Bogia and the North Road
Trip Start
Feb 06, 2008
1
14
22
Trip End
Ongoing
Madang,
Papua New Guinea
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Here we continue with the round of school visits and we are now in the stage of looking towards deadlines to push for some changes by the end of the school year. Experienced hands tell us this is the height of optimism and lesser objectives are all that is in sight. There is a major staffing upheaval here every year, so we are looking with care to see who is staying and going in the schools on our patch, and of course there should be more volunteers as the programme is due to expand in 2009. We know enough to be able to see who works hard and who does not, but we do not know enough to understand why they choose teaching as a job and what their motivations are
Mildred Malangan our neighbour and friend.
. We had 3 student teachers at the school who were very clear at what they wanted to do with their lives, and two saw the teaching as a way of accumulating some money to start businesses which would be used to provide for the whole family. And the whole family can be a very big thing here. Your wontak takes all relatives and can be fantastically supportive as they help each other, but it can also be like a leech and suck the rewards out of the effort of one hard working person(not my words but the words of a PNG worker). Some people stay very close to their family, others deliberately move as far away as they can. We got back to Bogia for a two week stay and it was nice to be in one place for a while. The walls have been replaced, and the new fly screens are due to be put on, but the white ants have re-emerged in the bathroom so Reuben(the man!) has more work to due as he tries to quell the tide.A chunk of the time was spent on domestic bits, and then we tried to follow up some of the training that has been done before. All was not well and some of the staff are definitely not pulling their weight...this is a recurring theme in all the schools in the province..staff absenteeism is a major problem and when we were in class it is noticeable that some classes miss a lot of their teaching time as staff go walkabout.
We had an interesting time in Karkar when the school guest house was full so we got moved to a place called Kaviak which is on the next coconut plantation, owned by an Australian family called the Middletons. They were very friendly and helpful, and there were lots of stories of life on the island before, during and since the war. The family is into a third generation as working plantation owners, and they have a wide range of experiences. Brett is a real story teller, and has a string of tales about workers, trees, water,boats, fishing, and of course crocodiles
Our home in Bogia.
. There is a big croc skin on the wall over the bar in their house, the croc was shot on the island. Apparently they live up the freshwater creeks in the marshes and go down to the sea at night to hunt. ..shades of Dundee! (Brett even looks like him) We went over to Karkar in the copra boat again, slow but safer than the speed boat, and that meant we met the old man of the Goodyear family who has been on the island running he shipping for ages...we think 40-50 years but the stories get confusing. He has a bungalow which looks like a museum inside as he is a collector of furniture and prints, and the sort of navigation and brass instruments which were used in the 1800s. Once again a friendly and helpful character with stories to tell and we really enjoyed meeting him.
Back on the mainland we have a week off between term 3 and 4. The school had to close early because of no ground water as there has been hardly any rain and the ground pump as broken(fated) They are having new wells drilled and a new pump and storage tank built so hopefully that will correct the water problem, and the fence should be put up as well so that will change the security position. On our week off Pam flew to Port Moresby for a conference for agencies dealing with HIV/AIDS. She came back with a sore throat and a mind buzzing with all the things she had heard and people she had met. Lots and lots of contacts and interesting ideas
Practical skills, building 'a win haus'.
. When we went back to Bogia last time we went in the 4x4 from the office as Gabriel, the office accountant, was driving. He has a daughter boarding in one of our schools, so he made a day out with his wife and family, visited his daughter and his brother, and took us back as well. It was one of our best trips back and we are hoping that it is the sort of trip we can get again. Coming doen to Madang was not so good. The minibus got a puncture about 2 hours out from Madang and there was more than a little nervousness as they fitted a spare which would have been on the scrap heap in UK, not on the vehicle. Anyway we got back in time and there were no hassles. I think there are going to be a lot of travel stories in this job.
People are also part of the stories. We are having extra pisin lessons from Esron, who is a waiter at the Lodge , also studying business studies part time for a diploma. He is very conscientious about teaching us and he takes it all very seriously. It will do us a lot of good if we can get a grasp of the language. The locals certainly appreciate an effort to speak, and are very helpful but often they lapse into English which they are very keen to practice. When we went to the local tourist centre, the haus tambuna, to arrange a trip, the two security guards showed us round and were very helpful even when the place was supposed to be closed. They took down all the details and said that there was no problems. When I came back on the Monday there were lots of staff, including an English speaking Japanese volunteer, and the place was open, but the security men had not passed on our messages and nothing had been organised at all. This was all taken very calmly in a relaxed and friendly manner and there was no doubt something could be arranged and there was no hurry...sounds about right!
The haus tambuna is a nice sized small museum, just right really, full of local artifacts which were confiscated off a german anthropologist who wanted to take it all home. So the customs hung on to it and it ended up in the museum. Fascinating stuff with some enormous dancing masks and lots of stone age materials which was in use in the 1950s...change has happened very quickly here and there is still a long way to go.
