Em tasol…

Spending a week in Madang has been great; really relaxing. Moreover, it gave me some time to get to know Sjoerd’s future home, his friends, his new work environment (Divine Word University: he is going to be head of Physiotherapy Department there) and of course Elina and her lovely family. Especially Elina’s family have made a great effort to show us around, introduce me to as much things I had not seen or done before and we had some nice dinners together. So our goodbye on Wednesday was tearful…

But no time for sorrow, because we had cool stuff ahead of us. Laura (another volunteer in Madang) decided to go with us to Goroka, to see a bit of the Highlands and of course to experience the Goroka show (different tribes showing their traditional costumes and singing and dancing).

Laura works for a creative self help centre: she does disability awareness. Special about Laura is that she has a superb personality, she is a great laugh and she is blind. Basically I think being a volunteer in PNG is quite an experience and their lives are sometimes pretty mindblowing, but doing what Laura is doing is truly amazing and I really enjoyed spending more time with her, because I genuinely think she is one of a kind.

Anyway, we got to Goroka on Thursday and we were staying at Marcels, another volunteer. He was doing a workshop that week at his Physiotherapy Department in Goroka Hospital and us three helped him out a bit in the preparation. We even joined him the next day at the workshop which was quite interesting to do because I had not seen a professional setting like this in PNG yet.

The Goroka Show over the weekend was just great: seeing all the different tribes, talking to them, getting to know the story behind the dances was excellent. I took loads of wonderful pictures as you can (hopefully) see.

Laura has a degree in music so she decided to join a tribe when they asked her. Lateron, one of the tribes stayed at Marcels place where we had dinner together. It was a really really wonderful experience for both sides, because the tribe had never experienced that white people were so friendly to invite them into their home.

Yesterday we took the PMV home to Mount Hagen, together with Robert and Mark who ended up spending the night at our place. Today is laundry day again and tomorrow, well the title of this message says it all: em tasol [this is it]. I had the best experience ever in PNG, all the different things we did, made the trip exhilarating. I really enjoyed my time with Sjoerd and Femke, and I will be sad to say goodbye to Sjoerd, because I am probably not going to see him for the next three years. Learning a bit of Tok Pidgin has been challenging, meeting all Sjoerds friends made my trip even more fun because every single one of them is special. But on the other hand, I am happy to travel further to Australia, to be on my own again and see how I like Australia again after 6 years…

Some pictures:

This is a tribe from Mount Hagen.










Unknown tribe: some kids taking it easy...












Unknown tribe: their bilas were great! Covered in grass, moss and weeds!










Goroka tribe: this woman is chewing 'buai' and she really liked my blue eyes. I said I was happy to change them for her beautifull brown eyes...












Oncemore unknown tribe: the tribe is showing a Snake dance