Lightening the Load

I am not prone to packrat-ism. I’ve spent too much of my life lugging suitcases around to believe that accumulating goods is worth my while. Yet recently even I have been shedding some weight.

In our modern world many are supremely privileged to have the capacity to pursue arts and crafts. Think about it: a couple of centuries ago you probably wouldn’t have had the spare change to buy a guitar, even if you could find one (when were they invented, anyway?). Here in PNG, that usually remains the case. Because people live a subsistence lifestyle off the land, most have little pocket money. What money they do have often goes towards school fees for their kids or basic necessities, like some store-bought rice or second-hand clothes. I am extremely wealthy compared to them.

So I’m passing on some of my goods to the community here. My guitar? I’ve had it for around 5 years and loved it, especially the smell of the wood when opening the case. I sometimes even made it sound all right! I have sold my guitar to a deserving MK who, at the age of 12 or 13, is already better than me.

Camera. I’ve had it for three years now. A decent DSLR is worlds better than your average compact digital. I used it during village living back in 2010 to get some great shots of life in PNG, and more recently have been capturing my beautiful daughter as she grows at an alarming rate. (I keep wanting to push the ‘slow down’ button on Tikvah, but can’t seem to find it.) The camera went to a young Papua New Guinean lady working in a partner organization here in PNG. She has been trained in media and is responsible for communications and promotional material. I think it will serve her well.

Other loved items have been passed on. Each of these represents an opportunity, and I’m grateful to have had them and to be able to share them. Life is brighter when there are avenues for creativity.

In addition to the good reasons of 1) sharing the blessings I’ve received and 2) not having to lug the stuff back across the globe, there’s a third good reason to be selling these things: we’re going to be going back to school this year… and school costs a lot of money. I suppose that is good motivation for paying attention in class.

Bows and Arrows

Returning from church one Sunday morning, I heard a lot of yelling. “A rugby match?” I thought. Rugby matches can be pretty fierce here, but this sounded more like ‘fight’ than ‘play,’ and besides, it was not from the direction of the rugby pitch that the shouting was coming from.

As I walked towards a spot where I’d have a view across the ravine, I heard a ‘boom.’ Definitely a rifle. Thankfully there was only one boom; the shooter must not have had much ammunition.

Getting closer, I could hear ‘kilim em,’ which you can probably guess can mean ‘kill him.’ It can also mean ‘hit him,’ and hopefully the latter was the case, but it all sounded pretty intense so I couldn’t be sure. By this time I’d seen a number of men running up a ridge into a small wood on the opposite side of the ravine. They were obviously running towards the fight.

I got home and pulled out the camera. To document a fight or not to document a fight, that is the question. I’d witnessed one before, and they’re not really the types of events you glory in. Anger and a desire for revenge drive these encounters, and unfortunately a fight is rarely the end of the matter. On survey we often hear, “Now that Christianity has come, we don’t fight any more.” I’m sure there is much less fighting than there was before, but the human desire to pay back evil for evil remains strong.

As you see these pictures, be grateful for systems of law and order that prevent this from happening in your neighborhood, but also remember the many countries where conflict between ethnic groups is regular and deadly. And don’t forget to pray that people everywhere would hear and learn this: that sin has been atoned for, that peace can reside in the hearts of those who have been wronged, and that—by God’s grace—we need not seek revenge.

Click on the image below or save it to your computer to see the images and text.

Day 3 - On and On and On

We woke the morning of the 12th, in the dark, to a tropical downpour. I’d woken up several times during the night and it had been dumping rain then too. “I have a bad feeling about this” doesn’t begin to capture my dark thoughts that morning. The vertical ascents and descents had been tough enough the previous day without the rain, and what about creeks and rivers we might cross?

I had felt similar dread in Montana, waking up in a quinzhee (a snow shelter) with the temperature at minus 5 F, knowing that my boots were frozen solid and that I had absolutely no desire to climb out of my sleeping bag.

Dawn brought a new perspective and a stop to the rain. We had breakfast in the camp canteen and bid our host goodbye. With improved spirits we set out… straight uphill another 200m (650ft) to our highest point of the survey, 1021m (3,350ft). We rested there before plunging down the north side of the mountain. And plunge we did! In the next two and a half hours we descended 681m (2234ft) over a distance of about 2km (1.24mi). This is a grade of about 34%, and would NOT end up being our steepest descent that day.


By the time we reached Bukandu at the bottom of the mountain it was just after 1100. Despite a slow and slippery descent, we all felt pretty good. We asked the folks there whether they thought we could get to Wawas that day. Some said yes, others said no, it will be dark. Based on the evidence of days 2 and 3 of the survey, pessimists should be respected. They proved right again and again.

We said, “Well, we’ll give it a try,” and set out. We were soon to realize that Lazarus, our guide, had not walked this portion of the trail before. If we had known we may have attempted to do something differently, but actually there was no one else available to take us; he may have been our only option.

We filled our bottles from a questionable water source (putting into it, as always, water purification tablets) and crossed a landslide. That turned out to be the easy part, because we promptly turned straight up an extremely steep kaukau garden. Kaukau is a staple food in much of PNG, somewhere between a regular and a sweet potato. And guess what? We went straight back down an equally steep kaukau garden on the other side.

A lovely boulder-filled creek quickly cheered us, and we walked upstream in the clear water. Lazarus kept disappearing ahead of us, and I had to track him by his wet footprints. We started yelling at him to wait up, but finally we didn’t see him for such a long time – nor was he answering our yells – that we decided we’d better stop and let him come back to us. We’d gone up the stream quite a ways by this time. We found some rocks to sit on and had ‘lunch,’ which meant that we all snacked on something or other.

Katie had made me some fruit leather from banana and strawberry – very tasty! – as well as some granola bars with chocolate in them. The flavor of chocolate, by the way, is greatly enhanced by physical exertion and the consumption of PNG food. John G had some delicious dried bananas and some trail mix. Brian had bees, and Janell butterflies. Well, not to eat.

Brian had been extolling the wonders of his skin; that wherever he went other people would get bitten by sand flies and mosquitoes and he would remain untouched. We took great pleasure, therefore, in the swarm of bees that began to cling to his pack and his clothes there at the creek, and which followed him for several days. We never did figure out why.

As for butterflies, there were some lovely ones flitting around. Janell took some pictures of them, then spent a few minutes sitting in a pool in the stream, soaking up nature’s splendor. Finally Lazarus returned with some glum news: he didn’t know where the trail was.

Turns out a lady had given him instructions in Bukandu. “Turn at the tree,” she’d said. The tree? We’re in a stinkin’ jungle, lady! Not knowing what else to do, we ventured back down the stream, poking into the bush here and there to find the trail. Finally it was indeed a tree that steered us right! A huge tree had been felled, completely blocking the path, but we found it zigzagging up the hill beyond.

It was now after 1pm, and our day of hiking was only just beginning.

Looking at the map some of us had guessed at the number of valleys and streams we’d be crossing. This gave us a measure of confidence as we went along, checking them off the list. Turns out our map-reading was overly optimistic.

We later learned (why is it you always learn things AFTER you need to know them?) that this trail was ‘built’ only within the last year or two, and that very few people used it. This meant that the trail was barely there in many places, in terms of being able to see it and in terms of having a place to put your feet. If you look at the elevation profile at the top of the page you can see this portion of the journey from Bukandu to the spot labeled ‘Kunai Over Bubuparum.’ We kept expecting the trail to stop going up. Indeed, if it was sentient, we would have commanded it to cease doing so. We were, after all, following the Watut River downstream. We didn’t anticipate going up, and up, and up…

Several things frustrated us during this time. Naturally, the interminable trail had us concerned, and it didn’t take us long to figure that yes, we were going to be hiking in the dark. But perhaps equally frustrating was Lazarus, who kept disappearing ahead. We’d shout at him to wait for us, that we didn’t want to lose the trail, that we had headlamps and could hike in the dark, etc. He persisted in disappearing up ahead. I could possibly have kept up with him if I’d pushed myself very, very hard, but of course I wanted to stay with the team.

The team was suffering from a variety of challenges. The trail itself was quite daunting, with only small footholds keeping a person from falling a very long way down the mountain. This was, of course, both physically and mentally challenging. Our weariness and the technical trail was also resulting in injury. One member’s feet were getting rubbed to pieces by his Chacos, while all three of the others suffered from cuts to hands and arms from grabbing onto sharp grass and plants to keep from falling.

Thanks to my experience in mountains and to my excellent footwear (the Salomon TechAmphibians I was trialing this trip), I fared well. I enjoy being out in the wild and don’t mind steep terrain. Though it was a long day for me, I never reached the same degree of weariness I had the previous day, and in fact it was more waiting on people and our runaway guide that wore me down.

Before I begin to sound proud in my abilities I want to say that I was immensely impressed by my teammates. Each was challenged by different things, but each faced their challenges with a great deal of fortitude. I suspect one team member reached the ‘can’t go further’ state long before the end of the day, but just kept going. Another became hysterical with exhaustion and strain, yet kept putting one foot in front of the other. They each had a much harder day than I did, and I had to remind myself of that when I was tempted to become impatient.

I can’t really give many more details of that portion of the trip. It just kept going on and on. We’d cross tiny trickles of water in shadowed gullies, then swing out on long, dry, gravelly portions of the trail. We kept being disbelieving about our continued ascent… surely this trail was taking us somewhere we didn’t want to go? Yet there were no other trails, no other options.

Darkness fell, and we turned on our headlamps. And plodded on. A few times there were moments of hope. A sudden breeze curving over that next ridge surely meant a clearing, right? Hey, Lazarus is saying no more uphill! Dare we believe him? In each case hope was unwise; perseverance was a better companion.

Finally, and somewhat suddenly, we came out onto a ridge covered in kunai, the head-high grass of PNG. The last of the light, which hadn’t reached us under the trees, showed us to be on the edge of a precipice. We could see the river down to our right, seemingly miles below. “Wawas,” Lazarus said, pointing over a distant ridge, “Is over there.”

It was 7pm. There was no way we were going to get to Wawas. Could we camp where we were? We had no tents, no shelter at all. We did have some matches, so we could start a fire. We had some food we could eat cold. We had mosquito nets. What if it rained? Would we sleep at all, even if it didn’t?

We debated our options. Lazarus told us that there was a small village at the bottom of the valley that stretched away to our left. Could we send someone down to check? Get some locals to come up and take our packs down? I was voted the man for this job, but expressed my dislike of the idea. I felt that we were within reach of houses and people, and wanted to push on as a team.

There was little argument. I think we were too tired to debate. We decided to descend.

Remember our 34% grade of that morning? Check out the elevation profile again. From Kunai Over Bubuparum at 650m (2,133ft) at around 7pm we descended to Bubuparum at 278m (912ft) by 9:20pm. That’s 372m (1,220ft) descent in about three-quarters of a kilometer. That’s a 49.6% grade! Of course the trail zig-zagged slightly, but it really was extremely steep, and, by this time, completely dark. Not to mention we’d already been hiking 11-plus hours by the beginning of the descent.

Back in my college days I took groups of high-schoolers out on hikes. One of the ways I got over my boredom at their slow pace when hiking in the dark was to go to the back of the line, then switch off my headlamp, walking by the light of the kid in front of me. Frequently he’d forget I was there, and would at some point turn around and get quite a fright to find someone following him in the dark! You can guess what kind of a childhood poor Tikvah is going to have…

Anyway, my evil habits helped me on this night, for I gave my headlamp to our guide so that he could find the trail, and walked between the other surveyors, getting enough of an idea of the ground from their light to keep from falling down the mountainside.

You may be feeling (and rightfully so) that this entry is going On and On and On like the title says, but I have one final detail to relate. Disputes over land are frequent in PNG where one’s survival depends upon gardens; these disputes sometimes lead to violence. Some of the members of the people group we were surveying had killed three young men of a group on the opposite side of the river within the past few years. Our guide started hallooing the village from some distance away, and some time later a young man came up the trail holding a rifle. He wasn’t sure who he would encounter in the dark, and was worried that his enemies were coming to retaliate. Firearms are, by the way, illegal in PNG.

Thankfully he and Lazarus spoke a common tongue, and naturally we whites weren’t after him or his family. So he cheerfully led us down the final descent to his house. The village of Bubuparum, it turned out, was quite tiny and up the opposite side of the valley a ways. Thankfully the guy who met us had a house right on the water which he invited us to stay at. We washed under a spout by the river, ate a bit of food, and went straight to bed.

We’d left that morning at 7:45am, arriving at 9:20pm. Once again we’d only gone 7km horizontally, but had actually ascended 869m (2,851ft), more than the previous day. Unfortunately I hadn’t recorded total descent for day 2, so figures for total descent on day 3 would be a bit of a guess, but it must have exceeded 1,053m (3,455ft).

I spent the night wedged between John G and Brian in our mosquito net, but my weary body didn’t have any problem sleeping…

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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Fast and Light

Upon our return to PNG three weeks ago we got suited up and buckled back into Team Survey’s Research 4WD. The most rugged of the terrain has been methodology meetings with team members. The team is hoping to become more ‘fast and light’ than before. We want to be able to maximize our resources by avoiding the temptation to “collect all the information you can, because it might be your only chance!” By asking only the questions we must ask we’ll spend less time analyzing information which might not be useful to anyone. Optimal ignorance.

With one survey coming up in a week and half and another in April, discussing methodology is ever-so-relevant, though that doesn’t always keep it from getting dull. The first is the Silisili Survey in Morobe Province, named after one of the villages in the area. Hopefully none of us will get sunstroke and get too silly-silly in the head.

I’ll be going with four other team members while Katie and Tikvah hold down the office. We’ll be visiting 12-16 villages, more than I’ve ever done in one survey, but we hope to get them all done in about two weeks. We’ll fly be chopper to the head of the Watut River valley, where we anticipate hiking through some narrow gorges. We’ll follow the river down to where it slows in the flatlands. Because it’s the rainy season there have been some deadly mudslides in mountainous areas and I imagine the flatlands will be pretty swampy. Something to keep in mind for us.

Between Worlds

I think a better title for this blog would be "Between Worlds" because that is our reality... in more ways than one.

Temporally, we are certainly constantly between worlds - the US and PNG right now. In a longer perspective, we're in this world but strangers to it. We must remember that the 'road's end' is actually just the beginning of another one. We look forward to that beginning.

With more than enough to do, we'll hopefully operate this blog according to the KISS principle - keep it simple stupid. People seemed to enjoy our pics and posts on FB so we thought we’d try to see if we have enough interesting thoughts to keep a blog running. No promises ; ) If nothing else, we can revert to putting pictures of Tikvah up… they’re sure to get rave reviews!