Episode 3 – Out of the Silent Planet

#pngretold - retelling the events of exactly 2 weeks ago

Bam! I have finally arrived and bam! Sensory overload:- bright vibrant colours, the sounds of shouting and children playing and the smell of, well, hot air, if that's a thing. In his book “out of the silent planet”, C.S.Lewis describes the protagonists first experience of a new planet like this; “He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours – colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are”. I think I know how he felt, and all of the time I was acutely aware that it would never appear like this again, that this was the only time I would ever get to see it for the first time. I stood on the runway looking around me, taking it all in. I watched the people milling about outside the airport and suddenly realised that there was far less airport between me and them than there usually would be. Just a gate infact. As I started to wonder where exactly my bags were going to end up, I noticed a table off to one side that was slowly being covered with the luggage of the fifty passengers. 

My winged chariot to Goroka

I found my bags, found Lukas (not too hard with him being the one with the white skin), got into his beat-up MPV and made the short journey to his house wide-eyed all the way. The compound in which Lukas' house resides is guarded by a 6ft corrugated tin fence, with curly barbed-wire perched ontop like a badly fitting toupee. The gate to the compound is operated by remote control. Such elaborate technology seems incongruous when combined with a gate such as this. The appearance was the very odd combination of looking like it was as fortified as Fort Knox whilst appearing to have the structural integrity of a sponge cake soaked in cream. It was actually far sturdier than I expected, although I still suspect that it was meant to deter people from trying than to actually keep them out.

My fortress

I had just enough time to drop off my bags and down a glass of water before Bryan arrived to take us to a women’s conference to pick up some stuff from a CRMF stall there. I was given the choice to stay and catch-up on some sleep, but I was eager to throw myself into Papua New Guinea to see what this country had to offer! So the three of us (plus two of Lukas' children and three of Bryan's) jumped into the car and headed off. The whole world around me was still very new to me and so I was fascinated by everything (whilst trying to play it cool infront of Bryan and Lukas) and tried to take it all in and have my eyes everywhere. I would love to describe what it looks like, but I can't. I don't have the words. I don't even think the English language has the words. Green and bushy with roads that are orange and squidgy doesn't really seem to do it justice somehow!

Standard PNG scenery

Distance seems to have a different meaning out here. Distance takes much longer to cover and places are far more isolated. Lukas asked Bryan if two particular villages were close to each other, to which Bryan replied, “yeah, they're really close. So close that they speak the same language”! Who knew that language was a measure of distance?

We arrived, set-up a picnic and listened to a sermon in Tok Pisin. Fortunitely, Tok Pisin isn't too difficult to understand and I got the gist of what was going on. It's a form of broken English with mostly the same vocabulary, just really strange sentence structure! It was great to see so many people there hungry to hear the word of God, and hungry they must have been to have come from as far away as they did. As we left with our supplies, we saw most of the attendees pile into the backs of pick-up trucks for the journey home. All the way back we also passed travellers who were walking home. Bryan greeted these people with a characteristic call somewhere between “uh-oh” and “yoo-hoo”. For the most part people replied in the same way with smiles on their faces, so I can only assume that this is a friendly greeting!

Listening to the Women's conference from just far away enough to conceal our identity as men...

With their very own unique brand of tenacious nagging, the children managed to convince their dads to stop off by a river so that they could go for a “paddle” (I have no idea where the line between paddling and swimming falls, but I'm pretty sure that it's not usual to get your shoulders
wet when paddling). The kids had a great time much to the amusement (or possibly bemusement) of the locals, whilst I was deliriously trying to work out if this was all real. 

The cooling waters

On the way back the fact that I had only managed 6 hours sleep out of the last 48 finally caught up on me. I had to use all of the strength of will I had to fight to stay awake. A fight which for the most part I won, with my occasional loss being indicated by the tell-tale sign of my head nodding violently forward. This did not go unnoticed by Bryan who insisted that I go straight to bed when we get back. So here I am in bed. Goodnight. See you in a couple of hours!