The
Case of the Missing Luggage
Clueless,
I Stalk the Wilds of Papua New Guinea
For Emergency Underwear
 The underwear choices were slim and grim in downtown Lae. |
LAE, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 6 — It’s a good thing I don’t possess the writing skills to describe how bad I smell right now, because I guarantee that you’d stop reading.
I recently emerged from a crowded, sweltering department store in downtown Lae. My four travel companions and I were shopping for underwear, deodorant, sheets and other items we’ll need for the next week in the village of 200 where we’ll be building a Habitat for Humanity house.
This shopping spree was necessary because all five of us — traveling from three different cities on four different airlines — managed to arrive in Papua New Guinea without our luggage.
My blue duffel bag was last seen in Brisbane, Australia. I checked it at the Air Niugini ticket counter, boarded Flight 04, but after I cleared customs, I found the luggage carousel empty. This was somewhat astonishing, as Air Niugini had only one flight scheduled — Flight 04 — and it made no intermediate stops en route to my destination, Port Morsby, Papua New Guinea.
In terms of sheer incompetence, Air Niugini surpassed Alaska Air, which last week managed to lose the very same duffel on my journey between LA and Anchorage. During a layover in Seattle, I did not change planes, although for some unknown reason, my luggage did.
Despite
Air Niugini’s inept baggage handling, I still rate the airline higher
than Alaska Air in the service department
because of the cheerful, hot pink pillows, the superior food ( a surprisingly
moist fish fillet with an Asian vegetable medley), an edgier selection
of country music on the complimentary
headphones, and the friendlier employees in the lost-luggage department.
(The Alaska Air agents were downright surly.)
At any rate, of the five of us on the Habitat crew, my luggage made it the farthest. It was the only bag seen on the Australian continent. The other four women — three traveling from Washington, D.C., and one from San Francisco — had not seen their bags since their points of departure. However, all five of us are in much better shape than Linda Newman, the sixth member of our work crew. Not only is her luggage not in Papua New Guinea, but neither is she. Linda was last seen three days ago in New York City. Officials at Habitat headquarters in Americus, Ga., are currently investigating her whereabouts.
 Half of our Habitat crew: Mary Ann, Angie and Hannah. |
Tomorrow, our crew — whether it numbers five or six — is scheduled for a three-hour boat ride to Sisi, a coastal village where we will help construct a four-room house. There are no stores near Sisi — hence the shopping spree in Lae, Papua New Guinea’s second-largest city with some 120,000 people.
The five of us were quite a spectacle in the department store. We were by far the loudest patrons, and somehow, the only ones dripping with sweat.
Our resourceful group leader, Julie Lopez, came up with a clever idea of purchasing sarongs, which can double as bed sheets. I won’t bore you with the details of our purchases, except to say that the underwear I was forced to buy is so unattractive that not even my octogenarian grandmothers would be caught dead wearing it.
Supervising this shopping spree was the local Habitat coordinator, Martin Petrus, who seemed a bit embarrassed to be accompanying five loud, sweaty American women on a search for emergency undergarments. When Julie asked Martin if he’d ever been shopping with women before, he dropped his head and said, "No … I must say no."
Martin seemed to relax in
the afternoon, when he took us on a tour of a tropical bird sanctuary.
I, personally, was bored by the birds, as I tend to be by most living
creatures that aren’t human beings. But I was sufficiently entertained
by my traveling companions, particularly Angie Clay, a 25-year-old student
at George Mason University in Washington. 
Not
10 minutes have gone by without an offer from Angie to supply the group
with a pharmaceutical or beauty product. "Suzanne, do you need some
sunscreen?" "Julie, can I offer you some mosquito repellant?"
"Some organic cucumber facial scrub?" "An antibacterial
handwipe?" "An insect-bite anti-itch stick?" "A Midol?"
And these are only the items Angie happened to have in her carry-on bag. If and when her luggage is ever recovered, she may want to consider opening the first drugstore in Sisi.
The youngest member of our group is 23-year-old Hannah Kim, who had never been in an airplane until last November, when she took a 115-mile flight from Washington to Charlottesville, Va. Hannah — and allow me to be frank here — is pushing the limits of my patience. She keeps asking if the store price tags are in American dollars. Hello? Are we in America? Do the people of Papua New Guinea look like they are walking around with pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in their wallets?
 Julie, our group leader, perusing the selection of flip-flops |
Hannah is a vegan who, in the pre-trip information packet, described herself as having "empathy for everyone and everything." Let me be frank again: Her empathy is driving me nuts. At the bird sanctuary, she felt sorry for some yellow-tailed long-beaked something-or-other that was all by its lonesome in its cage. Then she felt sorry for the cat that was loitering at the picnic table where we had lunch. "Oh," she sighed, "I wish I’d brought cat food."
On the opposite end of the travel scale is Mary Ann Luce of Los Altos, Calif., who lived in Papua New Guinea for two years in the mid-’90s with her late husband. Mary Ann seems like a nice woman, though she speaks so softly that I can make out only about half of what she’s saying.
Well, that’s the update. Tomorrow we leave for Sisi, which has no electricity, no flush toilets and no showers. We have no luggage, and some of us — namely, me — have no skills.
It ought to be a fascinating week.
A
Boatload of TroubleWhy I May Never Leave Papua New Guinea
SISI VILLAGE, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 7 — Please make note of the following address:
Sisi Village
Finschhaven
Morobe Province
Papua
New Guinea
This
is important because it is the address of the village where I may very
well spend the rest of my life.
I say this not because I have fallen in love with the coconut palms and the simple life, and I now feel inspired to remain among the villagers and write a novel. Not at all. I say this because the violence with which I vomited on this morning’s boat trip and the nausea I endured on the ensuing truck ride have made me so fearful of the return trip that I may simply never leave.
Today was brutal. But before I get into it, I should update you on our lost luggage and lost crew member. Two duffels were miraculously retrieved from the black hole that is international baggage handling. One was mine; the other was Mary Ann’s. We now have to bear the guilt of being the only two in our group with sleeping bags, pillow cases and underwear that does not look like something Barbara Bush would wear.
As for our lost crew member, Linda Newman: She turned up in Papua New Guinea after an unplanned trip to Auckland, New Zealand, an overnight in Sydney, courtesy of United Airlines, and a series of other detours set in motion by thunderstorms back at New York’s La Guardia Airport. Linda is a welcome addition to the group — a 52-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of two with short blond hair and a thick Long Island accent.
Okay, enough with the pleasantries. Back to my suffering.
 When our Daihatsu got stuck in the mud, we had to hop out so the Toyota in front of us could tow our truck up the hill. |
I suspect that Martin — the low-key Papua New Guinea national who is our guide — knew all along the journey to Sisi would be harrowing for the American princesses who so desperately sought to buy deodorant yesterday. I think he chose not to warn us because he didn’t want to scare us off. At our group meeting last night, he presented the trip as a swift and uneventful ferry trip followed by a brief drive on a paved road to a coastal village.
No potential difficulties were discussed, but I was still concerned. I hate boats. Bodies of water do not beckon me. I even managed to get incurably seasick on the only cruise ship I’ve boarded. (The nausea was only exacerbated by the "Broadway plays" billed as nightly entertainment.)
I became more concerned when we boarded the ferry this morning in the pouring rain. I mentioned the seasickness problem to the group, but nobody had any Dramamine — not even Angie, the traveling pharmacy. ("How about Immodium?" she offered. "Pepto-Bismol? Tylenol?")
I went downstairs and slumped in my seat to avoid a window view of the crashing waves. I ate my emergency package of Rolos, hoping the chewing might calm my stomach, and it worked at first. The only real annoyance was the televangelist faith healer on the cabin’s TV screen — Pastor Benny Hinn, who appeared to have cured his baldness with a seriously bad rug.
But
gradually, the sea became rougher and my grip on the seat railing became
tighter. The boat would ride a big wave up and drop straight down. We’d
crash on the water, ride an even bigger wave up, then plunge even farther.
By this point, Pastor Benny Hinn had been replaced on the video monitor by a sci-fi movie involving a robot, a baseball diamond and a woman with blood streaming down her face. I wasn’t paying close attention, but it seemed that every few minutes the woman would let out a blood-curdling scream that eerily coincided with the boat smashing onto the water.
As the rocking became more violent, I began to take short, shallow breaths. I scooted down off my seat and onto the floor, where I stretched out in the aisle. Next thing I knew, a big wave jolted me upright, and just as the woman on the video screen let out one of her ear-splitting shrieks, I opened the plastic bag I had been clutching for more than an hour and hurled right into it.
Mercifully, about a half-hour later, the boat finally docked, and our group disembarked to blue skies and a large and curious crowd of locals. With my head still spinning and my nostrils still burning from the sweet-acidy remnants of my stomach contents, I jammed myself into the back of a Daihatsu pickup truck, which had been outfitted with two planks for the Habitat crew and about a dozen locals.
Within moments, I knew there would be no quick trip and there would be no pavement. For nearly three hours, we bounced and jostled up a mountain on a winding, steep, muddy, rocky path that twice proved to be too much for the Daihatsu. After nearly tipping over, the truck got stuck in the mud and we all had to hop out. The driver in the truck in front of ours then attached a rope to our vehicle and yanked it up the hill while we walked behind. I’m sure I would have thrown up during the ride if I hadn’t already done so on the ferry.
 The women of Sisi welcomed us to their village. |
We finally arrived at Sisi Village, an assortment of thatched huts and small wooden houses on either side of a dirt road. While still in the truck, we were serenaded by a band of guitar-playing villagers hidden behind a blue tarp. After a couple of folk songs in Pidgen (the simplified mixture of English and German that serves as the common language in Papua New Guinea), the tarp was lowered to reveal about 40 men, women and children, our hosts for the week.
One family had moved out of their four-room wooden house on stilts (but no toilet; more on that later), so that we could move in. They provided a thin mattress for each of us, and we would sleep two to a room. Still nauseous, I was never so happy to lie down and rest my head on a pillow. Even in my exhaustion, I noticed something: The wooden planks that made up the floors and walls were quite rough and imperfectly cut. Suddenly, I felt just a little bit better about my complete lack of construction skills. Tomorrow I’m expected to start building a house.
I
Came, I Sawed, I CringedThen I Got Hammered Trying to Hit the Nail on the Head
 The house as it looked when we joined the crew. |
SISI VILLAGE, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 8 — In East Los Angeles there lives a short, cheerful father of seven named Ramon Gutierrez. Ramon is my handyman. He installed the crown moulding in my office and filled the holes made by my electrician and removed the cheesy, floor-to-ceiling porn mirrors left by the previous owner of my condo. Ramon is often late to work — days late, actually — but after my performance on the job site today in Sisi, I can say this for Ramon: His job as my handyman is not in jeopardy.
My incompetence with the saw — yes, I was issued my own personal saw — was surpassed only by my incompetence with my own personal hammer.
Our workday began around 9 a.m. The six of us ambled up the road to the job site, where yesterday's rain had turned the dirt into mud. The stilts were in place and the frame had been started. Already at the site were our coworkers, about two dozen local men — some volunteers, some employees of the local Habitat affiliate. The construction supervisor was Kaimo, a serious man wearing a baseball cap and a tool belt. Kaimo was one of maybe three men wearing shoes. Some wore flip-flops. Most were barefoot.
In
addition to having coworkers, we would be having an audience. A large
band of women and children had come from a nearby village to cook us lunch
and dinner. In between, they would stand and watch us, a mortifying
prospect.
Within minutes of being issued my tools, I was told to start sawing off the end of a 2-by-4, following a line that had been penciled across it. I wasn’t expecting a demonstration; after all, what is there to do with a saw but saw? Still, the abruptness of the order was a bit shocking.
I started thrusting the saw back and forth, and before I knew it, I was not following the line but veering to the right. I tried to correct myself, but it was too late. The groove was too deep; the path already set. I was hoping to keep this problem to myself, but somehow Kaimo, while doing 14 other tasks simultaneously, managed to notice. He walked over, pointed to the pencil mark and said, "No. Straight."
The sawing went slowly. It seemed to me I might have benefitted from a discussion on technique. Is it best to take short strokes or long? Should you saw straight across until you have a groove all the way along the pencil line, or should you just start in at a diagonal? I think I was gripping the handle too tightly because my hand began to cramp up on the third 2-by-4.
 Linda and I are hammering. That's Mary Ann standing in the background. |
Since my sawing was going poorly, I jumped at the chance to hammer when volunteers were called for. I'd never held a saw before, but at least I'd nailed pictures to the wall.
My job was to pound three-inch nails into the side of a 2-by-4. I squatted over the lumber and whacked and whacked and whacked at the nail, hitting it maybe seven out of every 10 times. But the damn thing would barely budge. Was I holding the hammer incorrectly? Was I not giving it enough oomph? Was I pounding at the wrong angle?
I probably took 30 swings at the nail before one of the men motioned for me to step aside, grabbed my hammer and gave the nail exactly FOUR whacks before it disappeared into the wood as if asbsorbed by quicksand.
After that, I put a lot more power into my hammering, but that created a new problem: lack of control, resulting in bent nails. Several times the man holding the lumber in place removed the hammer from my hand, banged the nail straight and returned the hammer to me, only to have me bend it again and put the whole shameful process back in motion.
My low point was when I bent a nail and one of the women who had come to cook — a woman whose culture probably prevented her from even thinking about picking up a hammer — became so exasperated by my incompetence that she impulsively grabbed the hammer from me and straightened out my nail herself. When I looked up to thank her, I discovered that this episode was being watched with great interest by a dozen 7-year-olds who had broken into laughter.
I wanted my saw back.
At
this point you may be wondering how my fellow Americans were faring. Not
really any better than me. Linda could saw straighter, but her two-handed
method would have kept her off of This Old House. Mary Ann complained
that the nails were of poor quality and bent too easily. Julie, our group
leader, maintained that the saws weren't sharp enough. (Oh really? Then
why were the men able to cut through the wood like it was prime rib?)
I was secretly pleased that my travel companions were struggling so I wouldn’t be the only one to be humiliated. But part of me was also rooting for them to succeed so that womankind as a whole would not be humiliated.
I mentioned to Julie that the whole arrangement seemed ridiculous. Why were the men holding the lumber in place while we did the sawing and hammering? If our jobs were reversed, I suggested, the house would be built three times as fast. We were causing more trouble than we were worth.
But Julie said I had it all wrong. Sure, the men could work more efficiently. But, she said, our presence on the job site was such an novelty that most of the local volunteers — the men who were busy working on other parts of the house — would not even have shown up if we hadn't been there.
This explanation did not make me feel very useful. In essence, we were the entertainment, like the car-show models who stand and exhibit their cleavage while the new Chevy Lumina spins around on the platform. But instead of wearing bikinis, we were wearing overalls and work boots and exhibiting our ineptitude with a saw.
 When I complained to our supervisor that my saw was bent, he said, "That's what happens to saws when people don't use them properly." |
You may be wondering why our entire group is female. It's because Julie demanded it. She says that bringing men on Habitat builds can be problematic. The men tend to have construction experience and big egos, she says, and they often take over and crowd out the women. They also tend to get upset if the house isn't completed by the end of the trip. Women, on the other hand, having little or no building experience, tend to go with the flow and exhibit no such completion complexes.
Despite what Julie says, I personally think it would help to have a few guys around with some skill and some strength, especially if they look anything like the beefy construction workers in my favorite country-music videos.
At any rate, we all hammered and sawed the best we could. My performance improved slightly by the end of the day, but I was exhausted. I'm hoping to be more useful tomorrow.
It's
a Board, It's a Plane, It's Superwoman!
I Take My Usefulness To a Whole New Level
SISI VILLAGE, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 9 — I am pleased to report that I have found my niche in the construction world: planing.
This morning when I arrived at the job site, I was thrilled to learn there would be no need for hammering, and we had a choice between sawing and planing. I had no idea what planing involved, but I was the first to volunteer for it.
 Planing: the best exercise since the rowing machine. |
Kaimo, our stoical construction supervisor, picked up a gizmo that looked like a large staple gun with a blade underneath. He shoved it back and forth along a long, thin plank of wood, handed me the thing, then disappeared. I grasped that the idea was to smooth the wood so it could be used for the floors and walls.
I took to planing immediately. It was much tougher than it looked; I had to put all my might into the motion in order to slice off wood shavings large enough to count. But as I forced the plan back and forth, back and forth, it dawned on me that the sensation felt familiar. It was like ... like … exercise! Yes! After almost a month of complete sloth — sitting in a lawn chair at the Jamboree, sitting in a Daewoo Leganza in Alaska, sitting on four airplanes en route to Papua New Guinea — I was finally getting a workout! Once I made this connection, I really perked up and put everything I had into my job.
In addition to providing a modicum of fitness, planing offered a benefit thus far unique to my construction-related tasks: zero potential for humiliation. There was no precision or hand-eye coordination involved, no danger of injuring myself or others. Planing was about strength and endurance, pure and simple, and I was pleased that I had sufficient reserves of both to keep at it all day.
If you are wondering if I was bored, I will tell you: absolutely not. Expecting to find the task tedious, I initially tried to pre-empt boredom by singing "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" to myself. But I kept losing my place and repeating myself, and I never got below 89 bottles.
The
reason quickly became clear: Planing is not drudgery. It is just strenuous
enough to not be mind-numbing — sort of like cranking the Stairmaster
to a level just outside your comfort zone, where you’re breathing
slightly too hard to think.
On the rare occasion that boredom did kick in, I took the opportunity to work on my technique. I observed that the top-notch planers — the men who could produce a smooth plank of wood in a matter of minutes — began each stroke with an explosive thrust. I tried to emulate their motion, but ultimately I found it tough to reproduce, like that elusive kick that professional bowlers do at the end of their follow-through.
But I wasn't hard on myself. You don't need that kick to bowl a strike, and you don't need that thrust to plane a piece of wood. My planing was just fine … No, it was better than fine. In fact, my prowess earned me my first cross-cultural friend on the job site.
I had noticed him early in the morning. He was about 4-foot-10 and 75 years old, a slight, gray-haired man with such deep wrinkles and pronounced jowls that he looked like he was perpetually smiling. He caught my attention because he was easily the oldest man working and because he planed the wood so methodically and consistently. I was mesmerized by him.
A couple hours into my planing, he came up to the man who was holding my plank steady and said something in their native language. The old man appeared to be motioning toward me, so I asked for a translation. The younger man said, simply: "You are good." I smiled and looked at the old guy, who responded with a nearly toothless grin.
We both went back to work, but every so often we'd look up and exchange smiles. And I'd get a boost that would make me plane even harder.
This
Hole Is The PitsMy Very Last Word on Toilets
SISI VILLAGE, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 13 — Once, while cross-country skiing in Bend, Ore., I dropped a fleece glove down a porta-potty. I thought this was pretty darned awful. Oh my god! My day of skiing is ruined!
 Our so-called "toilet." |
Now, having dropped a roll of toilet paper down a "pit toilet" in Sisi Village, I have an even worse perspective on the horror that can accompany a trip to the bathroom.
Before I go any further, I will make you a promise: This is the last — the absolute final — reference to toilet activity that I will make in the M:I series. Given the excessive number of mentions already — see "Blackwater Blues" and "Wheels of Misfortune" — you probably think that going to the bathroom is an obsession with me. Not true. In my daily life, I give the toilet no more thought than I give to starting my car. It’s a non-issue.
In fact, it drives me crazy to listen to people who ARE obsessed with the toilet, namely my grandparents. During a recent illness, Grandpa Julius called with daily updates on his bowel movements. Grandma Honey once chose to see the violent action movie Enemy of the State because the film she really wanted to see — the heartfelt Holly Hunter drama Living Out Loud — was playing at a theater whose restroom facilities were unfamiliar to her.
But enough with the apologies and rationalizations. Allow me to get to my point.
The house where my Habitat for Humanity crew is staying has four rooms. A bathroom is not among them. Nobody in Sisi has a flush toilet. The villagers have dug latrines for themselves, but these holes in the ground are located down a steep hillside in the bush, and the local Habitat affiliate, mercifully, did not consider these facilities appropriate for our group.
So the good people of Sisi dug us our very own hole, about 100 feet from our house. It is a deep, oval-shaped hole, and it is surrounded on three sides by walls of dried palm leaves. The roof is made of corrugated tin.
Now,
I am not such a princess that I can't deal with a hole in the ground.
I have squatted above holes in Morocco and Kenya and France, although
these holes had stable platforms. I have camped in the woods and dug my
own holes, but these holes — while lacking stable platforms —
were my own personal holes, not shared by anyone else who may or may not
have good aim.
But this hole of ours in Sisi — this shared hole, this hole without a platform, this hole with swarms of flies and gnats hovering over it — is different. This hole is a menace.
Allow me to share with you the six-step process involved in using this toilet, a process I have endured two or three times each night:
Step 1: Lie in bed attempting to ignore the burning in your bladder and convince yourself it’s just a passing phase.
Step 2: Accept the fact that you cannot wait until morning and you will have to get up and follow Steps 3 through 6.
Step 3: Untangle yourself from your mosquito net, slip on your full-length skirt (local mores), grab your flashlight, your toilet paper and, if necessary, your umbrella, and put on your shoes.
Step 4: Jiggle the front-door latch, walk down the steps and navigate the muddy, uneven terrain on the way to the hole, taking care not to step in any ditches or trip on any branches.
Step 5: Arrive at the hole and take a deep breath. Say, "Suck it up, Suzanne" (if you're me, of course). Unroll a sufficient wad of paper, and arrange your floor-length skirt in such a way that it does not cause interference with the business at hand.
Step
6: Traipse back to the house, stopping first to use the soap and bucket
of water outside. Walk back upstairs; arrange your shoes, flashlight and
toilet paper for easy access; slip off your skirt; tuck your mosquito
net back under your mattress, and resume sleeping, hoping against hope
that you'll make it until morning.
By the third day in Sisi, this whole ordeal was getting to be a bit much. So I streamlined it. I began sleeping in my skirt. I abandoned my mosquito net, tying it in a big knot above my mattress. I reinstated Operation Dehydration, drinking only when absolutely necessary.
I thought I had it wired.
But then early one morning I got lax. Instead of assembling my wad of toilet paper BEFORE doing the rest, I reversed the process, and when I went to grab the TP, I could not find it. With my coal miner's light atop my head, I looked all around the hut. Then I spotted a few pieces of tissue and, following their trail, realized that the toilet paper had rolled down the hole.
Panic set in. From my squat position, I began to scrutinize the leaves on the various trees and bushes nearby. I was nearly resigned to my fate when a miracle happened: I noticed a thin roll of toilet paper that someone had stashed in the palm leaves behind me. There was barely enough, but there was, thankfully, enough.
And there you have it — the very last story I will tell involving a toilet.
Many
Happy ReturnsRain, Mud, Severe Nausea and an Extreme Case of Terror: So What? I’m Outta Here
MADANG, Papua New Guinea, Aug. 16 — On our final day in Sisi, we joined more than 100 villagers in church, where a very nervous and very kind local man translated the Sunday service into English. I don’t know if it was his command of the language or the nature of the service, but virtually every sentence the pastor uttered was translated as: "Because of Jesus Christ, we have been brought together here."
 The locals went all out to entertain us. In return, we performed, "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands." |
Afterward, the whole village gathered at the construction site. The house wasn’t even close to being finished, primarily because rain had made some of the lumber too wet to work with. So there was no formal dedication, as is the custom with Habitat for Humanity builds. Instead, in a ceremony longer than any Academy Awards telecast, the villagers thanked us for coming, and they presented each of us, by name, with a handmade woven purse called a "bilim." I personally felt like we owed THEM something, like a large bag of nails, considering how many we had ruined with our hammers.
I can say with certainty that none of us would be returning home to give construction seminars at Home Depot. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that my skills had been steadily improving over the week.
When I last checked in, I’d just discovered the joys of planing. Given my enthusiasm, you may be surprised to learn that after two full and successful days with a plane in my hand, I switched to sawing. I did not make this change out of boredom. The truth was, I’d gotten too good at planing. Too comfortable. I had to remind myself that the purpose of M:I was not simply to be useful but also to stretch myself.
Sawing was still a stretch. So, I volunteered — along with Mary Ann and Linda — to saw planks that would be used for the floor. I was apprehensive because 1.) my initial foray into sawing had been fairly disastrous, and 2.) I had a front-row audience focused only on me. He was a villager named Jeffrey, and his job was to brace the planks while I sawed.
Here’s another astonishing development: I did a good job. My tendency to veer to the right mysteriously corrected itself, and my fears about earning Jeffrey’s approval vanished. The sawing session was the most fun I’d had all week.
I can’t say I was all that useful; surely Jeffrey and the other plank holders could have sliced through the lumber a whole lot faster than the three of us women. But I didn’t care. I had come to realize that the Sisi villagers did not exactly have a File-o-Fax bursting with deadlines. As subsistence farmers, they pretty much had all day, if not all year, to get this job done.
Perhaps
my greatest value was in amusing Jeffrey. Although he spoke little English,
we developed a good rapport, and he seemed to delight in calling me by
name. "Suzanne, I help?" "Suzanne, this one finish?"
"Suzanne, next one now?"
My first day on the job, I’d cringed when Julie, our group leader, suggested that our mere presence — not our work on the house — was our most important contribution to the village. But now the idea didn’t seem so appalling. I mean, it’s not like these people had Sex and the City or Pat Buchanan to amuse them.
No matter what we did, we seemed to provide the locals with endless entertainment. In fact, they didn’t even seem to care whether we worked. Some in our crew didn’t seem to care whether they worked, either. Hannah, for instance, frequently brought a book to the job site. I found this astonishing. She had flown 10,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean so she could sit on a bench and read an Oprah book?
"Aren’t you going to, like, WORK?" I snapped, in a weak moment.
"Oh," she said, giggling, "if they want me, they’ll come get me."
Frankly, I had my doubts. The villagers of Sisi did not exactly exhibit the supervisory capacity of, say, the U.S. Marine Corps, let alone Miss Kay, my sixth-grade teacher.
At week’s end, I was ready for the experience to be over. I’d had enough of the pit toilet and the shower (a bucket of cold water with a tin cup) and the food (sweet potatoes at every meal, plus rice and spinach with canned sardines for lunch and dinner).
Of course, I felt guilty for thinking all of this, considering the villagers were sharing the full extent of what they themselves had. I felt even more awful when it came time for our group to thank them for their hospitality at the final ceremony on Sunday.
First, Martin presented them with Habitat T-shirts, then — in an episode that, mercifully, was not recorded on video — our group performed an appalling rendition of "If You’re Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands." ("If you’re happy and you know it, hammer a nail!")
All week, locals had been performing elaborate song-and-dance numbers for us, complete with drums and costumes, and they had repeatedly asked us to reciprocate. We kept insisting that we didn’t know any songs. But by the end of the week — after the villagers had fed us, housed us and exhibited incredible patience with us on the job site — we felt compelled to try. But our group was neither cohesive nor talented, and it turned out that the only two songs our group had in common were "If You’re Happy" and "The Hokey Pokey."
 We finished more of the house than this picture shows, but not a whole lot more. |
Our performance lasted three minutes, which was about two hours shorter than any of their dance numbers. When we finished, the villagers seemed baffled. I think a few of them clapped. We hung our heads and sat back down on the grass.
That night it rained and rained, and I stayed awake for hours imagining the worst for our journey back — the road gets washed out and we’re trapped in the village for days, or the driver loses control and we topple down the mountain, or the rough seas cause me to vomit endlessly.
In the morning it was still pouring and the road looked frighteningly mushy. But the truck came anyway, and 17 of us — our group plus some locals — crowded in, along with loads of luggage. (Remarkably, three more bags were located and trucked up to us mid-week, leaving only Angie without her belongings.) Because of the rain, the tarp above us had to be pulled down over the opening in the back, so there wasn’t much oxygen circulating.
As we bounced and lurched down the mountain, I began to get nauseous. The sticky air, the exhaust fumes, the bodies crammed together — it was all too much. I put my head down and closed my eyes.
Then, out of the blue, Mary Ann offered me two stretchy wristbands purported to ward off motion sickness. I laughed. At breakfast, she had removed these same bands from her bag and handed them to me, only to grab them right back. "I’m just showing," she explained, "not offering."
But now, she apparently realized it was in her best interest to do what she could to keep the contents of my stomach right where they were. It was one thing for me to throw up while sitting several seats away from her on a nearly empty boat; it would be quite another for a repeat performance to occur on a small, overcrowded truck.
I guess it dawned on the rest of the group that they also should contribute to the cause, because I was suddenly deluged with motion-sickness cures. Angie gave me two Benadryl tablets, explaining that they would put me to sleep. Julie gave me eucalyptus balm to rub under my nostrils.
 On our final day, we joined the villagers for a church service. |
I managed to keep my breakfast down, but by the time we arrived at the wharf, I was still sweaty, nauseous and afraid — very afraid — of the upcoming ferry ride back to Lae.
But here’s another nice surprise: The trip was fine. The rain had stopped and the sea was calm. I slept for nearly two hours of the three-hour trip, until I was jolted awake when someone screamed, "Do you have a death wish or something?"
It was a handsome man on the TV screen yelling at a beautiful woman who was hanging out the window of a sport-utility vehicle as they sped down the highway. But that was all I could hear. After he stopped screaming, the TV’s volume was too low for me to make out the rest, and the movie’s subtitles were, inexplicably, in Japanese.
Yesterday, after a six-hour drive from Lae, we arrived at the Madang Resort Hotel. And today — 15 days after we left home — we received the final surprise of the trip: Angie’s luggage. "The pharmacy is now open," she announced, offering us surgical gloves, antiseptic creams, even a tube of toothache medicine.
To
Australia With Love, MateEvery
Day is a G’Day in This Land of
Tacky Koala Bear Souvenirs
CAIRNS, Australia, Aug. 18 — I always thought I'd save Australia for that time in my life — probably in my mid-70s — when I'm too old for trailers, tents and pit latrines, but still too young for bus tours to Laughlin, Nev.
However,
having now spent the most delightful 16 hours in Cairns — a breezy
coastal city just south of Papua New Guinea — I can assure you I'll
be back to this fine country long before I start weighing the pros and
cons of estrogen-replacement therapy.
The whole pleasant experience began at the bright, airy Cairns (pronounced "cans") airport, which is painted turquoise and beaming with giant mosaics of tropical fish. The first Australian I encountered was the customs agent, who apologized profusely for the inconvenience of the customs process. "So sorry to have taken up your time, love," she said, wishing me a happy stay in Cairns and a safe journey back to L.A. I then went to buy a Time magazine and when the clerk returned my change, she smiled and said, "Here you go, love."
I am not a sucker. I have traveled with Australians and know all about this business of "G’day, love," "Cheers, mate!" and "No worries." I realize these are expressions uttered reflexively by Aussies and are no more meaningful than an American’s "Hi, how are you?"
But still. There's something irresistible and uplifting about a country where complete strangers — including those not working for tips or commission — refer to you as "love" and "mate." I can tell you that no customs agent in the United States has ever expressed distress over wasting my time or greeted me with anything more pleasant than, "Next in line, ma’am."
The Aussie good nature asserted itself again when our group emerged from the terminal — this time, all luggage accounted for — to find a pale, pudgy shuttle-bus driver stuffed into the most ludicrous and adorable outfit: a blue cap, white captain's shirt, exceedingly short blue shorts, white knee socks and black shoes. When we boarded the shuttle, his co-captain reminded us to buckle our seatbelts, in a manner that suggested his main concern was not the liability of his employer but the safety of his passengers.
So
off we went to the Holiday Inn. Upon arrival, my first order of business
was the same as it always is upon completing a trip: lifting weights.
The Holiday Inn fitness center was sadly inadequate — a small room
with a total of two upper-body machines and no free weights at all. So,
after apologizing profusely for the shortcomings of the facility, Trudy,
the sunny young blonde supervising the front desk, sent me on my way to
a nearby health club.
Her directions were ghastly. Three times I got lost and had to ask passersby for new instructions. But Trudy had been so earnest and attentive that I didn't care in the slightest. Indeed, I had a perfectly pleasant stroll around Cairns, except for the two times I looked the wrong way while crossing the street and nearly got run down by fast-moving vehicles. (I can never seem to adjust to societies that drive on the left side of the street.)
When I finally arrived at the club, I found the facilities to be just awful — an assortment of primitive weight machines, some mismatched dumbbells, not a stairclimber to be seen. But once again, I didn't mind, as the girl at the front desk seemed so very pleased to make my acquaintance. "Enjoy your workout, love!" she offered, as she sent me off to the women’s locker room.
Now, I hope all of this pleasantness is not putting you to sleep. But I figured that after enduring tales about my vomit, my bug-infested toilet and my nausea-inducing truck rides, you might enjoy some easy reading.
At any rate, after my workout I ambled along the boardwalk. Cairns — as I should perhaps have mentioned earlier — is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and a tourist trap of the first order. The place is jam-packed with shops selling cruise wear and plastic koala bear placemats and miniature "kangaroo crossing" signs and boomerang-shaped earrings. You will not find similarly loathsome merchandise in the United States unless you visit a place like Solvang, Calif. (a faux Bavarian village cluttered with $4 china windmills) or, I suppose, Las Vegas.
But unlike Solvang, Cairns is not engaged in a desperate and obvious attempt to exude quaintness. And unlike Vegas, the city does not self-consciously flaunt its schlock, the way Don King flaunts his electrified hair. Cairns, from what I could tell, has no agenda whatsoever and seems not to even notice how truly tacky it is.
After
a while I wandered into a record shop and, as is my habit, began scrutinizing
the selection of country music. The choices looked bland and familiar
until I came across a CD by Lee Karnaghan, a rugged stranger wearing a
black cowboy hat and a look that told you he'd had a tough day at the
job site. I asked the sales clerk if Karnaghan was Australian, as I am
quite familiar with the large pool of American country artists wearing
that same hat and that same look. Indeed he is an Aussie, she said, and
I was most welcome to give the CD a listen in the store. When I promptly
dropped the case on the floor, likely cracking it, she scooped it up and
said, "No worries at all, love!"
Right then I knew that whether I liked Lee Karnaghan’s music or not, I would be purchasing his latest CD. (As it happened, I enjoyed the music very much.)
After that I had to raise my guard so as not be charmed into spending exorbitant amounts of money. I was pleased that, despite encountering numerous other cheerful and attentive sales clerks, I had the willpower to avoid purchasing a bush hat, a brumby jacket and a pair of Australian work boots.
This morning our group was picked up at the hotel by the same plump shuttle driver in the same white knee socks, and we were deposited at the international terminal to begin our long journey home. At the Air New Zealand desk I assured the ticket agent that I had packed my bags myself and was not carrying any firearms or flammable substances. "Fantastic!" he replied, and I do believe he meant it.
Next week I'm off to shovel dirt in Mecca, Calif. Until then, cheers, love!
