6 MONTHS of NATH BILONG PNG – Oh My…

[Sunset late-dusk - coast of PNG]
Has it been 6 months? This week it felt like 3 years, but sometimes it feels like life is (often in a series of clichés) flying on by.

6 months. Well. I don’t think I’ll “reflect” too much on the 6 months – at least not this week! It’s been kinda weird having the blog on for that long. You look back over all the posts (first time I’ve tried this sort of thing) and realise you build up quite a little story-book of things. But then it also misses more than it “gets” for what’s going on. Hehe – some people have said to me (3 or 4 of the ‘cool internet ones’)-: “you’ve got a BLOG!?!? Hahahahah”, but then every now and then someone says they check it now and then for a story… hence I keep on putting crap up here. But more and more it’s something a lot of the other volunteers I get on with(almost all?!?) do up here regularly. The other day when I said I was feeling crappy I had x2 emails and a phone call from within PNG. And that was by the end of the morning!

6 months of Anglicans. 6 months of being in charge (urgh – anyone wanna be my boss?). 6 months of gin. 6 months of the Yoti. 6 months of Maundu & SimonMikael (night & day security). 6 months of potholes. 6 months of thirty-four keys to locks. 6 months of meeting new people. 6 months of attempting lik lik tok pisin. 6 months of cooking for myself (well – trying). 6 months of TOO MUCH FREAK’IN WORK. 6 months of scammers & dirty-old-men. 6 months of my mostly cool little team in the ANO. 6 months of newness/adventure. 6 months of making occasional excellent, excellent new friends. 6 months of PNG.

Well – to finish this one I’m going to steal words again from a friend in Goroka, (I hope you don’t mind extra publishing Robyn!). Because I like them, and because it captured something I was thinking this week. The original post is linked here (worth a read in it’s own right), but here’s the words from a small part of it:

I pause before I pick up my book again. I wish I could gain the objectivity and insight of the anthropologist, and write a witty and yet insightful novel about experiences in today’s PNG. But a logical narrative thread eludes me. More and more, this is just life: some things are understood, some are not. What I learn does not add up; it just contributes to this vary varied thing I am living. And in this sense, all anthropology and ethnography is as if a novel; artifice trying for more coherence than the unfashionable real provides.