Nogut pik i bagarapim ples matamat

when i first arrived in png, i was eating dinner with the capital team and we were discussing the living conditions of people in the country. i was asking about the settlements i’d heard of, and wanted to know what they were like.

i think someone remembered that i was so recently out of bangladesh, and that i was probably picturing very crowded ‘shanty’esque situations. so i was quickly corrected. (it’s hard sometimes to switch mindsets so quickly when you are sooooo embedded in a country or region and the issues that exist there… bangladesh has very little land, and a lot of people, here it is a bit different).

land is of huge importance in this country. you must have land. enough land to have a garden. that was the clarification.

so the settlements that grow around the big cities are actually small villages. as one staff member explained to me last week, ‘if you live there, you run cords to the one house for electricity, and you tap into their waterline’. and the landlord? ‘makes a tidy profit for selling you the power and water’. are there gardens? ‘of course!!!’ (how could i be so silly to insinuate there may not be.. again, my bangladeshi experience nails me).

to ask if there were gardens was beyond redundant. of course there were gardens. gardens are everything here. our clinic has gardens around the border where the guard has planted taro and flowers and i think i may have seen a watermelon starting to form. even the dirt patches edging the walkways inside are full of clipped vines, some so small they must be protected by coconut husks as they gain height and strength.

‘what plants are grown here? what fruits?’ i had to ask. (i love fruit, and love to discover the most popular ones in each new location so that i can look forward to massive consumption of them while i live there.)

‘everything’ is the response. the geographical diversity in png means that the highlands grow different fruits than our area, and we grow different fruits than the capital region. ‘they have the best strawberries in the highlands…’i was advised. ‘don’t let someone go there without bringing them back’.

at this point in the conversation, i was getting excited, but still barely matching the excitement of my colleagues.
at one point, the doctor turned to me and said, ‘everytime i go somewhere, and if i see something i want, a plant i don’t have, i have to get it! i just have to get it… and then i just have to stick it in the ground and grow it.’ [i've seen this first hand while waiting for someone - our driver spied some pretty flowers, and saw that some had gone to seed. open invitation to harvest a few to take home for both our garden and his.]

while chatting with some of the staff, i asked about mangosteens… one of my favourite fruits in the world. everyone looked at me strangely as i tried to describe a fruit that tastes like a cross of mandarin oranges and lychees, and looks like a small round eggplant. obviously i must be nuts… nothing like that grows here.

but mere weeks later, i walked into the clinic and what did the doctor have?? mangosteens!! ‘i think i found them! i saw them in the market and bought them!’ everyone was curious about how to approach them, so i started peeling them, staining my hands the telltale shade of purple in the process, and we divvied up the sections. i was hoping it wasn’t an acquired taste, or perhaps one not suitable to the palate of my team. i realised i’d ‘done good’ though when the doctor declared she was going to start growing these in her backyard.

so yes, land is important here, but so much because of what you can grow on it. and when you receive a gift from that harvest, the honour is clear. the services at the clinic are all free, but there are a few cases where women wanted to express their thanks. one woman presented a bouquet of home grown flowers to her counsellor the day after she had been to the clinic. another woman dropped off a bag of vegetables with a note that said ‘thank you’. the gifts could not be rejected, no matter how dodgy an outsider may judge the act of acceptance. it would have been incredibly insulting. so the vegetables became lunch, and the flowers prettied up the staff room. the added beauty and the hearty meal were very nice to have, but the acts… the acts of taking something from their garden, something they had grown, and coming back with them to give us, it was a sign that we had ‘done good’. and we were humbled and honoured and touched by the acts.

this did not escape my thoughts as i sat down to dinner with my colleagues in the capital. we were having management meetings over thanksgiving weekend, and within the team we had a few canadians. somehow we three persistent canadian women convinced the male british logistics coordinator to cook us up a dinner of roasted chicken (almost a turkey) with all the fixins. while stuffing ourselves with the food, questions came up from the non-canadians about this strange holiday we kept referring to, and we did our best to explain. to me thanksgiving is dinner with my family, a table full of vegetables from my grandparent’s farm, a trip to their basement to gather harvested squashes, jars of tomatoes, a cold chain of freezer-bagged corn kernels; food for the winter that’s been grown to share. [not to forget that thanksgiving also means lots of pumpkin pie and the birthday cake for my dad.] it is a changing of the season, a moment with loved ones, and an appreciation of everything that sustains us.

this year, the third thanksgiving i’ve spent far from home, i thought a lot of the things that sustain us. the land the grows the food. the doctors that give us the medicine. the people who are there just to listen, and let us speak the traumas that haunt us, thereby lessening their power over us just a little. i thought about the act of giving thanks, of letting someone know that they did somehow help… giving thanks is in itself a gift of strength, and in the hardest moments it is a gift that somehow holds back the looming threat of feeling overwhelmed and defeated. perhaps what we do, however simple and small in the face of this violence can make some sort of difference. this is what sustains us.

i was having dinner with some friends the other night, and i think i was ranting about my christmas airline ticket (see, i told you i like to hyper focus on the trivial details) and one friend turned and said:

‘ahhhhh christmas. the best way to shop for presents is on christmas eve, as late as possible, all in one go’.

i nearly spit out the well chilled red wine i was drinking (in png, they believe in chilling the red, it even comes in an ice bucket).

anyway, my friend, my dear friend, had just described a recurring nightmare that i have every year. the nightmare that i’m expecting any day (night) now that turkey dinner I is nearly upon us, which means the countdown to turkey dinner II has begun. usually in the dream, i am frantically shopping at 11pm in the local 7-11 trying to decide how much beef jerky would be enough for a gift, and whether or not the hot nacho cheese will still be hot when my dad opens the plastic take-out container. last years nightmare actually included being on a plane on christmas morning and trying to buy duty free for presents. yes, i do have a problem.

my obsession with christmas and with presents was one i thought would perhaps, let’s say, wane with my career choice. but well, nope! the year in sudan… still got the nightmare and was frantically shopping the moment my plane hit the tarmac in vancouver (and i should mention the last minute souk trip in khartoum to buy jallabeyas for the men in my life). midway through working in bangladesh, one of the poorest countries out there where we worked with a population who literally lived in mud… lost neither the present enthusiasm nor the running out of time nightmare! still completely obsessed with presents (although to be fair, all shopping was done the night before we left bangladesh because there was this little thing called cyclone sidr that kept us a bit busy in the pre-christmas shopping season – i would like to point out that year was the closest i’ve ever gotten to a living christmas shopping nightmare. it culminated in me standing in the middle of a handicraft shop 15 minutes after they were supposed to close, staring up at the shelves and mumbling the names of friends i hadn’t seen in 10 years as i pondered what scarf would suit them best… luckily, jason dragged me out of there).

and now, here i am, another year wiser, another year more obsessed. but since the airline ticket just may well bankrupt me, i’ve openly pondered the option of just wrapping myself in a giant gift bag and sticking a bow on my head.

but lets get serious, that is not gonna happen. the credit card companies have been silly enough to issue me with plastic, and if i have to have my own sub-prime crisis, so be it. prezzies are not optional.

which brings me back to png. which is possible the only place to have people who actually seem to be more obsessed than i am. we’ve had traffic jams in lae for the past week, which is apparently caused by the entire province of morobe travelling to the capital for… yes… you guessed it… christmas shopping! and the wonderful pharmacy i dropped by today is already decked out with santa hats nailed along the top of the walls and a large plastic santa motive smiling benevelantly down at us.

definitely my kind of people. let’s see if i can get them all into repetedly playing the boney m christmas album too. then i will be in paradise.

i’m frustrated tonight.

and i’d like to say it’s for all the right reasons. but the thing about the human brain – when the right reasons are too much, the little (wrong) reasons take over.

i’m frustrated because i can’t find a cheap flight home for christmas. and because christmas means the world to me, so there is no option to not go. i have to see my family. i have to hold on to that one single tradition. so i will pay an extraordinary amount to do it.

i’m frustrated because a good friend of mine is no longer a good friend. time and space wrecked a good thing. i love human connections, and when i find out it’s been trashed, it hurts.

i’m frustrated because i have a pile of paperwork facing me right now. and it’s all got a purpose, but i’m counting the hours of the days and the hours to do the work… and there’s a wee discrepancy that may cause some problems. unless i can finally leap over that barrier of space/time relations.

but yeah, the real reasons. the things that i finally had a good cry over the phone to my husband about. the reasons that occasionally make me engage in the type of vocalisation an ex-yoga teacher (dave are you still out there?) would be proud of (luckily it’s loud enough in the ‘hood that i can yell in the backyard without anyone getting worried).

the real reasons. ok. so perhaps it was the 3 hours i spent the other day keeping an eye on the men beating on each other in the street. all so drunk they could barely walk, and yet, they’d have the strength to stomp on the other one who had fallen. frustrated at watching the kids peering from behind the large tree. frustrated that i couldn’t do anything.

or maybe, it’s the woman who came into our clinic, who wasn’t actually a patient of ours (she was at the wrong place), who was so thin from tb that i was careful not to nudge her as i walked by because she looked ready to break. and she wasn’t our patient.

maybe it was knowing, that for all we do, and for all the people here who work so hard, i heard reports of a woman pulled out of a police station by her abusive husband after she’d gone there for protection. the police did not follow.

maybe it was the past week of struggling to find a way to refer patients to services, and have those services work. knowing that we could simply spend our days personally advocating for each and every woman who walks through our door. knowing we could pound our heads against overworked and underfunded services who don’t know what to do either.

maybe it was dealing with a case where a woman had decided to leave her abusive husband, but literally had no where to go.

or maybe it was the young woman who had been brought to our clinic by a stranger after she was gang raped in the middle of the day.

maybe.

so now to appreciate the other little things. the family next door is shrieking and shouting right now… with happiness. they are laughing. it is alright.

and we cannot do everything, but i know we do something.

and the women here, for all they go through, they are strong. they are incredibly strong. and it’s been some time since i’ve seen women who are so assertive and opinionated and loud. and yes, that makes me happy.

and again, go back to the people who bring in their friends, who bring in their family. go back to what is, not just what isn’t.

the paperwork will get done. the ticket will be purchased. and we will treat the survivors who come with respect and give them back some choices and let them take back a tiny part of what violence takes away.

we will go to bed and try to get a good sleep.