of mice and men

Now and then things happen that remind you that you aren’t from here and don’t understand a lot of what goes on. A new staff member has recently started at work; he’s Papua New Guinean (Chimbu), but he and his family have been living in Bavaria for the past 5 years. The kids have grown up speaking German, and it’s been a big challenge for them to come back to PNG, learn pidgin and English, adjust to the mud, the unsealed roads, the thousand and one differences.

At this morning’s staff meeting, Jack related an incident that occurred last Friday night. There was a bit of a hullabaloo out on the street; a crowd of people were chasing a man. The man leapt over Jack’s fence, round the house and towards the back. The back fence is too high to leap over, so the man had trapped himself.

Jack and his family had heard the man’s movements. Jack’s teenage son crept outside, armed with a torch and a bush knife. He found the man, trying to hide under a bush in the corner of the yard. The teenager approached him – there was nowhere for the man to go – and put the knife up against the man’s cheek. “You’re caught,” said the teenager.

Jack came outside and he and the teenager then handed the man over to the crowd. “He was bashed up pretty badly and then they took him back to his village,” said Jack, nodding at the justness of the outcome.

My mate – a coastal girl – laughed later on, when we were out of earshot. “You can take a highlander out of PNG,” she said, “but you can’t take the highlander out of a boy.” I don’t know if she’s right or not, but the story surprised me.

(in a much more pleasant incident: i bought a bottle of wine on the weekend from the hotel; a new guy (from Hagen; Hagen guys have a bad rep but there are some I really get along well with; go figure) accidentally overcharged me; we were chatting away and i waived the receipt. later felt stupid but it's only money. in the mean time he'd worked out the error - tracked down my number - and this morning rang and then drove down with my change! Sweet.)

conch shell from buka

Currently working on a collection of letters written by a british missionary and his wife who came out to png prior to WWII. The letters span a 40 year period. It is interesting that in the last five years, when the writers are in their 70s, the letters admit to worries, fears and bewilderment, whereas these topics rarely appear in the earlier writings. The topics of these late letters are also more outwards-looking: they engage with what is going on in other parts of the world, other lives. The earlier letters are focussed almost exclusively on their own affairs.

These changes are not noted in the letters; the writers are not at all self-conscious or self-reflexive. But I see these differences emerge, as I read and edit the correspondence for publication. Strange that writing can record much more than you intend. Strange too that conjunction of growing older – turning out towards the world – and admitting to anxieties. Is it because that’s what old age can be like – a time of confusion and fear, a time where little happens in the theatre of your own life, so that you look elsewhere to be occupied?

Or is it that they are no longer concerned with hiding these anxieties? Have the demands of ego withdrawn a little more? Are pride and saving face less important? Do they see less, or more, clearly?