Friday, November 17, 2006
Unexpected stay in Madang
Dear Friends,
We had a one day trip to Madang last week, which turned into two days, because the truck developed an electrical short on the trip to Madang! We were driving up to Madang, and we'd crossed two rivers about 3 feet deep at the deepest parts, and then I saw the fuel gauge start to drop to zero in about 2 seconds. The fan stopped working, and I saw that the turn signals weren't working either. Somebody we were bringing to Madang (we had about 7 people in the back - deciding who will come is always a big deal, as I'm sure you can imagine!) yelled that he wanted to wash in the river before we got to town, but I said we couldn't stop because the engine might not start again, and we'd be stuck in the boondocks.
It turned out that it was an electrical short, and we had to stay in Madang overnight to get it fixed. We enjoyed being stuck in Madang though, with ceiling fans, restaurants, and friends. :)
We made it back to Buan village fine on Thursday, and arrived in time to have some light to get unpacked and start making supper. When we got here, the house was in great shape - our waspapa had slept on the porch at night, and stayed around the house during the day! We really appreciated his help. Probably no one would have broken in, and we had put all the important things inside the storage room and locked it, but still it would have been a big "hevi" and aggravation.
Now that we're back, we have figured out we have 22 days left. We will be very busy these last few weeks, doing language learning, and setting up a system for reviewing language.
I went out with the men to cut the Aid Post grass, and I found out that a man from Bom, north of us a bit, in the same language family as Sam, was working with the mining company down south, about 50 km from us, at a place called Passamuk. A local man was up on a digger or something, and he couldn't operate it - he'd said on his application that he knew how to operate the machine. So the Chinese boss said to get down, and replaced him with the Bom man. As the Bom man drove out of the yard, the local man's family came and tried to hurt him with a bush knife, and ended up cutting his arm and fingers on one hand.
So on Monday, as we were cutting the grass, I saw two guys from Buan going down to Bom to see the man and have a meeting to figure out what to do, and they thought the group would probably send a group to fight with the Passamuk people. But when I asked why we were banding with the Bom people (I thought maybe it was a thing like if the threat is outside the area, then the whole area bands together against it), the guys said that the real issue was that the mining company was going to send a pipeline through the Raicoast land, and wasn't going to hire locals to do the work. So, probably this man being cut was really an excuse to address the bigger issue.
Regarding a different company that started work in our area, on Tuesday I heard that a local man had stopped the lumber company workers here, and told them that before they could continue, they had to make the second road through the mountain range over to the coast. Maybe that was something they had all agreed upon before, but the company was just ignoring it and hoping no one would notice. Or maybe our community is asking for more and more stuff, now that they have the company on the hook. So far they have asked for a new Aid Post building, and new school buildings. There are two sides, and I don't know where we are in this issue yet. But I think our people are asking for more and more things. And only one of the four clans have agreed to sell their logs, so the company has the right to get logs from only that one clan's land! So the road and all the buildings are being built and only one clan loses their logs. So that will be interesting to see what happens.
We went to our local market Wednesday, held at the Aid Post, about a 3 minute walk from our house. We used the Sam language to buy things, and walked away with cucumbers, sweet potatoes, bananas and some huge beans. It's great! They just started this recently, and we think it's for the people from Erima, whose gardens were destroyed by too much rain.
We worked on making a metal-roofed shelter for the car, which will also collect rain water for our water tank. We made it yesterday, Thursday, and it looks really good. I hope it works. We had to anchor the gutter to some bamboo, and it wasn't sloped very well - actually it sags a little in the middle! :) But in a good rain we'll get some rain in the tank. Right now we are depending on a pipe from a spring uphill, but that was blocked by some mischief makers a few weeks ago, and reminded us that we really need two sources of water, so we don't have to go to the river and carry our water up!
We found out Friday that the people in one of the village we pass through on the way to Madang have fixed part of the road (which was tricky to pass through, but do-able) and now charge vehicles 20 kina to drive on the fixed part. We don't want to pay, but maybe in 3 weeks, when we need to drive to town, this situation will be resolved.
Take care,
Dave and Sarah
# posted by Dave Troolin @ 1:23 PM 
