Moving dirt...

The old fashioned way...

This photos seems like such a simple photo, but there's a lot going on
here. For one, take a look at the muscles on this guy... Most of the
guys in the Penale are cut like him. I would be too if I worked as hard
as the people do here to survive everyday. Cutting firewood, getting
food, traveling over rough terrain... It's no picnic.

Next, notice the small bilum bag hanging around his neck and slung onto
his back. Even though Kaiam is a "safe" community, no one ever puts
their possessions down. Bui, tobacco, matches or a butane lighter, and
a flashlight are very commonly found in these little bilums.

The traditional clothing for the Penale people usually consists of the
leaves that you see here, some sort of vine to go around the waist, and
a small piece of fabric called a lap-lap (no idea on the spelling, but
that's how it sounds) in front. More often though it seems like you see
the multiple windings of some sort of twine or wire and western style
shorts, but the leaves are still present. Also, you can tell that this
guy doesn't live directly in the Kaiam area because of the type of twine
around his waist. If I was more familiar with the people groups I could
tell you exactly where he comes from. Some other differences are
braided rope worn around the forehead, different styles of lap-laps, arm
bands, and many more that I can't think of right now. Pretty unique no
matter who you look at, but they all tend to be similar if they're from
the same people group.

The other thing to not overlook is the bright green colors and the side
lighting in this photo. It could have been a little better if you could
see a little more of his face, but the main reason I point out the
actual photo is just that I really tried to make sure the greens came
out the way they should on this photo... Hopefully now that I figured
out the process the other hundred photos in this same folder/location
will be edited much more quickly and you'll see more photos of Kaiam in
the near future... Or we can all hope so...

Mambis Antics

So when's the last time you were driving across the road and found out that someone had dug a ditch across the road?  Never?  I can't say the same as some boys from town decided that they didn't want people from the next village over driving the short way.  Now that village has to make an hour drive (or more) to get to their home.  It's a pretty strange thing to do, but it seems to make a lot of sense to the people around here.  I really don't understand Engans.

Carring Rocks

Ok, the last post didn't make it sound like the guys ever have to do any work.  They just happen to have to do slightly different work.  Here we see six guys who have built a rock carrier in order to move these large stones from the river up to the airstrip to be used as foundation points for a house.  Unfortunately they have to walk about fifty meters horizontally, and twenty meters vertically to get from the riverbed up to the airstrip.  And it's not an easy walk.  Again I find myself unable to do it with less than one hand out in front of me to keep from sliding back down the muddy bank.  These guys just dig their toes into the clay and get to the top quicker than I can just carrying myself!  Everything here seems to be more work that it's worth, but this will keep the house supports from rotting as they won't be buried directly into the ground, so a little (a lot?) more work now keeps the house (hopefully) from falling down in three years, which is typically the time that a traditional house lasts in the bush. 

Can you imagine building a new house every three years with just a bush knife and an axe to aid you?  That probably partly explains why houses here are so small and typically don't have any siding.

Penale Girl

It's amazing how much the kids at Kaiam like to get their picture taken.  Even most of the adults will give you a thumbs up or even jump up and down when they know that you've got a camera pointed in their direction.  This really doesn't work for me because I much rather prefer to have shots of people when they are doing their normal things and not acting strange.  However, I am a sucker for a cute girl. 

This girl was with her mom at our house at Kaiam who was busy weeding the area around the house footprint.  Since it's pretty easy to grow certain types of foods here, really anywhere is a garden and we have coconut, banana, guava, and many other edible plants all around our house.  Usually the mothers get the kids that can't really walk away from them, and the girls usually stick pretty close.  The boys, however, once they can keep up, or mostly keep up with the other kids, are off rampaging around the jungle.  The men typically are off doing their own thing as well, smoking, or chewing bui (beetle nut). 

Meanwhile the moms come by with two shovels slung over a shoulder, a bilum bag with some essentials, like the day's food, a baby in another bilum, both strapped to their foreheads and another kid usually alternating between one arm and a breast...  I'm in awe of these women.  I can't hardly walk with my water bottle because the heat causes me to drip sweat so badly I can't see where to put my feet on the slick slopes.  Yet they trudge up and down with apparent ease.  I'm reminded every time I leave the front porch just how much of an uncoordinated ape I really am...  Quite humbling really...

Cus-Cus (Tree Kangaroo)

Another example of Papua New Guineans coming to the door with interesting animals.  This time it was at Kaiam and this guy is a Tree Kangaroo.  I think they look a heck of a lot like the Ewoks from Starwars.  This guy became our pet at Kaiam, and last I know he hadn't become stew yet. 

His cage started out underneath the house, but as I was spending the afternoon on the computer I heard this terrible scratching noise coming from just outside the window.  The tree kangaroo had climbed out of his cage and was quickly moving across the firewood siding towards the sac-sac roof, which already has enough leaks in it that an animal larger than a gecko poses quite a threat to it's structural integrity.  The conversation at this point went something like this:

Me: Jeff!... Jeff! Your animal is getting away!
Jeff: Wah? 
Me: Get to the window, I'll pull him down.
Jeff: How? He? The?
Me: Ok (grabbing his tail) he's coming down, catch him.
(at this point, not realizing that the claws of these guys are pretty sharp to hold onto trees, I got my reward for grabbing his tail and he fell ten feet to the ground... but just like a cat landed on all fours)
Me: Grab him!
Jeff: Ack, he'll scratch me!

Ok, so it was really funny at the time, even with a bloody stump.

Later that afternoon the lik-lik cus-cus was built a proper home, and lives happily just outside of reaching distance... for both him and me... ;-)

Kaiam Airstrip

Here's the business end of the Kaiam airstrip as it looked on June 8th, 2010.  Hopefully I'll actually be motivated to upload the panorama pictures of the whole airstrip (which means that I'll need to stitch them together first)...  I've been back in Mambis for about a month and I still haven't gone through all the photos and video that I took while down in the Penale.  Since we only have solar pannels for power, and my computer is an energy hog I figured that I'd just put all my photos onto an external hard drive and do the actual work of going through them when I got back to the hydro power in Mambis.  What I didn't figure on was taking so many photos that I can't put them all on my computer at once...  Yeah, my 250Gb hard drive computer had about 30Gb free when I got back from Kaiam and not all the photos from the trip would fit.  I think I shot close to twice that.

Anyway, the airstrip here was soaking from a good rain overnight so we were unable to drive that morning.  Instead we spent the morning waiting for the sun to restore the wet, sloppy clay to a sticky goo that we can actually drive on without making too many ruts.  The amount of rain that the Penale gets is amazing.  I want to put up a small weather station to record it, but that's a story for another time.

The rain is also just as lacking in the dry season as it was prevalent during the rainy season.  The guys that are down there currently tell me, over the radio, that the sun has been baking the clay into bricks so that the stone we were breaking up with the big tractor is indistinguishable from the regular clay that needs to be moved.  In other words the top surface of our airstrip has been fired into pottery.  Instead of hoping it stops raining so we can get some work down, they're hoping for some rain to loosen up the soil so they can get some work done.  Such harsh conditions no matter which way you look at it.

Dragonfly

Would it seem strange to you if you watched a grown man walking around with his camera gear following bugs?  Well? Ok, I'm that freak... for some reason I just really like taking pictures of insects, and when you see this picture I hope that you'll understand why.  I really like this photo.  It reminds me of the photos that you see in the insect identification books.

In Kaiam there are plenty of "bugs" to take photos of... half the time you're more interested in swatting at them rather than pointing a lens at them, but you get the idea.  The last week or so that we were in the Penale the dragonflies came out in pretty amazing numbers and pretty soon my 16Gb card was full of photos and video, not only from the local dragonfly populations, but also of several types of insects that I'm not really sure how to classify yet.  I'm hoping to get a PNG insect book to help me out with that identification problem, but I haven't come across any stores with that type of thing in Mt. Hagen yet.

Internet at Mambisanda Hospital

Slowly but surely the modern conveniences of the western world are making their presence known in PNG.  While most people here don't own their own computer, or have ever even sat down to use one (I watched a friend of mine using a computer for the first time and, after I opened a word processor, it took him ten minutes to type the first line of his mailing address).  A two minute walk from where this picture was taken gets you back to the more traditional grass roofed houses, lack of indoor plumbing, and no electricity.  But the prevalence of such things like cellphones is quite astonishing.  Not quite as bad as the third graders having cell phones in the US, but just about.  I would say that about 70% of the adults have cellphones, even if they don't have electricity they will walk to somewhere that they can plug into the 240V power system, even if it's by 'hot wiring' the phone into the overhead lines.  Such is the dichotomy of Enga.

Majestic Bird of Paradise

One of the amazing things in PNG is the fact that people bring things to your door that you just don't see anywhere except the National Geographic magazines, or on the Nature shows.  This Majestic Bird of Paradise arrived at my door unannounced one afternoon and I had to take photos of it.  The long tail feathers still trip me out.

Enga Roads

Is the road bad where you live?  That pothole that you hit that you know is there, but never seem to avoid?  Well, this picture is an example of the roads that I drive in Enga.  Off to the right of the picture you will see an 18-wheeler semi-truck on it's side because it slipped off the edge of the road.  But this was good news because if it would have slipped off the other side and rolled like it did, it would have been about sixty feet down. 

On these roads in general you can drive in second gear, and if you're some what reckless, you shift into third like the PMV drivers and fly over all the potholes.  I don't really know how fast second or third gear is because I'm forced to dodge to the right side of the road in order to avoid something... And we drive on the left in PNG...

Dr. Steve's Memorial

Well, Dr. Steve Lutz's Memorial was a few weeks ago in Mambisanda, but it was pretty good.  There were lots of people there and it was fairly short overall... so I think it suited just fine.  At one point they had all the groups from around Enga that were in attendence stand up and, while I don't remember now where everyone was from, there were many, many groups there.  The good Dr. will certainly be missed, but only for this lifetime.