Home: Sweet Kaiam

Here's a picture of the house at Kaiam. It has three rooms, a common
room with a kitchen sink, and two sleeping rooms with built in bunk
beds. The floor is made of sago tree bark, and the walls are tied
together fire wood planks. The roof is also made of sago tree palms.
All in all this beam and pole construction does well, but it's not
exactly the accommodations that I'm used to living in. If you picked a
spot at random in the walls or floor, you can stick a finger through
them, but at least the roof doesn't leak over my bed. The porch you see
here is pretty nice though. It has built in benches that we spend warm
afternoons and nights sitting on where we can look out over the airstrip.

The interesting thing about this type of construction (using native
materials) is that they don't last very long in these conditions. This
house is a little more than three years old (I think that's what Anton
said) and the porch is starting to sag, and the house shakes more when
people move around in it than it used to... I wouldn't know except that
Anton has mentioned this. It's getting to be an old house and it's time
to build a new one, which is what we've been doing when we can't drive
due to rain or broken machinery. It'll probably be six months or more
before the new house is built, and all we've got to show for it right
now is a big tree stump that's been removed over the last five days or so.

For those of you who would like to see the very exciting path that I
underwent to get here, here's the GPS log in all it's glory:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&msa=0&msid=111086795554757393969.000482aebb27bada3d4c0&ll=-5.200365,144.063721&spn=1.304702,2.469177&z=9
My brother has been helping me put things on the internet, and he's
pretty impressed with how this turned out, so you should take a look at
it. The journey took three days.
Day 1: From Mt. Hagen (via MAF: Mission Aviation Fellowship) to Munduku,
jump into a canoe and head upstream where we got rained out and hastily
made camp in a House Win.
Day 2: Continue up river at at the end of the day we had three options:
Continue by canoe, hike a few hours overland to Kaiam, sleep in a very
little Haus Win overnight... We chose the 3rd option.
Day 3: A few hours more by canoe and arrival at Kaiam.

Most of the trip upstream was interrupted by low water crossings that
required most of the occupants to jump out of the canoe and push it over
rocks to deeper water, then drop the motor back down and race upstream
to the next obstacle. It made for some extraordinarily long days. All
told, we covered about 40 miles by boat from Munduku to Kaiam, and the
flight was about 110 miles.