My parents lived in the highlands in PNG in the late 70s and early 80s and my dad still speaks pidgin (mostly with his current neighbours who are from Port Moresby the capital). I've heard of lot of amazing (and pretty wild!) stories over the years. And met some interesting folk who up were up there with them - locals, missionaries and others. But despite our childhood being fairly steeped in PNG culture - and my name being from there, after a local who used to work with my dad - the closest I've been myself is the Torres Strait :/
That was an amazing introduction to your stories. I would love to hear them.
Would love to hear some of the wild stories...
I know someone who worked there maybe 10 years ago in an embassy, and it was wild in a very bad way.
- they had a meeting with some locals and the locals discussed the need for retaliation for something, and their plan was to rape someone's daughter
- a kid bought a mini packet of chips on credit from a general store, the debt wasn't repaid and the end result was the general store getting burned down
- a fellow employee forgot to lock their car doors (everyone gets told to do this) and was car-jacked, but he got his car back because the car-jacker couldn't drive a manual car
- the embassy had high fences and security, but just in case, each house within the embassy compound had a central panic room in case the outer wall is breached
It's sad because I know of people who worked there in the 1970s (for Australians it was close to home but a bit of extra money because it was overseas) and it was apparently fine back then, but lawlessness has well and truly taken over.
Share some stories with us!
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It's a reasonable guess but wrong. My dad is a carpenter and my mum is an artist. Dad was helping build houses up there for one of the government building contractors. Mum was along for the ride.
Edit: And not that it really matters, but neither of my folks are religious.
It is a pity you are being downvoted. I do linguistic fieldwork in a similarly remote region and, yeah, you learn pretty quickly visitors fall into about those three types.
I worked in two way geostationary satellite for years and learned pretty quickly what sort of groups of people needed to pay money for Internet in truly the most off the grid locations. The other major users not so relevant for PNG which I intentionally didn't mention are military/government. I guess if it's not "mining" in some places you've also got "oil/gas", which basically falls into the same category of resource extraction. Sometimes forestry/logging.
By the way, your discontent about missionaries shouldn't be centered just around "gospel" groups. Multiple denominations of Islam have pretty far-reaching missionary networks into seemingly faraway places.
Yep, absolutely agreed. There's even Islamic parallels in the kinda-fundamentalist-Sunni world to weird USA TV Christian evangelists if you know who people like Zakir Naik are.
Now at the risk of over generalizing
And yet you couldn't help yourself.
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Let me tell of a missionary school and it has left me totally jaded about the cultural wipe-out that is practiced methodically. All the cultural icons are appropriated and a cross plastered on everything, from didgeridoo to the boomerang and placed alongside the holy book. Indigenous knowledge production is low because there frankly it requires audience and artist needs to be rewarded and paid, but this can be taken advantage of by well endowed people. If you search results for that local language on Youtube, all the main results you get are from Christian missions who have translated hymns and set it to indigenous rhythms. It is like you learn keys of the castle from somebody without telling them the end purpose you have in mind from the very beginning, take their knowledge and re-package it. Within the next gen you have new converts actively forgetting what their own parents are teaching them, and think this all is gift of missionaries.
You are not alone, its pretty obvious what force of evil overall (even if some local good was done here and there) missionaries have been. And I don't mean just some 16th and 17th centuries horror stories, I mean even recent times.
The idea that christianity is somehow above all other religions, while covering at best around 1/3 of world population... lets say I don't enjoy talking to irrational, highly emotional people on such topics. Where facts become irrelevant so does my presence in discussion.
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