Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The First Day in the Bush

I consider the first day to be the first FULL day.
The night was miserable. No pillow plus little support from the one inch thick mattress made my neck scream in misery. I woke in the middle of the night and had to use the filthy bucket toilet. (definitely not going to fly when I live here long-term) and in the morning I got my first bucket shower. The freezing water was not awesome.
I longed for better times out and about. And I got them.
Lindy took Kristen and I to where the women were making saksak, a starch similar to flour. After sitting down and talking a little with the women, Kristen asked if she could try sigrapim saksak (scraping saksak) out of the sago tree. They let her and after a bit she passed it off to me. It was hard work and we weren't very good at it at all. It involved taking a pick-ax like thing and hitting it againt the inside of the tree to scrap it out into a bunch of little splinters.

The next step in the process is wasim saksak (washing) where you put the splinters into a mesh and pour water over it. then the splinters are wrung and the water drips white. A finer mesh better filters the white water and it falls into a canoe. In this process the baby IS the bath water. The canoe is then covered until the excess water evaporates and a powder is all that's left behind. The powder is the saksak.

Plane Day

We went to the airport.
We came back from the airport.
We waited for an hour.
We waited for another hour.
We where told when our plane would leave.
We went to the airport.
We waited another hour.
We finally got on the plane.
Upon our arrival, a singsing was preformed to amamas us (show us their joy at our arrival).
It was a long mile to the house of the missionaries as we walked between two walls of scantily clad, chanting and dancing men and children. When we got to the house we were given a kulow, a wet coconut unlike the dry coconuts we buy at the store. The wet coconuts have more milk and less meat. Kulow was never so good as on that day!
We then walked another mile to the house where we would stay. There I found a ginormous spider. The size of my hand. The house was covered in spider webs. Bugs everywhere. Clutter too. In a very little house. It took a moment or two to adjust to it and then I was fine. The some of the other team members didn't adjust so well.
But such is life in the bush. And life in the bush is whatever you make it to be. The missionary there didn't have arachnophobia and appreciated the spiders consumption of mosquitoes and their webs ability to catch them. So she let them linger in order to spare her the mosquitoes unorthodox weight loss program.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Samban overview

For two weeks, I've been in the jungle.
I lived in a bush house with a bucket shower and bucket toilet. For the first 4 days, a 6*2 1" thick mat covered in a mosquito net was my sanctuary. After that we moved down to the main part of Samban (we were originally in Nupela Painiten), where missionaries from Outreach International were located. They lived in an Americanized house. (During the first year or so, missionaries stay in bush houses until they've found just the right plae amidst just the right dialect to set up a more costly establishment.)
While in Samban, I learn how to scrap saksak (a starch akin to flour), wash saksak, cook saksak, make a belum (a purse of sorts), and I got along on my Tok Pisin. I also recorded the story of how to make a pui (a water dipper made of a coconut and a stick of bamboo) in the local language, ApMa. I then took that recording, transcribed it, found someone to help me translate it, took pictures of the process, and then made a literacy booklet that will be used in the schools there.
We had a great time talking with women and children (it wouldnt be appropriate for me to talk with men). I'd love to come back for a visit in the future.