To get to Dona village, first you get on a bus to Tokyo. Then it's a train to Narita Airport and a seven hour flight to Papua New Guinea's capital city, Port Moresby. You'll be hit by the heat and humidity as you walk across the runway and rush straight on to a connecting flight to the quickly developing city of Lae on the opposite coast. Another bus ride past jungle, construction sites, missionary camps with barbed wire fences and open markets gets you to the port. It's been a long ride but hey don't worry, you're halfway there already!
The boat trip follows the coast in a banana boat open to the elements and is spread over two days, spotting dolphins and counting the flying fish zipping out of the water as you pass. You'll see small villages on the beaches and kids that run out into the water to wave as you turn into the mouth of the Waria River and head back inland. Not long now, you'll pass people on canoes carved out of tree trunks and on rafts, taking their produce down to be sold on the coast where they'll let the raft float out to sea and walk for days to get back home when they're done.
You'll pull into a small inlet, slowing onto a mud bank by a small bridge a foot wide, head up onto a path that winds past coconut trees and banana plants. Then, with the heat of the boat, all your first bug bites and the exhaustion of traveling behind you, finally walking into the village square where the team working on the school funded by Niigata ALTs says “Hey! Great to see you, let's get started.”
Papua New Guinea makes a hell of a first impression, and as a couple of the team discovered this year, a strong second one too. PNG, and specifically the Waria Valley region of Morobe Province on the north east coast is where the Niigata ALT community (that's you!) is focusing its fundraising efforts to build new schools and support education. Every year for the last decade and a half, we've worked with our partners to find a community that really needs a school. In 2013 that community was Dona village, of the Jia tribe.
Jia is also the name of their language, one of the 800 plus native to the country. The tribe is split into four clans that members are born into (unless you're a lucky Niigata ALT and get invited to join when you visit). The clans and ownership of all the land is passed down on the mother's side of the family. The four clans are the Bego – charged with keeping the livestock, the Wapo – who handle the cultivation and gardens, the Sakiya – fishing and boats and the Yewa – who organize entertainment and serve the food at festivals. The first thing you say after your name when you meet is which tribe you're from, and being from the same clan is a sure fire way to score hugs and cheers.
Dona turned out to be one of the most prosperous settlements in the whole valley. Picture a long thin village that snakes from the river into the jungle, a main dirt path with homes made from bush materials on either side. They're fairly robust buildings, but with untreated log frames and palm roofs that will last between three and five years before the entire structure must be pulled down and rebuilt. Inside you'll see the ground floors aren't much used and a high water mark that shows how extreme the floods can be when they hit. Last year the villagers spent a week traveling around the village by canoe after a particularly strong rainy season.
Of all the buildings we've seen in Waria Valley, the churches were always the biggest, most lavish and well funded. One in particular, in another village a short trip from Dona, towered over everything else around it, freshly redecorated and with well a well kept ornamental garden around it. As a non-believer, it can be a little frustrating to see the amount of money that's spent on religious buildings when the area is so desperate for medical facilities and education. But Christianity is a big part of the community, bringing the people together twice a day for sermons – one of which we were lucky enough to be invited too. There were prayers, a bible reading and worship songs played on guitar just like you'd find in a western evangelical church. The priest was involved in every aspect of village life, even picking up tools to work bareback in the sun all day on the school building project. In Waria, it was Lutheran missionaries who first arrived and converted the populace. They still have an outpost in the area not too far from Dona and two German missionaries visited as recently as last year. Religion is inescapably a piece of the area's modern cultural identity.
Coming back for a second visit meant we could see firsthand how quickly PNG is developing. In 2012, our guide was excited to have a mobile phone, taking pictures and wandering back and forth all day searching for an elusive bar of reception (he could have been searching for a long time, the local signal tower was on a small island claimed by two different tribes that like to take turns invading it and pulling all the other's stuff down, tower and all). This time we saw adverts for mobile phone providers the second we stepped off the plane, and more than once we were pulled aside even in Dona to see someone's new mobile. Communication will be key in connecting the tribes to the mini economic and social revolution taking place in the cities.
The youth of Waria is keen to catch up – we visited the technology college, the only place in the province for higher education. They're asking big questions: How can Papua New Guinea become a developed nation? What does it take to become a powerhouse of industry like China or at the forefront of technology like Japan? And my favorite: “How do I get your job?!” The students there were internet savvy and aware of the larger world around them, coming up to us to exchange Facebook details for accounts they'd set up on visits to Lae.
Then there's the school project in Dona. Work had already started when we arrived, a base frame on stilts to keep it out of the floods. The floor boards were being nailed in and walls pulled up, it looked fantastic! So hey, of course it had to all go wrong.
The biggest difference between the traditional and modern style buildings is the milled wood – planks made from the really big jungle trees. A lot of money goes into renting a portable saw mill, specially designed to be usable on almost any terrain, whether that's steep hillsides or shifting sands on beaches. A sad blip in PNG's emergence into the global market is how that sawmill was invented and first produced in the country, but they didn't copyright the design. An Australian firm took the idea and now PNG has to lease it back from them at inflated rates. Running and repairing them isn't cheap either so when one breaks down in the middle of a project, you know you've got a big problem.
We trekked along one of the government roads – a dirt track cut through the jungle – to where the milling had been taking place. The team in Dona had chosen six trees, enough wood to complete the entire project. One of the giant trunks lay half milled where it had been felled, the mill sitting silent beside it. It would take weeks for a replacement part to travel there but rather than being down, the villagers were all upbeat and eager to talk about the progress that had already been made. The roof was nearly ready to go on! Did we want to go and bang a few nails in? It'll get done when it gets done, Papua New Guinea island time... Hey! Let's carry the last of the planks back and have a coconut.
The school was far from finished when we left, but we had the opening ceremony anyway.
And it was great.
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