Robert@PNG

An interesting couple of days…

On Saturday I headed into Lae with Peter and on the way into town we visited one of the local settlements. This settlement is located right next door to one of the secondary high schools and Peter had one of his backhoes onsite clearing some damage from recent rains. The water course had changed direction and was causing damage to some of the local gardens and also homes. The settlements are areas that basically are “off limits” to outsiders, traveling through there alone would be a very dangerous thing indeed. The thing is that the people living in these places are people, people like you and me. I estimate that 80% of the population in Lae live in settlements. Lae has a population of around 140,000, so I would estimate that there might be roughly 80 to 100 thousand people living in these settlements. Settlement is really another word for “slum” because this is what they are. Men, women, children and old people live in these “slums”, they have no running water, no power and no sewerage. All these people leaving there villages and moving to the cities to find some sort of answer. PNG truly is a developing country with many challenges ahead.

We have had power outages for the past three days, they call it “Load Sharing”. Power for the Lae region (Morobe Province) plus five of the other PNG provinces get their power from a hydro station (forget the name) located somewhere between Lae and Goroka. There are supose to be 5 generators each producing 15 MW of power. I was talking to an engineer this morning and 75Mw is no where near enough to service the population in these 5 provinces. It's quite astonishing 30 years of independence and they still haven’t got the infrastructure right. Roads, health, education, power and other such basic facilities are in a shocking state. What is happening to all the money???   PNG is a wealthy nation rich in natural resource so why the poverty and lack of funds for basic needs???  This is the 64 thousand dollar question and everyone you speak with has their own ideas and thoughts on this subject. My view?   These problems can be narrowed down to 3 things: politics, mismanagement and wantokism. You could probably narrow these 3 down to one : Wantokism. The best friend and also the worst enemy of the PNG national.

Saturday afternoon after Peter dropped me off I had a nap. At around 5 pm I headed off to the Madang Compound, one of the settlements that borders with UNITECH. Many of the people that live here work on campus grounds as unskilled or semi skilled staff. In one of my previous blog posts I mentioned Jerry the librarian, well Jerry lives in the Madang compound with his wife, 3 out 4 of his kids and also (I found out today) his mother and father. Anyway, on my way to the compound I run into someone I knew and we walked over together. Just as you walk into the compound there are markets and we headed there as I wanted to get something to eat and also chew some buai and mingle with the locals. As I was walking around and mingling I got quite a response from the locals. My Tok Pisin is now coming along and I can carry on a basic conversation in the local lingo. The locals love it !  A westerner, talking pidjin and chewing buai and on top of that wanting to spend time to talk with them. It must be a colonial thing, a white person living here but not really mixing with the locals. Many people I have met so far, especially the non educated people have known white people all of their lives but never really been friends with any. I enjoy mixing with the man in the “street” as this is where people tend to be real.

People in the settlement areas are really fighting to survive and those people referred to as “rascals” are but young men trying to make ends meet. Many people have converged upon Lae and Moresby only to find they cannot find work and with PNG not having any form of social benefits this has led to much social unrest in places such as Lae and Moresby.  Back to the compound markets….   at one stage I had about 12 young men standing around me and we were talking about Australia, who is going to win the State of Origin and other “boy’s” stuff. Younger boys were trying to join us but the older boys were chasing them away. I got the impression that the older boys felt privileged to be talking to me (as an equal) and didn’t think that this “men” space was appropriate for the “boys”. There are times when I feel honored to have been “invited” into the lives of these people.

As it was starting to get dark I decided to make tracks and head home, one of the young men, Joseph decided that he was going to walk with me back into UNITECH so that I would get home safely. I talked with Joseph for a while and hope to see him again soon.

The point is and the “128” thousand dollar question : What is happening to all of the development dollars coming into this country and what is happening to all of the money being generated by the local mines and other producers of natural resources? The problems in PNG are very complex and there are many but in my observation they are all linked.

Sunday?  Well Sunday I went along to the Baptist church with Peter and his family, come back to UNITECH, did some more marking of exams and went home to enjoy another “dark” and uneventful blackout.

And so on and so on….