You’d eat my what?!

Equality. It’s a tricky one. Especially in a culture that just isn’t ‘there’ yet in many ways. Here in Papua, it can be pretty blatant. Women walk behind the men, women do most of the manual labour – gardening, cooking, house related tasks and child care. The men…well they chat and get to eat first. Women can exert power in various small, often passive aggressive ways like giving her husband the worst potato in the pot for his dinner.

Our time in Koropun wasn’t all about drinking in the awesome scenery or fighting rodents in the dark. My sister, Naomi was there on behalf of the World Bank to assess how the ‘Respeck’ programme was working in the villages. Respeck is about ‘community driven development’. It is supposed to empower the community to transform their own areas by giving each community funding for various initiatives. Problem is, there is a heck of a lot of corruption. For example, in Koropun the first guy to head up the programme used about 45% of the funding for a bride price and ran away! The second and third guys who then took over were also corrupt and both died. (I didn’t ask how!). Obviously unless you are straight as an arrow this is a job that should come with a serious health warning! Apparently the belief is, that Jesus was sold with corrupt money, so when you use money for evil means then you are basically selling your soul to the devil and are cursed. The devil will then come and take you. Scary stuff, but it does make one pause and think about how we spend our resources!

I had the opportunity to sit in on some of the tribal meetings, during which it became very clear that the Papuans see Naomi as one of their own – rather than a ‘foreigner’. They see her as having grown up in Soba (a nearby village a couple of mountains away) although in reality she lived there for 8 months when she was a teenager. When one is involved in development work this is a very helpful attitude.

We sat for hours on the floor of a room beside the small airstrip and there was lots of talk, some shouting and the occasional gasp. None so obvious as when it was mentioned that the women should have been getting 15% of the funding for their own programme. Something that rarely happens and hadn’t been happening here.
While the Kimyal are generally pretty quiet, I got to see a very different side to them as the meeting exploded into a competition to see who could shout loudest, tempers ran high at points and the daylight disappeared.

At one point Naomi asked the assembled group if a woman could become the head of a village? The room erupted into noise and cries from the men of “of course they couldn’t…they’re not men!”
Having said that, some of the Kimyal people don’t generally have major issue with women leading – I was surprised. Someone (I literally couldn’t see who at this point) suggested that the idea that women should not lead was a new idea brought in by conservative missionaries. Although others claimed that women were the cause of all tribal wars so were best kept hidden away so as to avoid conflict.
Naomi tried another question regarding women getting more leadership – through finding paid work. The issue for the men gathered was “well if the women are out to work, who’ll look after the children?” Naomi’s suggestion that perhaps the men could look after them was greeted with hysterical laughter. She pressed them further by asking them: “ Think of everything that has gone wrong with the Respeck these past 5 years…who was doing the job of leading? Women or men?”. There was a gratifying silence.
The truth began to hit home – if they persist in leaving the female half of their population behind (or powerless), things will never change for the better.

The next day was a day discussing things like the politics of goats (they eat everything in sight and cause issues of fines and community politics), meeting with community leaders and discussing how the church there can bring about positive change.
At this stage I was already tiring of the ‘every meal’ diet of rice and noodles…I am obviously an ungrateful wretch, but oh, my kingdom for a cheeseburger!
Some of the issues these people face is that education is half hearted. E.g. Outside help gives them rice to plant but no advice on how to harvest it – therefore it dies in the ground and people are still hungry.

On the final day we took a walk up the ‘hill’ (read steep mountain!). I felt like the pied piper with the stream of children walking behind me. The crowding in is one thing, but as soon as you try to take a picture, children run away screaming with laughter and hiding! At one point I decided to have a rest and sat on a rock. The second I did, I knew I’d done something wrong. The gasping and fast chatter turned out to mean that I had chosen a rock that was clinging by scraps of soil to the side of the mountain…me sitting on it was bound to dislodge it and send it and me careening down the mountain…darn those doughnuts I had months ago!

The rest of that trip was a blur of falling out of planes (see my previous post!), riding on the back of a motorbike in the sweaty lowland town of Dekai, where I met the most wizened old lady I’ve ever seen who grasped my hand and wouldn’t let go as she told me over and over, “Halabok, be soc soc” (apologies for the spelling!) which basically means “I love you so much I would eat your faeces”. Pretty effusive stuff given we’d literally just met and in spite of the knowledge that it was a huge compliment, I wasn’t entirely sure what I felt about it! I eventually made it back to Bokondini and my next big trip will be the one I make to leave this bizarre, fascinating and open armed country and go home…