And one more for the long weekend…

Proper soaking rain tonight for the past 5 hours – still going strong. Lightening all around. Cracking thunder. New security guard. Quiet house. Quality chocolate (ta Jen!). And one (just one tonight) cheap G&T. New Year’s weekend winds down to a very quiet ending... Oh well, at least there’s electricity tonight!

Back to the grind of the year-end (December) workings tomorrow – but another kinda short week. Getting some new staff members going over the next 2 weeks, which (very!) hopefully works out well.

Think I’ll go off the air for a bit whilst this bevy of accounting and (hopefully also time for) traveling to other diocese is in train over January - be good now y’all.

How to make a blackout work for you

Or should I say… it worked out alright for me. Last night (which at the time was the evening of new years day) was one of the longer blackouts we’ve had for a while – power went off around 3:30pm or so, and came on for about 10 seconds at a time for the next 2 hours… I think we got another half-hour of power around 6:30, which charged the phone system here for a Sunday phone call (Sunday all day is the only ISD off-peak call-rates day – meaning you pay nasty rates, but not quite as nasty as usual). Still only managed a 10 minute call before the power cut out entirely again! So there I was, reading by my 2 candles for an hour or two – getting hungry, but I this night I couldn’t be bothered cooking in the dark. Just when I was starting to think “gee – I need to buy more candles”, Alex & Jonika dropped by on the way back from somewhere to invite me over to sit out the blackout. Huzzah!

So there were some batteries in my I-Pod still, and in an I-Pod that A&J had been given for Chrissy… and there was also a little hand-held radio-tuner running on batteries. An I-trip later, and there was party central by candle-light in central Lae on new years night. Heh… was the best dance I’ve had in ages! Not very PNG perhaps, but the i-pods made for a very, very good NY’s day dance.

Oh yeah – and the power came back on sometime inbetween as well.

((Jeremy, them’s a lot of good songs in that i-pod you’ve passed on there! - - Roger, the present was well used!))

West Papua - Just a footnote…?

Just finished re-reading “Paradise Betrayed” (thanks for the loan A), one the good n toffee-like Quarterly Essay’s. I read most of this one ages ago and consigned it to a footnote, as you do. Once I’d started rereading it this time though, I couldn’t put it down... it’s very, very well done – and (in many ways) dispassionately written... like only some journalists can do.

There are some friends back in Melbourne have supported fundraisers etc. for some Free West Papua groups… but how much do we consign these struggles to a footnote? Probably ‘as much as we need to’ if you’re in a generous mood. And probably ‘as much as we can’ if you’re in a self-righteously-chardonnay-type angry mood like I find myself after finishing reading the essay. All that said, I’m not grandstanding, I still know very little, am no expert, and all that stuff. But here’s a quick blog.

Population of West Papua-: Maybe 2.3million
Cereal Box History-:
1960’s – Under pressure from Kennedy during the Cold War, West Papua ‘given’ to Indonesia – originally a Dutch colony.
1963 – broad based uprisings since the Indons arrived – somewhere between 80,000 to 200,000 people killed.
1969 – Indonesians chose 1026 representatives from an indigenous population of 814,000 people to vote for “The Act of Free Choice” signing them into Indonesia. Former UN dudes, and everyone else really, agree later it was a total sham.
1969-early 70’s – refugees arriving to PNG.
1977 – Uprising/unrest again (more so than usual), put down by Indonesians.
1999 – Arrival of troops in East Timor, September 1999.
2000 – Revenue from the West Papua Freeport Gold & Copper mine listed at US$1,868,610,000 – the largest gold and 3rd largest copper mine in the world… and Indonesia’s largest tax-payer.

Differences in history to East Timor? Well, besides the biggest mine in the world, here’s a bit as written by John Martinkus in that QEssay:

The repressive strategy being played out in West Papua by the Indonesian authorities is an intimately familiar one. Only the most blinkered and partisan supporter of Jakarta could refuse to admit to the culpability of the Indonesian military in 1999, an event that forced the Australian government in the end to act decisively to end to the violence under massive Aust. public pressure. Now, as the same Indonesian commanders… are moving towards a comparable goal in a province that also lies directly to the north of Australia, the line has been drawn and it seems we have no outrage left.

That’s a good line – “it seems we have no outrage left”. Time to keep talking about West Papua...

Check out this New Internationalist article from 2002.

And another link/info page here.

Finally, this is from the DevZone website-:

“Messages of solidarity for the people of West Papua

You are invited to send a message of solidarity to the people of West Papua. Add your voice to those of people all around the world who are calling for justice, peace and self-determination for the people of West Papua.”

http://www.dev-zone.org/cgi-bin/knowledge/jump.cgi?ID=9452

One kinda PNG Nuyia

So Nuyia 2006 is on.

I actually had a good new years eve. It’s almost passé these days to say “I hate new years” – but I guess most of us still do and don’t in some way or another (or pretend not to care in one way or another). Maybe it helped that I wasn’t sure what it would be like, kinda like that movie you’re seeing that you haven’t read a preview of, so I was happy! Once again hanging with Alex & Jonika more that anything – months into hanging out and they’re still way cool.

People wise (national and ex-pat) things get quiet over here in Lae over Dec/Jan. For the next few weeks, think I’m the only AVI still in town (normally 4 or 5 of us)! So the group of buddies I’ve been tagging with generally was a little diminished – but we made up for it as best as possible on the dance floor of the Lae International Hotel. We started quiet with DVD’s n more relaxo-rancho. Eventually we trucked 1 minutes down the road to the Lae International, where everyone else had been having the large buffet dinner… maybe 150 people there or something. Following a 4 song set by 3 islander style-dancing ladies, people were up on the floor and dancing to a… variable mix of pop & rock. There was a beach theme, a countdown and hugs n kisses all round. Happy Dayz as an old friend used to say a lot - All good fun.

All good fun, but there were also oft moments in the night where I couldn’t help but think to those ppl in Melbourne I’m missing. Alot.

I woke up on New Years day a little sore and flicked on BBC World. Brandenburg Gate looked pretty cool, half-a-million in Paris at the Eiffel tower, 2 million on Rio’s Cocapabana (sp?) beach, two-hundred-thousand in Edinburgh, and thousands, of course, in Sydney for the Harbor bridge. New Years might be a bit of st*pid effort for some people, but it’s always kinda cool that it happens all round the world for 24-odd hours.

Viva la 2006 peoples! Hope it’s a good one for all...