Going to the Garden- Part 1

     Well, tiff caught me. Apparently she talked about going to the "klostu gaden" in the "bananas in the morning..." post and said that I was going to talk about going to the "antap gaden" later. Now is later so here we go. I spent a good deal of time going to gardens. They go to the garden almost every day. The day that tiff and the kids went to the klostu gaden the men went to the antap gaden. The picture below is the view of the womens, kids, pots, and clothes bathing spot. If you look off in to the distance the mountain that is fading off into the clouds in the far right is where the garden tiff went to is. The garden that we wnet to was almost that far again. They told tiff that she couldn't go up there because she had so many little kids. It should be said that there is a perception amoung all people from PNG that whiteskins are soft and just can't hang with hard work. So they tend to baby you and try to protect you. We spent a lot of time early on trying to dispell this sterotype and let people know that we were not afraid of work. We were pretty successful and they allowed us to do more than most.

{"klostu gaden" near the far right mountain}

     The day that waspapa decided to break me in on the garden was one of the big days for new gardens. We went to his "taro kong kong" (a root vegtable originating in asia) garden. It was the day that all the holes for planting had to be made. As I said before almost every job has a gender and making the holes is masculine. Planting the kong kong is a female job.

     Making the holes is called "brukim graun". All the men get a small log about 4 or 5 inches in diameter and about 6 feet long and sharpen one end. They all go out onto the field that is on the side of a steep mountain and choose a section. Then they begin to take this log and drive it into the ground repeatedly  until they have made a hole that is about 10-12 inches deep and 6-8in.  wide.Then you move on to the next hole until the whole mountainside is covered with these holes about 2 feet apart. Upon finishing waspapa made his distinct call (not words but kind of a woop) to let the women know that we were finished and were comming down and that it was their time to come up and plant. We all sat down in the shade for a little while and then went down to the base of the mountain. What happened next was another great cultural experience that I will tell you about tommrow.

matt