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.

Tractor bearing

Well, you know there's a problem with your tractor when the wheel stops
turning. And all these loose pieces of metal may be part of the problem.

Anton and I have had a few dry-ish days in the last week we've been at
Kaiam and have gotten some dirt moved from the hill over to the fill
spot. Yesterday was a little bit wet, but we decided to work through it
anyway. After we'd been working for about an hour we had chewed up the
soft ground pretty well and the little scraper being pulled by Anton in
the little tractor was having trouble navigating the ravines. So I came
through with the loader tractor to smooth out a little spot for him to
drive through. After clearing one pass for him, I was waiting for him
to go through and I was going to clear the rest of the area for him, but
when he tried to pass by me, his right rear tire didn't want to turn.
We call this a bad day. After a few tries forward and back, it loosened
up and he was able to drive (slowly) back to the shed where he took of
the wheel and found the resulting situation.

It looks like the bolts had loosened themselves, allowed all the oil to
drain out, resulting in a hot bearing and the pieces you see here that
remain. Down one tractor.

It's crazy hot here today... more than usual. Most nights it cools off
and we've got a refreshing breeze, but last night we had heavy cloud
cover (with some rain) and no breeze and today the humidity is through
the roof and I'm literally dripping sweat from my elbows as I type
this... And I don't usually drip. Today will probably be a great day
for a swim in the river.

Sac-sac and fish

Well, it may not look too appealing, but it was actually pretty good.
Sac-sac (I'm not sure how it's spelled, but that's what it sounds like)
is one of the staple foods here and it's made from the mashed, washed
insides of the Sago tree. It's a very strange powder when it's "dry"
because it's a lot like corn meal as it will hold a shape and can be
packed together fairly well. As soon as it gets a little wet though it
becomes very runny. The way you cook it is quite complex: take a
handful of sac-sac and place it in a frying pan over the fire and squish
it into the pan... flip when ready. It becomes the only food (that I'm
aware of) that is both sticky and crumbly... I know, I didn't think that
was possible either! When it's well cooked it becomes translucent and
sticky, like those sticky hand things you get in the $0.50 eggs at the
supermarket. We had some the other night that was cooked inside bamboo
and it was nearly all translucent... yummy translucent worms... As far
as taste, well it doesn't really have any, but I had to drink about a
liter of water for the amount of sac-sac you see here in this photo, so
I guess it's a great food to eat to keep from getting dehydrated! It's
actually pretty tasty with a good layer of salt. As they say: more salt
to make it sweet... well, at least they say that here... lol

Trip to Kaiam

Well, it took about three days, fifteen hours of travel time, forty
miles, and dozens of pushes of the canoe to travel from Munduku to
Kaiam. Anton and I left Mambis on Monday morning at five, drove to Mt.
Hagen and got onto an MAF flight to Munduku. It was only about an hour
flight between the two, but we traveled about a hundred miles in that
time. We weren't on the ground more than ten minutes before Anton had
his hands greased up in the tractor there that was misbehaving. It
looked like when they had changed engine and transmission oil, they only
put 6L into the engine, and 6L into the transmission. Not only was that
not enough oil to keep the transmission from making an awful racket, but
it also wasn't enough to be able to use the hydraulics on the machine to
lift the 3-point in the back... We told them they needed more like 40L
for that tractor.

We then started to load the motor canoe full of our gear and then looked
at a powered lawnmower that wouldn't walk by itself, or spin the
blade... The belts had become loose, so we tightened them and it was
back up and running. A little while later we had to get fuel for that
motor, so we stopped at THE fuel drum to get a few liters for our trip
up river. They had a hand pump in order to transfer fuel from the drum
to our containers, but they had to measure how much they were taking
out, so it went into another container, then was hand pumped from that
container into ours... Another guy though he had a faster way, so he
took a few 5L jugs and a hose and tried to do a gravity siphon. He put
one side in the barrel, and started sucking on the other side, but it
apparently wasn't working to his satisfaction, so he takes out the other
side, puts the side he had in his mouth into the barrel, and proceeds to
get the siphon working by sucking on the now fuel covered end.

There's a saying that came up at some point... "It's a wonder they made
it into the stone age"... Not very nice, but given the tenancy to do
not so bright things, it does make you think... and it's truly a wonder
that we made it to Kaiam (safely) at all...

The GPS data for the flight, and trip up the river will follow in
another post, but I figured I should post something sooner rather than
later. And one last thing: If I thought that Mambis was hot at close to
6000' elevation, Kaiam at around 800' is sweltering... Even in the
shade I'm sweating and everything ... EVERYTHING is wet... and not just
damp, but ring out water wet. It's no wonder the airstrip has taken ten
years to get to the point it's at now. With all that water and clay
mixing it's going to be a lot of hard work to complete.