A trip around the island
A couple of weeks ago we finally went and did our 'social awareness training' day, which is put on by the mines' community department once a month to give fly in and out workers and expats
a bit more of an education about the Lihir group of islands and the customs here. Every month since we had been here it had been cancelled because of rain, which makes crossing creeks impossible (not many bridges here), but finally as we come into the drier months it was time to go.
We did a loop around the island, stopping off along the first half at the mine, the villages that had been relocated in the early nineties because of the mine, and Parlee, which is a village that was initially settled by Catholic Missionaries early last century and used to be the island's main town until the mine started up in the mid nineties. There is still a functioning hospital and a secondary school at Parlee which people from across the region use.
Although there are plenty of religions practised and churches scattered across the islands, Catholicism and other Christian denominations such as Uniting, Seventh Day Adventist and Anglican are the main ones. There are plenty of open-air churches and little shrines like this one scattered through the island.
It's about a 70km drive around the island, and there are villages scattered all the way around. Many of the people in the villages commute to the mine and its' related industries for the day, or for two week stints where they stay in the mining camps. But lots of the villagers live there all the time, practising a pretty traditional life of subsistence farming (with the occassional trip into the town supermarket to buy rice, tinned meat, nappies, two minute noodles and soap, if the main contents of the supermarket are anything to go by), going to their village schools, washing their clothes and themselves in the river and raising their highly prized pigs.
Half way through the day we hopped into a dug out outrigger canoe and paddled across to one of the villages for a bit of a treat- some dancing and feasting.
Everyone in the village had gotten dressed up in various plants, and the whole place was beautifully decorated with palm fronds and bright tropical plants.
We were also dressed up in leafy garb. Part of the custom is to have your back spat upon once the leaves had been tied to them. A bit of a surprise.
And then the real entertainment started. The males of the species got to see the dancers close up, and participated in a ceremony where they chewed betel nut, ate some treats and got attacked with face paint.
However us women and children were delegated to standing beyond the fence outside the 'haus boi' (translates as boy house)and watching from a distance.
In typical Lihirian style, it then started pissing down, so while the menfolk were inside chewing on their mild narcotics that have the tendency to stain ones' teeth red if regularly chewed, Ed and I escaped into one of the almost-waterproof meri haus' (lady houses), where suprise suprise, most of the cooking for the haus boi's parties gets done. Then came the obligatory passing around of the white baby until he loses his patience (his tolerance is definately building up).
Unfortunately due to the torrential rain, we had to make an early exit from the village. Just in time to get over the fast running creeks that we drove through on the way home. No wonder that on some of the past training days people have had to spend the night in the village until the water receeded. But it was a fantastic day, where I exponentially increased my knowledge about customs on the Lihir islands.
