The Things We'll Miss...

As we get a little closer to the time when we will have to "go pinis" (no trouser python jokes here... go pinis = go finish = head home), we are going to miss a whole bunch of people, places and things. We'll probably cover a whole lot more of these in the coming weeks (particularly people and places) but for now we'd like to cover some of the things we're likely to miss the most...

The market: The market is something that we've been really able to enjoy (but that other Dim Dims in less safe parts of PNG have to miss out on). The best thing about the market is without doubt the fresh fruit...


Bananas!!! Year round, sweet, savory, ripe and not $13/ kg (for those of you noticing the price tags 1PNGKina ~/= 50c)


Pinapples!!! Sweet, delicious and not chemically ripened which means that they are not at all acidic like the ones we get back in Aus, they are so nice that you can and do eat the core, it is the sweetest part.


Pit Pit & Kalamansis. This young lady is selling Pit Pit (the corn looking green things) which is a sort of fibrous vegetable which is a really lovely with coconut milk, chili, tomato and ginger. She's also got Kalamansis which are a citrus fruit half way between kumquats and oranges, they go bloody well with green coconuts ("Kulau" left of shot) pineapple and just a little Cuban Rum...

There are of course other things that we'll not necessarily miss but which all contribute to making the market such a uniquely PNG experience.


Smoked Marsupial: Yeah see that cute curly little tail, that means it is a Cus Cus, a small possum-esque marsupial distantly related to endangered tree Kangaroos (and for all we know endangered themselves), these guys are taken down with GIANT slingshots, quartered, smoked and delivered to market all for the princely sum of about PNGK 4.00 per chunk...


Coral Lime: no despite the resemblance this photo isn't of a hollywood starlet or movie producers wet dream. It is in fact one of the things that is contributing to the poor dental health and alarming rates of mouth cancer in this country. An integral component to chewing betelnut (or "buai") you add this to the nut and a bit of mustard plus of course your own saliva and get ready for a buzz... of course as it is lime (which mobsters use to help bodies decompose faster) it eats away at any fatty tissue in your mouth, also the chemical reaction with the other ingredients do tend stain your teeth permanently and horribly. To make yourself some baggies simply find a coral reef and destroy it...

Also there are the occasional things that you notice on the ground near the market which make the above little beauties pale in comparison.


This is a beer bottle lid, thats right the more perceptive amongst you readers will have already followed this to its logical conclusion... In a country with poor education and a terrible amount of domestic and sexual violence the major brewery thought that they'd help out the families of PNG by offering drinkers the chance to "win school fees" that's right folks the more you drink the more chances you have of being a good father...

Our first recordings.

So. Recording has started. We went to the only functional studio in town, waited for 3 hours while there was a black out, and then decided to come back the next day. Luckily the power was back on by that time, and there followed two days of solid and quality recordings. Episode One out of the way. Or so I naively thought. Since then it has been undergoing post-production, something I have heard about many times, but being largely involved in live performances have never really had to deal with. Something which takes twice as long as the actual recording itself.
So hopefully we will have the finished product of Episode One by the end of this week!

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we will be able to use this studio for the recording of our other five episodes (that's right – FIVE MORE), so we will be exploring the land of recording and editing on our own – scary and exciting (thanks Chris for the tips on equipment). We are just hoping we can keep up the same standard and quality as that of Episode One. We are also starting to feel the pressure now as we only have around five and a half weeks in country! We can do it all in that time! That's one episode for each week, and also wanting to hear the first on broadcast on air before we leave. Trying not to feel that we're living the impossible dream!

Big thanks must also go to Cam who is as usual dealing very well with a crazy-busy Jane, making sure she eats properly etc. He is being a fabulous support! Also thanks to the Wanigili theatre group who are being patient and dealing with whatever is thrown at them. We were so busy we only got a few piccies of them recording, the one below is of the team entertaining themselves while waiting for their scene to come up.

Blackouts...

In most of the world an electrical blackout looks a little something like this...



In Alotau in the non-rainy season a blackout looks a little more like this...



Yeah I know, nice, trust me if you'd lived through 5-months of virtually non-stop rain you'd realize just how much we're owed this sort of weather. Anyhow I digress and all of you back in Australian drought land will get cross at me if I sound ungrateful for rain, so back on target*.

The thing with blackouts here is that by and large they don't mess with the majority of the population, people are still able to go to the market, to go fishing, to cut kernel at their job at the oil palm plantation, etc, etc... Most of the population of the province (~90%) don't have access to electricity anyway so even those in town can hang tough for a little while because it is kind of just like being in the village.

But why the sudden interest in blackouts? Well as it turns out you can't run a recording studio on coconut oil, and so when you have two days of blackouts (unusual here, the power was pretty reliable until the last couple of months) you end up having two days of no recording...

Two days of hair pulling frustration, two days of driving people up and down from top town to bottom town, two days of having nearly a dozen people who have been preparing for months for this waiting, watching, slipping onto ships (ok, ok, I can't back up that last one).

And most importantly two days less recording time... Which as we edge closer to the end of our year makes for an even more anxious time.

There is some good news for Cam though even as he eeks the last dying minutes out of his laptop, and can't boil the kettle for coffee all of the building sites (three) surrounding our house have generators, so they are still able to run their noisy cement mixers...



* Alotau's annual rainfail is somewhere in 3 - 5 metre range most of that falls, well, always, 5 days without rain is virtually unheardof and more than a week has people crying drought. As to the whole "well send some of the rain this way" comments, we'd be pleased to but as we all know thats not the way it works.

Happy Birthday Mr Darwin...

(Apologies and acknowledgement to Rick for being spurred by his inspiration, I also borrowed your graphic, thanks)...

Well folks late as this may be on the day itself I just wanted to wish a certain English gentleman a happy 198th birthday. Charles Darwin remains arguably the most influentual scientist in history. His work on many levels and his commitment to understanding the world we live in has directly or indrectly brought about a clarity of thought and a grasp of our reality that was impossible before his time.

In many parts of the world to day there is still a problem with understanding his "dangerous idea" PLEASE PEOPLE READ SOME DAWKINS! and there is even more sinister a desire from many people to attempt to discredit what is surely the most clearly outlined and well understood "theory" in science.

Various dissembling organizations around the world argue for equal hearing of Intelligent Design (called by some creationism in a tuxedo) along side Darwinian Evolution. With all due deference to policital correctness etc there are some things that are just plain wrong, to muddy such a clear pool of though with the ID arguments is like suggesting that the world is still flat with the sun revolving around it.

But I digress today is for celebration please look right and take in Rick latest inspirational post (his link is in our sidebar, scroll down through his posts they are awsome) and if you have time go to the Darwin Day website.

http://darwinday.org/

The world that we live in today would certianly be a better place were there more rational thinking and reason. To this end please have a look at the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science link (pictured in the sidebar) when you have the chance. Clear and Free thinking is its own reward.

The Bay Today...

This is Jane McKenzie...



As many of you may know Jane is the better half of this blogging partnership. She does all the hard work required to ensure that you folks are kept updated (as regularly as is possible over here) with witty, well written and mostly correctly spelt (sp?) adventures about our time over here in PNG.

It is a somewhat thankless task particularly when compared to Cam's contribution which basically amounts to pointing a camera that seems unable to take a bad photo (except perhaps the one above) and trying to remember which button to push.

But contrary to how it may appear on this little page we've both been doing a lot more than just flouncing around taking pictures or having our pictures taken. That's why today unbeknownst to the chief blog editor I'm hoping to give you a little bit of an insight into just what Jane is up to with her volunteer placement... and I'll let you in on a little secret, given how tricky it can be to work over here it is pretty bloody impressive.

The project Jane is working on involves developing and delivering a six-part series of radio plays exploring important social issues (HIV, good governance, domestic violence, alcoholism, gender equity and youth) for the Media for Development Initiative MDI, who have provided a grant for the project. This is and has been what can only be described as a massive effort.

Not only was there all of the paperwork required to actually receive the grant but since then it has been a sort of nineteen-part balancing act which has focused on all the necessary elements that are required to make this sort of thing work.

The principal focus has of course been on the selection and skill development of a core group of performers who will be performing for the series. You may have met some of these performers on "The Bay Today" blog (see sidebar) and you will have certainly come across a few of their performances in other posts here (see World AIDS Day {December}).

What is special about them and the whole situation is that only one of them has had any previous acting experience. For the whole group to have progressed to where they are; recording scripts, improvising and working together as an ensemble is a pretty massive achievement. These folks have varying levels of education and natural talent but their development as actors (which is so impressive given the innate shyness of most people in Milne Bay) can be traced (in my completely unbiased opinion) back to learning from some one who takes such joy in learning herself. Jane has jumped headlong into improvisational theatre workshops stopping only for breath and the occasional glance at a Keith Johnstone book for inspiration.

It probably won't surprise you to hear that that is not such an easy thing to do here. There are cultural barriers about interactions between the sexes (heavily biased towards the uglier hairier half) and there are also very strong (but not necessarily clear) hierarchies established in all situations based on relatedness, station in life and age. There is also a strong directive from pretty much the whole community which could be paraphrased as "Don't show off, don't be a smarty pants and unless you have heaps of money and a good position don't be confident". With this as the case Jane who is not only female but is also the youngest member of the group (a group comprised largely of men and entirely of people who really don't fit the "be confident" category outlined above) has managed to work wonders.

But she has had some help, so just in case you thought that this was just a shout-out for my lady only you must of course remember Jane's counterpart Maxine...



Yeah well, apart from the amazing ability to be caught on camera looking silly these ladies have in common a serious dedication to their work and their group (they are also helped in equal measure by Beatrice from EMB management but I {un?}-fortunately don't have a photo of Bea worthy of this post... sorry.)

At the moment all of the team are super-busy with the writing, rewriting, translating, formating, and recording of scripts not to mention the rehearsing, timetabling and writing of lesson plans, all up it is bloody hectic.

The thing that I want to emphasize here is this huge amount of work is going towards the issues mentioned above that touch almost every single person in this town (and most likely country) on a personal level. The lack of gender equity is enormous and it's natural consequence, domestic violence, quite frankly makes me sick. PNG is amongst the worlds worst in terms of domestic violence and sexual violence against women and children (for more information about this from someone who is working more directly in the field check out our link to our friend Carolyn's blog on the right we've called it "kickass blog from a kickass chick", but it's official title is "Pink Ukelele" it is also good for some great rants and laughs).

With the way that all of these problems are well know and recognized in the public eye (by community members and politicians) it is nothing short of horrible to find that perhaps the most trying problem that the project has faced thus far centers around political / bureaucratic power tripping. Without going into too much detail or dragging this out there is a perfect and I mean PERFECT facility in this town available for recording, editing and broadcasting this program (and many would argue built with development donor aid money for exactly this sort of purpose!). The facility basically sits idle (as it has done for the past 3 years) because of the bureaucratic muscle flexing of whoever decides they are in charge of it when someone asks to use it. The girls are currently as diplomatically as possible trying to explore all the correct channels to secure use of this facility. While they do so the province's one radio station (whose broken down studio would make Guglielmo Marconi's facilities look state of the art) sits in the shadow of this new and basically unused edifice, a testament to both the incredible dedication of some people (Radio Milne Bay) and the incredible short-sightedness of others (the powertrippers).

But I should stop now as this is becoming a rant and if you want a rant you should either go to Carolyn's blog (see right) or bloody email or call me in person and then I'll see what I can do. The thing is that I guess I wanted to dedicate this little post to the Girls and Guys working towards the radio-drama project (particularly to Jane; she's dreeeeamy she's a dream-boat ; ) ). I also wanted to just let you know how bad some of these issues are up here, and to remind all of you out there in sweet-access-to-internet-land (the developed world) how lucky you are to never have to think about, let alone experience many of these issues. So maybe today give to a charity or read up on some of these issues (not just for PNG but for your own country) and also finish up with a look at a photo that I hope the girls are a little more likely to approve of...



P.S. Janey don't get cranky at me for such a text heavy post... It is probably for the best that I didn't put in too many more photos...

Cam Adds a Touch of Class

Even though it is a small place, Alotau has it’s fair share of social events, and in order to relieve any cabin fever we might get from being in the house too much, we try and get ourselves to these events occasionally. Most recently one of the local establishments advertised a wine tasting night. As we don’t often see that much wine around the idea was intriguing. We were considering attending, when a slip of the tongue found Cam committed to hosting the event. Apparently working in a bottle shop throughout uni made him the most qualified person in town

So of course, we had to go.



As you can see the set up was rather nice (this was taken before the people started to arrive). And this would have to be the most wine bottles we’ve seen in any of the local pubs/establishments in the whole time we’ve been here. PNG would have to be one of the only places where it is socially accepted to serve cask wine at important functions, regardless of who is in attendance. The red wine was even left out of the fridge (as per Cam’s request) so as to be at room temperature for the tasting. A real classy event.



Overall the night was a success. Cam did a great job of hosting, using all those wine words (tannin, oak, residual sugar) and knowing what they meant (more than most of us did). Jane did a great job of heckling and having extra tastings of the wine – just to make up for the small-sips-only approach that Cam had to take given his professional demeanour and after his recent bout with malaria. And she loved dressing up in the dress Maxine gave her for Christmas – we all need a classy event to dress up for occasionally!