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.
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.
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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