Last night, as I was enjoying a delicious dinner of rice,
greens, and a pork chop, a woman came into the kitchen to cook her own dinner
and of course we got talking (folks here are superfriendly and will not shy
away from conversation with a Mexican!). Her name is Jennifer, and she is a
high school teacher way in the interior of New Guinea, where civilization is
hundreds of kilometers away. When asked about the origin of Melanesians she thought
that, no, Melanesians are not a recent African migration. And when I asked her
about the cost of basic things like milk or eggs, she looked at me with
puzzlement and stated the obvious: “We don’t drink milk, and we get our eggs
through barter”. What could be easier than that? She told me that she has to
work against a lot of superstition with her students, because the idea that
disease comes through poor sanitation sounds absurd to them; they have eaten
with unwashed hands for generations, so the current bout of loose bowels or
bloody sputum must be related to witchcraft [TB is a big problem in PNG because
they don’t follow the treatment for the many weeks it is required, so
antibiotic-resistant strains are affecting a lot of people.]. I loved talking
to Jennifer, who is 42-years old and has an excellent head on her shoulders; I
look forward to additional conversation tomorrow.
I slept the sleep of the tired tourist, but when I woke up
at 5 am I was surprised to hear a party on full swing out in the street. Mile 9
is the place to be on a late Friday evening party that carries on until dawn!
I went down around 6 am, and saw that Tomatha had left the
kettle and coffee ready for me. She is a sweetheart. I was half way through my
first cup when Maria walked in. She is 61 years old, and is staying in POM (the
name we natives give to Port Moresby) while waiting for her visa to Australia.
It turns out her son lives down the block, but she prefers to stay in the lodge
because she doesn’t want to butt in on her son’s life. Her son is in China,
finishing his Master’s degree, and her daughter-in-law is going to Perth to
finish her own Master’s in Economics. Maria is coming along with her, to
babysit her four grandchildren. I suspect it is going to be a “tight” situation
between Grandma and Mom, but you do what you have to do.
At 7:15 am Andrew and Tomatha drove me to the airport, to be
picked up by the van that will take me to the coast, so I can then take the
boat to Lion Island to go snorkeling. Tomatha arranged everything for me, for
PNGK 150, and she even packed me a lunch. I am feeling very well taken care of.
I was the first pickup of the van, which then went to The Gateway Hotel, to
pick up a gaggle of Australians. The hotel had the same high security measures
as the Laguna Hotel had the day before yesterday, and I noticed that it was the
same company that provided the private guards: Black Swan Security. What a
coincidence, only a couple of months ago I read a book by Chris Voss, Never
Split the Difference, who is the President of Black Swan and was for 20
years the chief hostage release negotiator for the FBI. The book is the best I
have ever read about how to negotiate a hard bargain (like, do not get the
hostages killed), and Black Swan (a symbol for a nugget of information that
will change the course of the negotiation) is making a mint based on the
reputation of its President. Personally, I think the “high risk” is a legend
fueled by Chris Voss to make mega-bucks from hotels, restaurants, mining
companies, and oil and gas companies.
The gaggle of Australians turned out to be a group of paramedics
who have volunteered their two weeks of vacation to try to start a paramedic
service associated to St. John’s Hospital (I had never heard of St. John’s, but
I believe they are an international, non-profit hospital operating group—a bit
like the Red Cross). They were enthusiastic young and old people who were ready
for a day of fun in the sea, so it was really easy to converse with them and
join them in our snorkeling forays. We did two. The first one was easy-piecy because
we were swimming direct from the beach of this tiny, paradisaical island (it
even had its little palm tree). Worth-mention sights included some needle fish,
a bright, electric blue, fat starfish, some sea urchins, and a great variety of
colorful fish. I was goofing around in the shallow seaweeds, when I came face
to face with a small leopard shark; with his whiskers he looked like an old
Chinaman! I was so startled seeing it a few inches from my nose that I bolted,
which scared the living daylights of the poor thing, so it also bolted. Close
encounters of the second kind!
For the second swim I felt more adventurous, so I decided to
swim all around our little island. I did not realize then that (a) the reef
extended way the hell out there on the one direction, and (b) the tide was
dropping. I ended being lost in a labyrinth of coral, often closed out by steep
jagged walls and having to swim back out to deeper water. After an hour or so
of this I looked up and I was barely a fourth of the way around the island. I
had to suck it up and take the closest path to shore, which involved getting
poked and cut by some rather jagged shallow coral. I walked the last 100 m to
the shore, ouching and aweing as I stepped on the pokey coral. Never a dull day
out on the reef.
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