Moning olgeta,

10:40 a.m. on Saturday. I managed to avoid Seventh Day Adventist church today by claiming I had lots of work to do on the internet. (See, Mom, it's not just in the U.S.!) It's been a little less busy over the last two days. On Thursday I met Josephine, a wonderful woman from Masi, a hauslain close to where I used to live on the road to Gahavisuka Provincial Park. She works at Telicom, the telephone company, and is such a joy to speak with. We stayed up late (11 p.m.) and storied and storied and storied. It was so nice to feel that immediate rapport with someone. To her I wasn't Sivirito (my ples name) -- I was Skye.

I've been chafing a little bit over the last two days, what with the constant family time and feeling a bit like a child. (Yes, I CAN walk alone to the Internet cafe. Yes, I DO know where the bathroom is in the office building after two weeks.) Usually I'm able to go to "my" room and close the door and rest for a while, but not always. I've tried to explain pasin bilong Amerika -- that sometimes I like to be wanstap, on my own, for a while. I know the constant attention is a form of affection, and I am trying to keep that in mind in the moments when I just want to walk away for a few minutes.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, either. It's just that 16 days straight of family time is intense. I have to admit I am looking forward to flying to Madang, on the northern coast, on Monday morning. I'll be staying with an American and his PNG girlfriend, who run an NGO there.

Side note -- two old men are singing in their tok ples and pounding on drums outside the Internet cafe. Wish I had my recorder right now.

Yesterday we had a busy morning. We went to the Ifiufa Women's Resource Center and I interviewed the head of the women's center in English. We sat in a little makeshift church near her house, actually, on rough wooden pews. She said her women's group is working to do two things: improve literacy (maybe 40 women out of 1,000 in the village can read) and set up some kind of marketing program so women can sell their food without having to spend all day at Goroka Market just to make K20 (about $6.50).

People are starting to change their diet a little more and aren't eating as much garden kaikai (food). Now they're buying more tin fish, more Ox & Palm (a corned beef hash kind of thing, I think), eating bread for breakfast, etc. The cost of food has really gone on top in the last few years. Families here have to pay school fees if they want their children to attend school. It gets expensive quickly. And if they're fairly well off, as my aunt Delta and uncle Moses are, they have to provide for their family members and are CONSTANTLY doling out cash to them. It's expected of them.

Back to my interview with Cathy. She said she's been fairly successful with the literacy part, setting up literacy programs for women and men in Ifiufa. But the market idea is dead in the water. She says the government isn't making any effort to improve the situation and that needs to happen. I keep hearing this again and again: the government isn't working. The management is buggered up. Nothing happens. People only provide for their wantoks (family). Many women have said to me that they, women, have so many good ideas and they need to be in power to get things going.

Josephine also told me before that educated women are starting to say "Why do we need men at all? They just sit around. Why not live our own lives and just be single mothers? It wouldn't be that different." It's interesting to see some women so empowered while others do whatever their husbands tell them. The difference in work burdens between men and women is really, really obvious. Women cook, clean house, weed the gardens (and the gardens are ENORMOUS by American standards), take care of the kids, cook, clean the dishes, etc. Men dig ditches in the gardens, carry heavy things, build roundhouses. If they work in an office, they provide. But generally they sit around, talk with other men and play darts. Maybe they drink beer if they have money. Seriously, they get their pay and it goes to whatever they want before it goes to the family.

Enough on gender roles. The interview with Cathy was good. Her program is, as she says, an "eye-opener" in PNG and a lot of women are trying to set up similar programs around the country. It's exciting, even if it's moving slowly. She really sees her role as helping the women of her village to improve their lives.

We went to town after that to reconfirm my flight (which is Monday morning). Reconfirming one's flight in PNG is the BIGGEST WASTE OF TIME. It drives me crazy. We sat there for an hour while the Air Niugini employees sat around, didn't do much, etc. You have to reconfirm your flight or you'll lose it, even though you've already bought your ticket. I have to do this again once I'm in Madang, on the northern coast. I started to get very pissed off waiting and was trying so hard to check the ugly American inside me.

After that we went to Aka and Rossy's school, where they were having a "cross country" event at school. Races, high jump, etc. I started to REALLY chafe at family time. Let's just say low blood sugar, five forkfuls of spaghetti for breakfast and running out of "clean" water weren't a good combination. We sat around and picnicked for a while. Went back to the office eventually. My friend Anna, with whom I worked at J.K. McCarthy Museum last time I was here, came in to get a loan from MV Microfinance and we chatted for a while. It was great to see her! When Delta came back, we went to the Museum and I was able to sit and stori with my friend and former boss, Vince Pou, for a half-hour. He's doing some amazing things, expanding the museum's activities to include staff exchanges, offering cultural tours in various villages, and starting classes in museum studies at the University of Goroka. I'm really excited to see that the museum has come so far in the 7 years since I worked there.

I was really sad to hear that my friend Ivan Mbagintao died last year. I'd hoped to record an interview with him, since he has a really interesting story. A scientist from the U.S. named Carleton Gajdusek (sp?) came to the Fore region of Eastern Highlands in the 1950s to study kuru, a disease much like mad cow. It was tradition in the region for women and children to eat sections of men's brains when they died. This caused them to get really sick. Gajdusek studied this disease and eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work. He came to the region and hired some local boys to be his porters. Ivan was one of them. When Gajdusek left the region, he brought Ivan back to the States with him. Ivan schooled in Washington D.C. and lived there for a while before returning to PNG. His kids, too, schooled in D.C. He had an article from Time or Newsweek about him that I copied -- it's pretty awesome. So I was sorry to hear I couldn't stori with him about his experience. He died about a year ago, just a few months after he was retrenched.

Last night, my apo (namesake), Sivirito, storied in her language about growing up and the time when the whites came to PNG. She'd talk, and then somebody would stori in Tok Pisin. It was great to hear some of her stories. Seems like another lifetime ago... She got all excited and went and dug out her money from before, a spear that was used to kill men and a shell called a kina (same as the currency here) that used to be used as money before the whites came. I took a photo.

There are friends staying with Delta and Moses from Lae, the big coastal city at one end of the Highlands Highway. They came to see their adopted daughter, who's in the Goroka Hospital with depression right now. We have no water pump, and haven't for a few days. This means pouring water into the toilet before flushing. washing in a hose "shower" behind torn tarp walls while trying to move my feet so the grate I'm standing on doesn't cut them. It's invigorating... At least I'm trying to tell myself that! I'm constantly using this antibacterial stuff on my hands because I'm not able to wash them very often and I shake about 100 hands a day.

That's about it from here. I'm almost out of internet time. I hope you're all well. I go to Madang on Monday morning and will write more from there. Hopefully I can post pictures too! They're on my computer -- I just need to hook that up to an internet connection.

Lukim yupela.

S.