We spent five weeks living in a Papua New Guinean village,
and the experience was more than we would EVER experience in the States! To say that life is different is just a bit
of an understatement. Life in the
village made my hardest day in America seem like a walk in the park. At the same time life in the village also
made me realize what I don’t miss about life in America- the frantic pace and
craziness of life. I hope to share what
a day in the life of our village was like.
Here is our house that we called home for 5 weeks.
This was my kitchen (haus
kuk) located next to the house.
This was our bathroom, or more accurately our toilet (lik lik haus)- located about 100 feet
from the house.
Our morning would officially begin at sunrise- around
6:30. Although the roosters typically
started waking us up at 3:30am. Whoever
started the lie that they just crowed at the crack of dawn, never had roosters
roosting in the tree outside of their hut in the middle of Papua New
Guinea!
That is the one of those roosters that gave us an early
morning wake up call. They really liked
to hide up there among the vines and trees!
Our first job was to get the fire started. The first couple of weeks, someone started
for us, but toward the end the kids were getting up in the morning and starting
our fires.
Andrew is doing the most important job of the day- heating
up the water for Mom & Dad’s coffee!
After a breakfast that consisted of pancakes, scrambled
eggs, granola & milk, or oatmeal, it was time for school. No rest for the poor kids. The mean school
teacher and principal of Ellis Institute of Higher Learning came with them to
the village. (That would be mom &
dad). Some days it was a quiet time of
doing school on the veranda. Other times
we had many additional eyes watching and learning along with us. They really enjoyed listening as I did our
daily read aloud.
This is the one and only day we did our school downstairs
under our house. It was way too
distracting!
While the kids and I were doing school, Tim would do his
best to find something to do. Anyone who
has been around Tim much knows he is not someone to just sit down and take
things easy! He has to be busy!
He managed to bring back some firewood one day. This was a tremendous achievement, and it has
nothing to do with Tim’s ability or inability.
Although he had chopped down several trees and cut more firewood than I
care to count, the men of the village rarely let him do it. The only reason he carried this back was
because he grabbed it and just left.
Most mornings he would walk to get our daily drinking
water. We have learned the value of
re-using plastic bottles to collect water!
Many times the kids of the village would follow him and bring the water
back. He confessed to me at the end of our stay that he actually
never collected the water. Someone would
always come along to do it for him.
Our
drinking water came from a stream that was about half a mile from our
village. The walk down was easy, but the
walk back, well it was a bit tougher carrying all those bottles loaded with
water uphill! Our last week or so, our
“dates” were trips down to get water.
Even then I got in the water to fill up the bottles while Tim put them
in our bilum (string bag- see the
previous picture). It usually took about
an hour to walk down to the water, fill the bottles, and then walk back. It provided a great workout!
After school it was time for lunch. We tried to keep lunch pretty simple because
we didn’t want to cook over an open fire any more than necessary. We rotated between having tuna salad on bush
crackers (think large animal crackers that are rectangular in shape), peanut
butter & jelly on bush crackers, or 2-minute noodles (think Raman noodles-
the things that only starving college students eat and I vowed to NEVER feed my
family…) We would switch things up and occasionally have the tuna or PBJ on
tortillas. Yep, lots of variety
here! Our favorite time of the day was
right after lunch- malolo (rest time)
for a half or so.
The afternoons usually meant it was time for me to wash
clothes, dishes, and bathe. For most of
the ladies in our village, it was all done in one area. My wonderful husband would go and get water
for me, so I would usually do the dishes on the veranda using two separate
tubs. A couple of times we would bring
enough water back to the house, so I could do the laundry on the veranda. So, why wouldn’t I want to take it with me to
wash? Well, this is the trail down to
the water…
Those steps tended to get a bit slippery if it had rained or
if a lot of kids had been down there playing.
The picture on the left shows the washing water from the
steps. The picture on the right is taken
looking upstream from the large rock.
The water was about 3-4 inches deep after a good rain, but that is about
it. Needless to say, it wasn’t easy to
wash clothes or bodies in this water.
We hung our clothes to dry on a clothes line. Tim made one for me outside of our haus kuk (kitchen), and then we had
additional lines under the eaves of our house for when we didn’t want that
extra “rinse” courtesy of the daily rain!
Before I knew it, it was time to prepare dinner. Again, the choices included things I NEVER
dreamed I would cook my family. We
preferred to eat before it went dark, so we cooked earlier than most of the
women in the village. This usually meant
lots of stares and inquiries, but that is for another post! Most of our meals consisted of some sort of
tin meat or canned meat- think of spam, corned beef, and things I’ve never seen
in the States. Of course the only canned
meat I had ever purchased before was tuna or occasionally the shredded chicken
when I didn’t have time to make chicken for a chicken salad.
Sometimes our evenings involved sitting with the men and
women in the village to stori (talk)
while watching all mongi (sounds like
monkey) play.
One night some of the young men would pull the kids down the
hill in front of our village on a piece of limbum
(a part of a palm). They had the best
time!
One day they brought home a pig to be roasted, which was
quite an interesting evening!
One night we showed “The Jesus Film” in Tok Pisin (the trade
language of PNG) for the entire community.
We had a generator, projector, and a white sheet on the front of a
house. It was all that was needed for a
theater.
This was just a basic example of what a day was. Of course some days we went on little
excursions. Our favorite was probably
the day we hiked up the mountain to see our friends in another village. It was well worth the 2½ mile uphill hike for
the few hours of being with friends.
Although our lives were very different than it was back in America, or
even now, there were some things that never change. Kids still argue. Husbands and wives have disagreements. (I
know that probably just destroyed everyone’s perfect little picture of the couple
that never fought or had misunderstandings.)
Kids get sick and injured. Life
goes on!
