DOBORO IN ALOTAU

                                                                                     

                                    

from Storyboard diaries

by Russell Soaba

Our flight to Port Moresby on 29^th December 2012 was disrupted. It was a late Saturday afternoon flight, PX 959, and since it was a peak period it was hardly surprising that the Air Niugini plane did not turn up at all at Gurney Airport.

We had to get back to town for the night.

Late that evening we went in search of PMV or bus owners to negotiate transport to the airport for the next morning’s flight. No PMVs or buses operated on Sundays, we were told.

Since we were from Cape Vogel we felt it was appropriate to find a bus owner from that region of the Milne Bay Province. A relative recommended Doboro and we felt relieved. She said we could find the owner somewhere at Goilanai.

Off we went to the Goilanai Heights.

This is a posh area of the town. Much of the middle level management populace can be found there. A lot of Rabarabas live there, including the famous Kedu Gloria who helps us occasionally with both land and sea transport.

Almost every door we knocked on knew Doboro. Storyboard was amused that just about everyone there addressed him with politeness as Doboro as well. Indeed, it is a privilege to be addressed as Doboro in Alotau.

The word doboro means old man, but it is used traditionally as a term of respect for the elderly and men of rank. When used in social etiquette it has a special ring to it and is often said with a slight bow.

After having covered the whole of hilltop Goilanai a resident advised us that we could find Doboro at a beach residential area called Small Wagawaga. It meant crossing the Goilanai Bridge and walking another kilometre or so. We did. And as we did so we saw new realty estates springing up here and there such as those by Raven Real Estate, a popular housing enterprise with clientele comprising private and government business houses.

But our trip bore no fruit as we did not exactly know where seaside Wagwaga residential area was and we had to turn back because it was dark. At the bridge we came upon a taliu, meaning a wantok from Misima. We taliued or parlez vous’d a bit with him and he offered to take us to the very house where we could find Doboro. So we turned back to retrace our steps and what a blessing that turned out to be.

We found Doboro surrounded by a large family set down to dinner. The dinner was served and all was waiting for Doboro to say Grace. He in the meantime was absorbed in his copy of the Post Courier.

Our taliu escort introduced us and looking up from his paper, Doboro said, “Ah, yes, I know you very well, Doboro.”

“I am pleased to meet you, Doboro,” said Storyboard and that was it.

After saying Grace he let his family settle down to dinner and we talked. His name we learnt then was Kevin Buyarasi.

Kevin spent many years working for private construction firms in Lae. He first went to Lae in 1970 having completed his apprenticeship at the KB Vocational in Alotau the previous year. His earlier education was observed at Menapi Primary School and being himself from Mapouna in the Dawakerekere area of Cape Vogel that would have been quite an achievement for him and his people in those days.

Kevin Buyarasi spent about 32 years working in Lae. It was during those years that he met his Mailu wife, Shirley. Together they have ten children, the first being around 28years old and the last around 8 or 9. And such well-mannered young men and women the children are.

In 2009 he felt ready to quit and travel back to Alotau where he had hoped to settle and start up a business. That dream paid off and by 2010 he started running the little and humble Doboro bus service in Alotau town.                                                                            

We left Kevin to supper with his family after making an arrangement for us to meet at the Nako Fisheries, Sanderson Bay, as the pickup point from where he could take us to Gurney Airport.

When we awoke and clambered down the Nako hill the next morning we discovered that Kevin and Shirley and a son were already waiting for us. We checked our watches and we realized we had almost slept in and we could miss our flight to Port Moresby. It was Sunday and Kevin and Shirley had to be back in town for Church service with their family.

Nonetheless, it was an enlightening conversation we had with Kevin while driving up to the airport. Starting up a business is indeed difficult at first but one learns to get by, he explained. The vast green landscape before us as we drove along looked more like a green desert after the oil palm trees were felled for new ones to be replanted. It was quite depressing what with all those trees missing. That in order to start up a business one needed to know where one stood with capital, what strings to pull if any and that sort of thing. We learn to get by and that is all that matters.

Yet, what really made us feel comfortable as we drove along to Gurney Airport was that very rarely do we have people from Rabaraba running businesses in Alotau town! Witnessing Doboro Kevin Buyarasi run a small bus service was and is exemplary enough. We feel proud about this. He is our source of encouragement and no matter the odds, no matter the setbacks, political, social or otherwise, he strikes us as someone more than determined to enable us all to move ahead.

As Kevin and Shirley drove back to town for Sunday service after dropping us we wondered if there would be more licences given to our people to similarly participate in businesses in the town itself. Storyboard himself could not help but wonder amusedly if even he could be granted a licence to operate a PMV from Alotau to Awaiyama one day.                                                                          

SPARTANS OF PNG LITERATURE

Ms Joyce Pogla, course advisor of the Literature and English Communication Strand, signing on new students for the 2013 academic year.

                                                                                 

The number of fresh intake of literature and English communication students at the University of Papua New Guinea has fallen to the lowest since the 1980s. This was noted at the start of this year’s academic year when the university’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences met to welcome its new students in its orientation program.

There may have been a lot more candidates wishing to apply but these might not have done so due to various complications encountered at their respective schools throughout the country.

Nonetheless, the Executive Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Betty Lovai, said a few good things to these new students and many would appreciate her words of wisdom.

Their new life for four years at the university, the Dean had pointed out then, would prove all the more testing. They were at a place away from home and parents, she further stressed, to become mature adults in scholarship and learning. It meant reading as much as they could not so much to digest books as books or literature as literature, as to become critical thinkers themselves. Their expertise, their diligence in scholarship and learning was what was needed to make Papua New Guinea adjust itself to the fast changing times that we live in.

An hour after the Dean’s address students of various strands within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences took leave for much more informal meetings with their lecturers and tutors. It was then that the literature and English communication staff as a strand discovered they had only seven new students present there for them to meet.

At first they were shocked. The staff outnumbered their students by more than half, it seemed.

And yet this is the largest strand within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences boasting, economically speaking that is, of managing more than a thousand students in its compulsory courses. Students from virtually all of the schools of the university come to do these compulsory courses as a necessary requirement to graduate at all after four years of study.  And this year the selectors would only provide the strand with seven new students?

Over the next few weeks, however, it was discovered that literature and English, as a strand, had in fact seven non-school leavers, approximately fifteen continuing students and seventeen school leavers as its fresh intake. That balanced things out a bit, as it were.

But that should not mean the strand may now recoil to its comfort zone of the sublime and beautiful in scholarship as the issue at heart of our article here is to point in the direction of how much this strand has been ignored over the years.

To start off with, the strand has been denied a strand leader over the Christmas-New Year break. Financially speaking that would be a crucial oversight on the part of the strand’s superiors as administrators. It does not matter what measures are taken in these cost-saving exercises, so-called, as the intriguing factor noted here was that a whole strand lacked any sense of leadership at a time when all decisions pertaining to finance and expenditure across the board would mean denying that very strand any participation at all in that process of decision making.

The outcome to this was simple. For every staff member of the strand returning to duty, it became a norm and the usual knowledge that the whole school was broke, there was no money left for purchases of new equipment and staff were thus required to buy their own computers and stationery to teach at all.

The second denial noted was that none of the staff of the Literature and English Communication Strand was required to teach any of the strand’s external courses during Lahara (October 2012 to January 2013). The argument? Too much money goes to Literature and English. Let’s give the other strands a chance.

It might not be surprising to hear next that the strand itself might be shelved in preference to other service-oriented strands, whatever that may be. This is by no means an act of disrespect to the superiors by pointing out these little details here, but it strikes one as odd that Literature and English, the largest of strands within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, would be singled out as something of an unnecessary flaw within the consciousness of a premier institution of higher learning such as UPNG.

While the number of its student population dwindles away to less than those of the 1980s the strand still retains its status as the provider of the sort of learning proved wiser in so many respects, starting from the country’s pre-Independence era. That every student that comes out of this strand does something extraordinary often in favour of humanity out there, in the free wide world.

A quick look at class distributions of students doing literature this semester reveals the following: 17 in Literary Criticism, considered the strand’s most boring course coordinated by Storyboard himself; 11 in Literature, Nation and Culture, also a Storyboard course; 57 in Literature and Politics coordinated by Dr Steven Winduo; and 3 in Special Topics of Storyboard’s and members of staff.

The strand considers Literature and Politics its heart beat that makes the university itself tick as the premier institution of higher learning within the Pacific region. In bringing a review of the course text book of this course called “Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in Papua New Guinea” to appear on these pages shortly perhaps the reader will that way be given the opportunity of knowing how vital Literature and English Communication is in UPNG.

This year the strand has approximately 39 majors on record. It depends on how that number performs during the course of the four-year BA in Literature and English Communication program. The number may be less come graduation day. But even that small number should suffice in churning out what should rightly be considered the Spartans of PNG Literature.  

                                                                                                                      

SYMPOSIUM ON CULTURE AND ARTS

Photo by Ketsin Robert.

                                                                       

The National Cultural Commission has once again come to easing and soothing the woes of struggling Papua New Guinean writers, artists and musicians through the staging of its National Symposium on Culture and the Arts.

This was observed at the National Museum from 7^th to 9^th November, 2012, and in collaboration with the National Museum, the Melanesian Institute of Art and Culture, UNESCO, UOG and various institutional and private bodies in town.

Among the highlights of this event was the launching of the locally-made University of Goroka film “The Last Real Man” by the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Honourable Boka Kondra.

The main theme of the symposium was “harnessing the arts for national development”. Papers presented were therefore of a variety of subject matter, not wandering too far off from the theme, of course, although there were one or two powerful oratories of some value during the course of the whole program.

Themes covered at this three-day long symposium included the importance of culture and the arts in nation building, cultural industries and the challenges facing these, the actual development of cultural and creative industries, problems of copyright, promotion and marketing, capacity building, heritage and the cultural industries, views representing provincial perspectives and, finally, the work of the writers and artists themselves.

Many thought that the last session, appropriately titled “artists’ corner”, which was devoted to writers, artists, musicians and film makers and headed by this writer, was the fiery one of the lot. We’ve heard the best of oratories then. Nonetheless the whole program was seriously observed and with many new things learnt within the world of arts and letters.

An interesting detail noted during the week was that of Professor John Waiko’s assertion and insistence upon the fact that while we still believe we have 800 languages there are, in fact, 1,100 plus pure languages in Papua New Guinea today, with a few others yet to be discovered. But, warned the professor, on yet another matter of relevance, if we do believe that we have that number of languages in our country we must also provide material evidence as scholars do throughout the world that we have been here on our island nation for the last 50,000 years. 

Dr Steven Winduo speaking on the importance of arts and culture in nation building pointed out that there had been so much dug out of our country by way of cultural research and knowledge with very little given back in return. And yet these are crucial elements constituting our sense of culture, nationalism and cultural inheritance or identity.

 Another speaker on this topic, Mari Ellingson, spoke of music as a significant aspect of our lives, touching as well on the problems of copyright and pirating of local musical products or in simply dealing with the industry itself in a manner that often brought little reward to the musician as an artist. “Music comes from the heart,” said Ms Ellingson, “the spirit, the soul.” Just as any other cultural unit it, too, needed support, especially in funding. Examples cited, among others, was the lack of facilities found at UPNG to cater for both staff and students of that institution.

Aside from the intellectual debates and discussions that went on there were poetry readings and music provided in the evenings, culminating each day's proceedings. It was fun kind of a symposium, thanks to Dr Jacob Simet and his staff at NCC and to Dr Andrew Moutu for providing the venue and necessary facilities for the whole program.

But, as it is often said of them, “Where there are writers and artists there is much merriment and feasting.”

TIRED OF THE CITY

                                                                           
 Time to flee the overpopulated crowds of Port Moresby city and go home.

And why not?

Go home, meet up with cousins and forget the night mares of the city, say the children.

And why not?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ONE AND ALL!

                                                                

THE LITERATURE OF HIGHER LAWS

                                                                      

No one feels and knows the impact of good literature until he or she experiences it first hand.

When we read Alice Wedega we think we are reading stuff that is conservative, out-dated, irrelevant. But the teachings of this great woman remain as powerfully contemporaneous as ever. When she says, for example, that for a Milne Bay woman the choice is either to serve God or marry, she ain't kidding.

There are no in-betweens.  The in-betweens usually spell disaster. Those that are descendants of this great writer must therefore be extremely careful how they conduct themselves and the life style they choose to lead. You either are married or are serving God.

In a Sophoclean drama things are much more tragic than that. Antigone, following the rules of those higher laws, marches forward to meet her fate. In a Shakespearean tragedy it is wise to take heed of the lessons imparted in a young general who calls his would be followers "curs", or a mighty general misled into thinking that his young bride is unfaithful.

And so with us in our country. And how we regard literature.

For those who study literature know that as far as the laws are concerned you are the invisible legislators, your are the unofficial ombudsmen of your society. The literature you create remains as powerful as Shakespeare had willed it in composing Coriolanus or Othello.

And so the message left by Alice Wedega remains as powerful as ever. Listen, and you will never go wrong.

                                                                                        

TALKING ABOUT MY PORT MORESBY

                                              
O friend
O fellow mariner
How can I ever forget you?
At 16 I sailed into your harbour
tired, hungry, lost somewhat
yet fascinated when I woke up the next day
from the Koki Mission Station
to look upon your stilled waters again
your ever enduring beauty.

There and then did I first
set my sight upon you
my eternal lover

I will never forget you
I will never abandon you
my Port Moresby!

                                    
I first set my foot on Port Moresby's soil at 16. The township then was the most beautiful in the Territory. There were no such places as Tokarara, Gerehu, Waigani, Erima or Morata. These were bush, the hunting grounds of the Motu/Koitabus. 

In fact, as recently as the 70s we could see some maganis come out at dawn, lick their paws before the morning sun and start chomping away at the lawn that surrounded the Waigani campus. That is how fresh and hygienic Port Moresby was then.

Today, the whole city is so overridden with trash and filth not a single one of our so-called "social engineers" knows how to clean the mess up. Sad... so sad.

                                        
This post is dedicated to Gerard Dogimab and Michael Midiwabu.                

NIGHTFALL

                                                                           

 A poem by Naka Tauna

Darkness steals across the sky

An explosion of colours on the horizon

Lit fires dot the island, mothers hush children

Aroma of smoked fish mingled with coconut milk

Smoke spirals endlessly towards the heavens

A musician’s tune drifts slowly on the breeze

Scent of jasmine and frangipani saturates the air

                                                                      

A lone fisherman pulls up his catch

Creatures of the night stir and fly hither

Echoes of distant thunder

                                                                             

Swaying palm trees whisper softly to the wind

Rain comes falling

A moist blanket encompassing all

The stillness of the night is drowned

Cool southerlies calm the storm

Billowing clouds disintegrate like vapour

A slight breeze settles the windswept beach

                                                                                  

The silence is captivating

A silver sphere rises majestically

Covering the sky in abundant light

An eerie glow illuminates the earth

Shards of light spill softly thru thatched roofs

Filtering thru windows, toying with dark shadows

Playing havoc with one’s imagination

Cicadas and crickets lead the crescendo

Fireflies resemble floating fairy lights

                                                                             

Night fishermen gather quietly

Waves lap gently, canoes side by side

Paddles slice thru water

Following a shimmering path

Ghostly apparitions disappearing into the mist

A lone owl hoots overhead

Black figures materialize out of the shadows

Silhouettes of women drift endlessly

Onward towards a secret destination

Children slumber with dreams of a new day