| The village of Arop has a few thousand people living in it. It was amazing to see the communal life and meet so many warm, friendly people. | |
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People, especially kids, loved to have their picture taken. |
| We had a great time playing basketball, especially knockout. (below) |  |
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Preparing sago palm. |
Preparing the tortilla-like sago, an everyday meal. For this, the inside of the sago palm tree trunk is ground and dried, after the processing shown above. Click on the picture to the right for video, where you can see the process and hear both English and Pidgin in the background. (about 30MB) |
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Sometimes it's prepared in a large pot with water and put onto banana leaves in heavy, starchy clumps. This kind was pretty flavorless. |
| In Arop sago is only prepared that way on special occasions, in this case a celebration (nobody said funeral) for a man who had died just before we arrived in the village. Guys from the construction team before us built a coffin. |  |
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We enjoyed lots of fresh fruit, especially bananas, pineapples, papayas, and coconuts. Fish is the primary source of protein. |
| Vanilla is a fairly valuable, but labor intensive, cash crop. Each plant must be hand pollinated. Gerald told us he has 1,347 plants. |  |
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There were a few ornery looking pigs in a pen nearby. |
| Houses are built off the ground and usually don’t have water or electricity (solar panels provide electricity, if they have it). |  |
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For us Americans, with our immune systems weaker against local parasites, rainwater collected on the corrugated metal roofs and stored in large tanks was a safer choice for drinking, although we still used well water in the showers (a bucket with a showerhead attached) and toilets (flush, with septic systems). |
| Above, the roof on the office (and current dorm, where we slept), with gutters for rain collection, tanks for well and drinking water for immediate use, and large solar panel array. Right, rainwater tanks. |  |
| It was interesting to see the way technology was worked into life in a remote village. The Nystroms have a system of solar panels, batteries, and inverters to provide 12 V, 110 V, and 240 V power for their house and the translation offices (and new buildings we helped build). We were running a generator most of the day to run the power tools. Contact with the outside world on a regular basis is limited to daily scheduled radio calls, and email is sent over the radio (very slowly) as well. |
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But the network within the home and translation center is much more advanced. They use laptops, wired and wireless networks, AlphaSmart keyboards, and Network Attached Storage devices all the time, and especially when translators from all 11 languages and dialects in the Aitape West Translation Project come for translation workshops. |
| Mark, from team two, comes back from the generator shed with the multimeter we used to monitor the voltage at the generator. The generator had some trouble regulating its voltage under a heavy and constantly shifting load from power tools, washing machines, and other things, so we had to keep a close eye on it. |  |
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The village used to be located on a narrow stretch of sand between the ocean and a lagoon, about 3 miles from where it is now. In July 1998 an earthquake triggered a series of tsunamis that devastated Arop and several other villages. Nearly every family lost someone, and it’s clear that it will take decades for the community to fully recover, if ever. |
| They rebuilt inland, where their gardens were. We hiked down to the beach and saw where the village, and the Nystrom's house, used to be. |  |
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JB and Jenn at the beach |
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| The panorama above was taken at the site of the Nystrom's old house. Steve plays with a GPS unit, Ruben rests, and Jenn looks on. In the middle is the location of the house, with the old septic tank hidden behind the shelter. Beyond that is the lagoon, and the left and right edges connect and show the beach on the ocean side. (Click for the unshrunk image - 6.2 MB) |
| While we were there, Steve started to climb a coconut tree, but didn't get any farther than this. |  |
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This is how it's done. (Click for a video - 18 .2 MB) |
| He got two coconuts from the top, and we drank the milk. |  |
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On the way to the beach and back, we crossed this canal (or "baret") in canoes. |
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| Ruben paddling the canoe, carved from a single log. |  |
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Nick did learn to climb the trees. |
| And so did his dad. |  |
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We also walked to a nearby river to go swimming and cool off. On the short walk there we passed a village where they speak a completely different language. |
PNG has more than 800 languages. In addition to their tribal language, most people speak Pidgin, or Tok Pisin, which has many words from English and is fairly simple to learn. This chalkboard shows the order for a church service, and is written in Pidgin. |
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Some things need no translation. |
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