Hey Everyone! So some weeks ago a generator blew up the cord to my laptop so I will not be able to check my email before my return to the US on October 2. If you need to contact me before that, find another way.

Yams.

Yams are a big deal here. If the yams from your garden are scrawny, it means you haven't been behaving properly and as a result the yam "meat" translocated itself to another garden.

And the other day I found out that people here used to have these enormous yam gardens. They'd dig up all the yams at once, paint each one, then build a 3 or 4 story structure to house them all. Then for weeks people would guard the giant yam pile, sleeping on and around it for weeks until they'd throw a huge yam party where people would come from all over to eat the yams and have lots of sex.

Now is that fascinating or is that fascinating??

Things are looking up!

Things are looking up! I've been doing a lot of linguistics, eating lots of pineapple, and I've figured out why I'm getting dog lice from Rover--bye bye dog lice!

But I'm really looking forward to being on that flight. The other day I remembered how 6 months ago I saw this trip as a good way to get me out of my day-to-day existence, shuffling around in slippers nursing hot morning or cold evening beverages and avoiding leaving my apartment for days on end.

And now what do I spend most my time thinking about besides Chini linguistics? Shuffling around in my slippers nursing hot morning and cold evening beverages. How glorious the thought!

A puppy!

(Ghost-poster's note: Joseph sends me his posts by cell phone, and I put them up. I have been also out of cell phone contact for about a month, so now I'm posting several of Joseph's entries all at once. Enjoy!)

A couple of weeks ago an ex-Peace Corps guy here offered to a few of us the following wisdom:

"PNG. If you can make it here, you can make it here." Genius.

Lately a number of things have conspired to make me pretty miserable, so I'm trying to focus on the positive. One great thing that happened is: I have a puppy!! Which the villagers named Rover, oddly enough. Before I left the village for a break he was yelping,  being overrun by lice. I washed all the lice off and snuggled him by the fire. And the basically the whole village became obsessed with him, fed him tons, and now he's twice the size of his brother.

He's adorable, follows me around everywhere. Unfortunately, though even if I delouse him first, every time I play with him I get dog lice for 2-3 days. Ugh.

Currently up in Goroka in the Eastern Highlands where I'm hanging out at this sort of linguist commune. I've mostly been lazing about existing on coffee and beer and avocado so there's nothing too exciting to report. Several days ago though I went to Rosove, a village perched high up in the mountains. The sumptuous vistas were out of control but sadly my camera battery died so I have little evidence of the sumptuous-ness.

Having the highlands as a cultural point of comparison has also given me a lot of food for thought. So many things are so different. So for instance I can't help but notice how people here don't verbally assault their children all the time like the Chini do. In Andamang I've gotten so used to people calling their children 'worthless' as a term of endearment "Hey worthless, what are you doing over there?". To deny a kid's request for something they'll say "Your ass smells like shit!" And when a baby cries too loudly or for too long someone'll call out "Pull out its eyes! Pull out its teeth!" Up here though you don't hear those kinds of things, but in both places everyone seems to turn out alright in the end I guess.

Back in Madang as of a few days! Enjoying autonomy and access to cold things. 

To get here to Madang I had a 2.1 day journey with about a dozen other people. Parts of the trip were pleasant, like when I collapsed from heat and thirst and fell asleep on some (stationary) driftwood in a cold stream. But mostly it was just miserable, and so I got grumpy, which is bad because here you have to be agreeable all the time. I had barely slept for two days, and we were making our way to Madang in the middle of the night in the PMV (=truckish bus). I got sat next to the driver. Around 1am as I was calculating the likelihood of my surviving the trip, he offered me this leg of goat he had gotten from some person on the road. He put it right in my face, I mean it was so discolored and pungent and obviously old so I wasn’t at first able to even recognize it as meat, and I said (in Tok Pisin) ‘Nope. I don’t want it.’ (“Nogat. Mi les.”). That was taken as pretty impolite apparently so the other passengers corrected me – apparently in that situation I’m supposed to said ‘I’ve had enough’ (“Mi inap”) even though I hadn’t actually eaten anything. 

In unrelated news, I’ve now chewed betel nut a few times. It’s this bizarre kind of sour fruit thing that you chew and it puts you in a good mood and makes you chatty. The betel nut alone turns your spit white, and you have to spit all of that out. Then you take this other sour thing called daka that resembles a furry green bean, and you dip it into a container of crushed sea shell powder (kambang) and then you bite the end of the daka with the kambang on it and you chew. That combination results in a chemical reaction that turns everything red and makes you salivate, and so then you have to keep spitting out your red spit. It’s actually rather nice, and puts you in a good mood. Everyone here chews it constantly and people’s social lives are basically centered around it. And there’s always red spit all over the ground everywhere. Anyways here’s a picture of me the first time I chewed betel nut. 

Exciting food times! I ate a baby crocodile for dinner last night, and had wallaby with sago and river water coffee for breakfast this morning.

Generally the food here isn't bad, just bland. And so as a result I end up craving these expired Australian imported vitamin C chewables. They're nice and tart, artificial orange, and I eat more than the recommended daily amount and spend way too much time coming up with justifications for consuming more.

Anyways, I'm headed back to town (Madang) and am really excited to have control over what I eat for 2 weeks.

And beer. I'm excited for cold beer.

(Ghost-poster's note: Joseph sent this post a few weeks back, but I only just received it. Sorry!)

So the other day I was told there's this forbidden pond in the forest, and so I asked a couple guys why. Their combined responses go like this:

"Well, it used to be OK until this one day this woman was fishing there and a big black snake went up her vagina, and its head came out her mouth and the two were buried together like that. Now the place is inhabited by wallaby-headed, pot-bellied, cassowary-legged dwarves who will eat you and only your bones will remain."

(Another guy insists they're just not very friendly and will only attack if provoked.)

I guess that means I'm not in Kansas anymore.

Got to play with this baby tree opossum, record breaking cuteness levels!

Then I ate its mother.

Here I am in the middle of the New Guinean bush and what do I hear emanating from someone's stereo, but Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Wtf.

In other news, yesterday I heard this guy cooing to a baby in Chini and he said to it, "Yes yes! Sleep! Yes! Where's the soup?"

Last time I was here I told some people that I didn't want to bathe in the river because I was afraid a crocodile would eat me, and they told me, "It won't eat you! They don't like human meat. It will crush you in its jaw and drown you and leave your body in an underwater hole." They appeared to think they had responded to my concern.

So this time I framed my concern by saying I was afraid of being attacked by a crocodile as I bathed. "It won't attack you while you bathe! It will wait until you're heading back up to the shore!"

Back in good ole Akapmɨnggɨ after a 2-day journey, complete with a capsized canoe, ruined cargo, and the near break-out of a fight between members of the two Chini villages.

Anyways, downriver canoe trips make for great opportunities to figure out the semantics of directional verbs. If you want to say, "I'm leaving/going" in Chini, you have to know which of at least 7 possible verbs to use, depending on where you're heading. It's also even more complicated than that, since they don't all take the same tense-aspect-realis morphology. It's basically a linguist's dream, though I suppose mind-numbingly boring for everyone else!

In Madang, leaving tomorrow

In Madang and leaving for the bush tomorrow. Going to go an unexpected route, am excited because I'll've traveled nearly the full stretch of the Sogeram by boat.

I forgot how uncomfortable and exhausting it is to have celebrity status for being white. Sometimes it's not that bad, though. Today this random PNG version of a 2cool4school kid came up saying, "Hey waitman!" and shook my hand saying in the freshest PNG slang, "Boi stret!" (means something like "yeah dude!").

Otherwise the most exciting thing that's happened is the lizard I saw between the screen and the glass in the ATM this morning. I tried to save him by alerting the security guard to his plight only to see later nothing had been done. Poor guy!

Hey so this is basically my "I'm still alive somewhere in PNG" blog, which I'll be mysteriously updating despite having no direct access to the internet.