn’t even know Tok Pisin that well, was extremely friendly. He said we could stay for the night, could eat their food, could take showers, and could even wash our clothes in the washing machine. Say what? A washing machine in the middle of the PNG bush? Yes indeed!

The corned beef sandwiches were prime rib, the watermelon the most succulent, refreshing fruit imaginable. The showers were ridiculously hot. We collapsed mid-afternoon on mattresses – not our Thermarests but real mattresses – and either slept or wrote in our journals.

That evening we schemed much about the coming trail. Could we make it to Wawas? How many ridges and valleys were between us? What was the trail like? Our Australian host put himself at our disposal, helping us with some maps, even letting John G get on a laptop with satellite internet so he could put an update on our survey facebook page! (http://www.facebook.com/pngsurvey?sk=wall#!/pngsurvey?sk=wall check out the Feb 11 entry) We asked about the possibility of helicopter transport, as one had flown in at least three times that day to deliver supplies. We figured the chopper could probably drop us in Wawas in about ten minutes. Our host was optimistic about the possibility and contacted his boss, who – concerned about public image – said no. We didn’t blame him. Public relations and who-helps-who can be a delicate thing.

We went to bed feeling that we’d done all we could do, and just happy to have a dry place to rest. We woke the next morning before dawn to a tropical downpour. I’ve rarely felt so much dread…

Silisili Survey - Day One

Well folks, the survey team has returned! The Silisili Survey was a success, despite some challenging circumstances. Namely, vertical terrain. Here’s an introduction and day one; stay tuned for the whole story.

Preparation and Day One

Once upon a time there were four surveyors. Sitting comfortably in their office in the Highlands, they heard of the Watut River Valley and of their lack of the Word in their own language. Several languages bordering this area have translations or are in the process of completing them, but the Watut Valley had no language development projects.

Other development projects were in plenty. The lure of gold had brought several mining companies to the region, so that despite the extreme remoteness of parts of the valley, helicopters could be heard overhead several times a day. What a strange juxtaposition! The most modern of technologies used for the extraction of gold while PNG’ans living within hearing of the helicopter’s blades still live as they did hundreds of years ago.

The regional director asked the survey team, “Will you please go to the Watut? If you find a thriving language there, it will be first on our priority list for a translation project.” That’s the kind of thing we like to hear! Because, in fact, two surveys had been completed in the area, one in 1965, one in 1990. Both had recommended a project, but either no translation teams were available or no one considered it high priority.

The survey team spent several weeks considering the questions the regional director wanted answered and developing questionnaires and other research tools for the job. Then, the morning of February 10th, we four – John G, Brian, Janell, and myself – boarded the Long Ranger helicopter and took off.



A 45-minute flight found us over our first village. Remarkably, the coordinates I’d given the pilot for its position were actually correct! We grinned to ourselves as we noticed a man acting as traffic director; he was waving his arms vigorously to show us where to ‘park.’

Hopping out, we ducked under the spinning blades and yelled, “Is this Dangal?” It was, so we thanked our pilot, and he was up and away. That quickly we left behind the comforts of our modern age: motorized transport, electricity, western food. We were in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.

When we first arrive in a village we try to never be in a hurry. Often people are out in their gardens, or perhaps a village leader is not present. Because we are looking for community consensus and the attitudes and intentions of its leaders, it would be pointless to pick a random fellow and ask him what he knows.

So we sat around, talked a bit, got stared at, answered some questions… finally we decided to start some work that wouldn’t require everyone, since we didn’t have much of a crowd yet. I began the word list. Our current word list consists of 170 lexical items and 20 short sentences designed to get at grammar, sentence order, etc. I quickly found there weren’t many strange phonemes (sounds) to record, but that [l] and [r] were in free variation, meaning that the people don’t distinguish between these sounds! One time my informant would say [bola], the next he’d say [bora], and he wouldn’t know the difference. This caused a bit of confusion when speaking Tok Pisin with them. For example, ‘road’ frequently became ‘load,’ which naturally made getting trail information a bit tricky.

Anyhow, the word list went fine. Meanwhile John G had gone on the Walkabout Questionnaire, a tool he’d helped design to get at immigrants and their influence on language use. He was gone about four hours, and returned absolutely wasted, saying he’d just done one of the hardest hikes of his life and that we couldn’t possibly do some of what he’d done with packs on our backs.

We were to prove otherwise, but in the meantime we took his cautions quite seriously. We’d heard of a village – Sanang – that was straight up and over the mountain. We’d not heard of this village before, so suddenly our travel plans were brought into question. Do we try to get to Sanang or not? Watching John as he collapsed to rest, we were convinced that Sanang – even supposing we could reach it – would not be worth the struggle of getting there. What’s more, the Dangal folks said, “They speak just like us,” so theoretically our research in Dangal applied also to them.

Our Main Questionnaire had to wait till late that night, and we never really got a great crowd together. But as we were to discover, the population of this area is extremely low, so there just may not have been many more folks around.

Some other memories from day one include seeing the young guys go off to pan for gold (apparently they can make a very good wage this way) in the Watut River; getting soaked to the skin because I decided to go take some pictures just before the clouds let loose; seeing the church building with one bench in it; and washing under a short pipe they’d stuck into a clear stream.

We crawled into our mosquito nets and hoped the pigs would keep it down so we could get a good night’s rest, wondering what the morrow would bring.

Even in Australia

I decided to do the good motherly thing today and read a couple of books to Tikvah. Before we left Papua New Guinea last August, I had the chance to buy some stuff from a family who had left the field. They had a lovely collection of kids books, which I was only too thrilled to snatch up (I bought them all for Tikvah… really!). Henry the Duck, Lyle the Crocodile, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and even Doctor Desoto were among the treasures I rescued to be loved by a new Ukarumpa MK.
Today was a lovely sunny day, the kind that have been greatly missed of late. The kind of day that makes you feel guilty for not doing laundry, even if you didn’t need to, because at least it would have dried. So I grabbed an old blanket, my mug that tells me to “Drink PNG Coffee” and which I dutifully obey, and headed for the great outdoors of our yard to read to my darling daughter. I admit that at five months of age she is a little young to truly appreciate reading. But she didn’t complain. So I made my voice as animated as I could and read the words while Tikvah did her best to eat the pages.
Tikvah listened (and grabbed and chewed) as I read the tale of Alexander’s “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day”, a story I remembered enjoying myself as a child. Well, I mean I enjoyed hearing it, not eating it. Alexander, the boy sharing his woes, recounts how everything that could go wrong in his life one day did go wrong. His solution to the problems unexpectedly made me laugh out loud. When his brothers get toys in their cereal boxes and he doesn’t, he declares, “I think I’ll move to Australia”. It’s such a cliché desire, to be somewhere else or be someone else or have something different. I should know better than to think those thoughts, and yet I still fall prey to such wishes.
For example, I would love to be on survey right now. At least, that’s how I feel. Never mind that I’m in PNG, never mind that I’m a bona fide missionary, never mind that I have a wonderful husband and a sweet daughter. I want to be on survey! Survey is COOL! Yes, I wanted all those other things, but I wanted to be a surveyor too!
John called me on the satellite phone last night, and I loved talking with him. He said he’s doing well after their crazy hikes, though the boat ride down the river through rapids was a little on the scary side.
“Is Tikvah walking and talking yet?” he asked. Wanting to make him feel like he was missing something, I replied in a dubious tone, “maaaaybe.” It worked. “It’s not fair!” I heard him exclaim after the half-second it took for his voice to get to a satellite and then reach my phone. Wow, I thought. YOU’RE one to talk! Here I sit, wishing I could be where you are, wanting to feel like a part of the team, wishing I could be doing survey on the rugged PNG countryside like I wanted to do. And you envy me because I’m changing poopy diapers, living two-thirds of my day with only one arm free, and taking care of a grouchy baby all by myself? Thanks to Alexander, I now know exactly what I should have said to John - “I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone part and lands in Australia.” So there.
It really isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound, of course. I’m loving having Tikvah around, loving her smiles, loving her spit bubbles, and even loving watching her dance and grunt because she’s trying to fill her diaper! And I’m loving the fact that I have many friends to help make the time pass quicker. It’s just that some part of me still wants to do survey, to have at least a tiny part in helping Bible translation happen here in PNG. Is it wrong to want that? I don’t think so. Do I need to give it up for a time and be “just” a mom? Perhaps. Am I a worthwhile person if I don’t do survey at all? Of course! Then is it just my selfish pride that makes me feel I should do something with survey still? Oooooh, good question. I’m not sure I have a solid answer either. I do hope that God will grow me and teach me, however, and help me answer it in time. And, to help me answer each of these questions as they come up each day.
But for now, I’ll work to be content where I am. I’m confident that it was a good thing for me to stay home with Tikvah this time. And though I wish I were out with John, I know that there are hard things about being on survey too. So I’ll work to be content while I work to find my new niche - even if I find that it means being “just” mom.
It seems like contentment might be an important thing to learn, no matter how much better another situation might look. After all, as Alexander’s mom tells him at the end of his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day - “some days are just like that. Even in Australia.”

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!

Of Birds (Pidgins) and Conquest

The Silisili Survey, on which we depart in three days, is different from any of the surveys I’ve done before. Prior surveys have taken me to areas and languages never before surveyed. The Silisili area, by contrast, has been surveyed at least twice.

Why go again? Shouldn’t once be enough? With 800+ languages to get to, do we really have time to repeat some of them? The problem is LANGUAGE SHIFT.

In a country where you can leave your village, walk five miles, and meet people speaking an entirely unrelated language, language shift is bound to occur. Another catalyst is foreign forces. A century ago missions came into the country and picked a language to work in, making it the official church language. One language went from about 600 to something like 70,000 speakers this way!

Perhaps most influential in today’s PNG in Tok Pisin, the trade language. Tok Pisin was created on plantations over a century ago, when foreign bosses and PNG’an workers created a pidgin language to communicate (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin for a definition). It has now become the primary trade language of PNG, and is, in fact, one of the reasons we surveyors can do our work. Think about it: 100 years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to communicate with the people we go to survey. Now, most people in the villages we visit know Tok Pisin.

Back to language shift. Shift towards Tok Pisin happens for a number of reasons. 1) In many areas it is the language of business and education. Want your children to go to school and get good jobs? You’re probably going to encourage them to speak Tok Pisin rather than your own vernacular, even at home. Live on the ocean and want to trade fish for garden food with inland peoples? You’ll use Tok Pisin to bargain. Need to get a job with the nearby timber or mining company? Tok Pisin is a requirement.

2) Another reason for shift is low prestige. A language or people group can become looked down on for quite a few reasons, but if it has such a reputation, you’re probably going to avoid speaking it, right? On a previous survey we found a situation where language X had tried to force the women of language Y to marry their own men. When there was resistance, they took stronger measures and killed a bunch of language Y’s people. They still live side by side today, but only one speaker of language Y remains, and even for him, much of language X’s vocabulary has crept into his own. Linguistic conquest. Of course it’s about more than language, it’s about tribal identity. But language is inextricably woven into that identity in most cases.

3) It’s worth mentioning that language shift isn’t always premeditated or intentional. If you grew up somewhere where your parents speak a vernacular but your schoolmates, friends, and siblings speak Tok Pisin, you’re probably going to speak mostly Tok Pisin, right? This often happens in the States with children of immigrants, who grow up speaking English and learn very little of the language of their parents.

Why do we need to know about language shift? As surveyors, one of our primary responsibilities is assessing language vitality. Is the language alive, used for a variety of purposes, and likely to continue to be used in future generations? Ok, that’s a good reason to send in translators. If it’s not likely to be used in future generations, it is much less likely a translation team will be sent. When you consider it often takes 10 to 15 years to complete just the New portion of the Book, you can see why it’s important to us that it’s going to be used!

Can significant language shift have happened in the 21 years since the last survey? Yes, definitely. It’s our job to find out whether it has.

Does Having Gold on Your Land Change Your Language Use? Yes!

Many countries blessed with raw resources such as minerals have been cursed with the resulting conflict over those resources. PNG is no exception. Thankfully, unlike some other places, it hasn’t resulted in large-scale war here in PNG, probably partly due to the multitude of languages and cultures involved.

The Silisili Survey (5 days away!) will take us to a valley downstream from a gold mine. This mine has been in operation for decades if not longer. Locals are said to pan gold from the river we’ll be traveling along; since I’m taking a Frisbee anyway, I might try my hand ; )

The common complaint in PNG is, “Look, these minerals are in my land; why am I not getting any benefit from them? The foreign companies come, destroy our environment, take our minerals, and we don’t see the profit!”

Without getting too much into the debate, let’s admit that it must seems very unfair to the PNG’an. They see the company come in with an insane amount of equipment, hire a bunch of workers, and haul away all of their raw materials. If they live close enough they may get work with the company but even still feel inadequately recompensed.
One of our jobs it to determine how much this kind of scenario has impacted the area we’re surveying. An area’s economics IS interesting to us, but more important to us is the impact these companies are having on language. Does it seem like everything comes back to language for us? Well, it pretty much does.

I know of a language group – virtually an entire tribe – that relocated to be nearer to a mine. Are they likely to retain language and culture, having relocated among other people groups for economic advantage? Probably not. Less drastic but almost as impactful are instances where a man leaves his home area to work at a company, where he is immersed in an environment in which his language isn’t spoken. He may return to his home area with the status of a working man, and other people may emulate his language use because of that status. These are the types of things we attempt to measure. It can definitely be a brain-twister.

P.S. If I find any gold nuggets, I’ll probably keep it to myself ; )

Happy Reading!

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