When you first arrived, you noticed everything as if a novelty. It was all so different and fascinating. Now, after a few months, something's shifted: what you note is similarity. We're more alike than you'd thought. What you hear in stories are the broad strokes of human nature, played out again and again.



Last night was dinner with some friends and a bunch of medicos from Australia who’ve been here 3 weeks and are leaving tomorrow. The food was excellent, but the company a bit boring: the majority of four hours of conversation was limited to medical aspects of life in PNG. And when it was allowed to swerve, it actually moved from boring to irritating.

“What I can’t understand,” said one, “is the expats here. Some have been here for 15 years or more, and never been to a village mumu. Now, if they’d just ask the people they work with to take them to one, they’d [nationals] be overjoyed, and they’d [expats] learn something about the life of people here.” I couldn’t stop myself from interjecting something here (may have been related to feeling hungover and being forced – forced I say – to sip more red wine); these instant experts are annoying, and they do not allow for a complex context shadowing what they fleetingly observe. Or have a sense of that contrary relationship: the more you learn, the more you are aware of how little you know.

But soon I simply surrendered and listened to these and other insights. What they were trying to do was simply make some sense of things they’d seen. And who hasn’t felt that flush of excitement at the new, and that desire to share it – in all its naiveté or wisdom – with others? Who could say that they were different?