I have some time today; Su and Zoey went south to visit her sister in the hospital. There’s some time then to get back to trying to unravel what’s happened to me during my 11 weeks in PNG. I’ve started two posts, but they have both started to unravel under some invisible weight of change – it’s the change thing that has me disoriented. I’m not sure if it’s a change in ideology, in worldview, or in some ambiguous theoretical stance (although to be honest, I lost my Marxist/Freudian theoretical stance during the crazy month thirty some years ago when I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation).
So, I’ve been flopping around the house since I returned from a month on the Sepik River, taking care of my granddaughter, fixing things around the house, and worrying about my children and grandchildren. But, running in the back of all this has been the need to get a grip on what happened in PNG.
Zoey has her bilums (net bags that everyone wears and uses in PNG and in Indonesian Papua as well, although they call them nokens over there) spread out all over her room; I didn’t 
know if she would like them as gifts, but she stuffs things down inside and says, “I have a surprise inside my bilum, Grandpa, do you know what it is?” And then there are the masks that I brought back and have hanging on the wall and the sacred flutes that Zoey likes me to play. So PNG is in my awareness constantly.
Living on a cruise ship is, in itself, a surrealistic enough experience, but add to that the destinations – small villages (and some not so small villages) and islands known to most of the outside world primarily through guide books and the anthropological writings of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune and a slew of folks who have followed up on their work.
I just happened to find an anthropologist who had been through this experience years before me; another American living over in this corner of the world who had worked on the same cruise ship that I have just finished traveling on. She wasn’t an academic anthropologist, she called herself (at least on her blog) as an applied anthropologist, and it turned out she had a blog where she wrote about her life in PNG.
Unfortunately, she passed away in one of those unexplained and tragic auto accidents while she was back visiting in the US. But she has this blog that is still online and through it, I’ve started to get some feel for what it may be that I’m looking for.
A Jump Start from the Homeland
I was looking back on what I wrote above yesterday while watching the always depressing news about what is happening in Trumpland, and the realization suddenly hit me that what I’ve been thinking around – not able to get to it head-on for some reason – and what it was that startled me about being in PNG was resilience.
Kopar Village, PNG
Despite everything, all the difficulties of living in remote areas with no immediate access to education and health care and often running water, as well as the lack of direct assistance from the government, was the sense of the resilience of the people that I met over 11 weeks. They are working on finding the path that leads to a successful blending of modernity and tradition. And with that, I’ll leave more until the next post.
