Happy New Years

It is NEW YEARS DAY here in PNG and we are on our way to the village to goto church and have a meal with a friend and his family. When I say family here it does not mean nuclear family, it generally means everyone that you can think of that is in any way related to you... Any way in honor of the oddity that is New Years I have posted a picture of Mae holding the strangest carrot that I have ever seen. I bought it at the market yesterday. It was in a pile with a bunch of other carrots.

(put some pants on that carrot!!!)

Give it Away

      Ok, so I (matt) have been tagged in. This whole idea of the wantok system and askims is very interesting. Yesterday tiff told you that wantoks are people that speak the same language as you and this is very true especially when you are in your own region of the country. When you are outside your region of the country then your wantok is anyone who is from a village that is close to yours. So, when you are in your "asplace" (they say the place your rear end first touched the ground) people from the next village may be your enemy but when you are in another region in the country that same person is your wantok because you are neighbors. I taked to two men who live in Port Moresby (the capitol city) for whom this is the case.

{kundok}

     So, you are  obligated to help your wantoks if they ask you. If you have something (money, food, housing, ect.) that they need then you have to give it to them. One of the simplest and most vivid examples of this that i can think of is a time that Kundok and I went to a patch of mango baui trees that he had ontop of the mountain. It was about an hour and a half walk to get there. We picked a hand of these buai (about 20 pieces) and began to walk back. It is worth noting that a mango buai gets its name because it is the size of a small mango  (4 times the size of a normal baui) and are very prized for this reason. As is usual with most trips of this nature in PNG we did not take the shortest route there and chose an even longer route home because he wanted to visit his sister's garden. Along the walk back we encountered several groups of people from our village each of who asked if he had any baui. Each time he reached into his bilum and gave each person one of these mango buai. We got to the garden and sat down and ate some of stuff that they had picked out of the garden and cooked on the fire. His sisters and one of their husbands asked for buai, from which he freely gave again. I should say that he also asked for some produce for our family and for him and we left with so much that we had to borrow another bilum from them to carry it. We passed more people on the way home and they asked and he gave. By the time we got back to the village and he didn't have any left. He only chewed one or two pieces and the rest he gave away. But by the same token I have seen him ask plenty of times and people give to him without hesitation.

{Rita (Kundok's sister) and Rolins (Matthew's friend)}

     The other word I used earlier was "askim". It is usually called "askim tasol". This is simply when someone who is not your wantok whom you don't have a relationship with asks you for something. It is not a big deal to them if they get it or not -they are just trying. The easiest example of this is when I get at least one text a week on my cell phone asking for 1 or 2 two kina to be transfered to thier phone. I have no idea who they are and don't reconize the numbers. This is a culturally acceptable thing to do and sometimes people will give it to you but you are then obligated to them too.

-matt

The Market

{Ikey at the market}

the market in Songum reminds me of children playing store. i don't think anybody really makes a profit. and i don't think making money is the point. it's more for fun than anything. the customers are your neighbors (and visitors from Yonglum, the closest villiage to Songum). they give away as much as they sell.

if, for instance, my children really wanted some peanuts but didn't have 20 toya the lady selling peanuts would give them a 20 toya coin so that they could "buy" nuts from her. or the boys selling mangoes would remember that Si really loves mangoes so they  would slide a mango in Sisi's bilum as he walked by.

{selling buai at Songum market}

the reason for this is that it is not culturally appropriate to get ahead by making money on your "wantok"or one talk-meaning people who speak the same language (wantok has other meanings too). also culturally if you have somthing that someone else wants or needs and they ask for it you have to give it away...

i'm getting off subject now- i'll cover more on giving in PNG later...

xo-tiffany

drum oven

{dough rising on our "kitchen counter"}

one of my favorite memories of villiage life was teaching the Songum ladies how to bake bread in a drum oven. a drum oven is a homemade contraption made of sheet metal and such. [matt of course made ours]

{finished bread in the drum oven}

i knew i had truly been accepted into villiage life when my poro (friend) from next door told me that we were going to make bread and sell it at the market. it was an ENORMOUS hit. we sold half of it before we even got to the market. the rest sold out in 5 minutes.

{selling our bread in the market}

my friend, Beti decided that a fair price for 1/2 a slice of bread with margerine would cost 20 toya (around 7 cents US). our total after selling out was around 6 kina or $2 US which we split between us. the market is obviously not a money making event..

more on that next time~

xo-tiffany

Merry Christmas from PNG

(bilums hung by our fireplace waiting on Santa)

   I know for most of you it is still Christmas Eve but it is Christmas day for us so Merry Christmas. We hung our bilums on the mantle this year and guess what, Santa still came and filled them up. Thanks to all of you who made this first PNG Christmas special for us. My PNG friend Paul is going to come over later and then we are going to eat with some friends from the states. Have a blessed day. Happy birthday Jesus!!!

                                        Matt

Statement of clarification

I feel like I need to make a little clarification about the story below after reading through. The Christians in this story are not representative of all Christians in Papua New Guinea. There are Christians here for which syncratism is not an issue (even in this village). And again these folks do not yet have a Bible in their heart language which makes deeper level Christianity more difficult.

The Spirits of the Water

     Alright this is kind of a difficult one to explain but it is so critically important in understanding spirituality in Papua New Guinea and syncratism in general. As many of you have heard most of us got a pretty nasty rash shortly after we got to the village, some of us (Tiffany) worse than others. I wish I could show you the pictures of her rash but I promised not to. The rash went on getting worse for about a week. The nurse from the training center was supposed to be coming to visit in another 5 days or so. So we were trying to hold out.
     But someone in the village noticed first and we became the topic of much discussion and inspection. There were two trains of thought as to what the problem was. The first was that there is a grass that grows beside the water called pitpit and it has very fine needles on it. When it rained the water would come up washing the needles off the pit pit along with other irritants (aka. masong) and then we would bathe in the masong and get this nasty rash. The other line of thought was that the spirits of the water didn't like us because we were new and they were causing the rash. I should mention at this point that there were some other white skins from our training class bathing in the same river about 1.5K down river and they were not having any problems.
    Finally, the oldest man in the village (wasmama's father)(pictured below) came to see for himself. After a short examination he decided to go with the spirits in the water. His speech was very slurred and my tok pisin was very bad at this point so I did not understand this. He quickly decide on a remedy that involved some counter magic (which I didn't understand either) and plants.

(Me and the oldest man in the village)

   I should also say that I don't believe that this man or wasmama were Christians. Neither one of them would even go near the church and they would disappear when the pastor came around. But some of the people that helped with what I am about to describe were Christians and here in lies the problem.

     We thought that he was doing some basic bush medicine with locally available plants (this is often very effective) but it turned out to be more than that. First he got one of the young men to cut the plant from the bush and bring it to him. He broke off a small piece and began to mumble to it in his tok place so I was not able to understand him, even if my tok pisin was better. Then he gave the piece to the young man who passed it around our heads. He spoke to it again. And then instructed the young man to chew it up and spit it on us in a fine mist. He did this then, the old man rubbed it in. And the whole thing was done. If you are interested it didn't help at all.

    So the real problem here was not that they thought that the spirits of the water were doing this to us. I believe that this is a real possibility, especially since the people down river were not effected at all. You see they believe that these spirits are very localized and they live under certain rocks in certain areas. The pit pit idea is also very plausible and I saw the needles myself. The real problem is where they believe power resides. Do you believe that these spirits are more powerful than the God that you claim to serve and so you have to revert to ancestral magic to try to control them. Or do you believe that the God that you serve is more powerful than anything that Satan can throw at you and that he hears and answers your prayers. This is where having the Bible in your heart language is so valuable, where its transformational effects can be truly experienced in a persons day to day life.

    This is getting really long but we left the village for a few days, bathed in rain water while we were gone, and prayed. We got better. When we returned to the village we brought drinking water up to the house for Tiffany, Silas and Evie to bathe in. The rest of us continued to bathe in the river and we all got better. Praise be to God.