Postcard from the South Pacific
Written March 4, 2017
I have been in Bougainville for just over three days. I sit here beneath my hardworking ceiling fan and listen to the sounds of children playing outside. I live on the top floor of a two story house in the area known as Bushbin. It’s a small community of locals as well as two other VSA volunteers. Across the street is the airport and at midday the local Air Niugini flight from Port Moresby lands and then departs again, passing so close I can see its underbelly. The Bougainville airport is unfenced and when it is not being used for its intended purpose it becomes a soccer field and thoroughfare for the locals. This is to change, however, as a fence is soon to be built that will keep people out and already brings to light the ways in which something that seems like a necessary step can still have a negative impact on the local population.
If I wander a few metres from my house I come swiftly to the water. There is a brief stretch of sand then the water lies shallow a top the coral before plunging further out into the swiftly moving Buka passage, where banana boats ferry passengers between Buka and Bougainville Island.
In town you can smell coconut-or copra as it is known locally-being processed. It’s a sweet, warm, heavy scent that permeates the air. At the markets you can buy whole smoked fish for as little as NZD$1. But it is the produce that is plentiful. Fat, white cucumbers, piles of baby bell peppers, purple fingers of aubergines, pineapples, mangoes, oranges and endless leafy greens for which I have no name. Tapioca is baked with banana and wrapped in leaves, kaukau (kumara) sit at the entrance, freshly dug and wet with dirt, or peeled, baked and wrapped for a quick on the go snack.
Supermarkets and corner stores abound, each holding different pieces to a homesick expat belly, this one has cheese, another cereal, here we find Vitawheat crackers, and a lone fridge contains the only chocolate I have seen since arriving.
Yesterday we did some sightseeing, first catching a boat to Sohano Island, a leafy oasis that sits in the Buka passage. Then to Kokopau, on the main island, to pick up VSA’s other vehicle and traverse the bumpy road to Chabai.
Chabai is home to the Nazarene Rehabilitation centre and is run by Catholic nuns. It is a world apart from bustling Buka town. Its endless gardens are well tended and prolific, full of flowers, pomelo and starfruit trees, and peppered with statues of religious figures. There are no shops, and no internet, except for a lone spot in a kaukau patch, where the indomitable figure of Sister Lorraine will often work.
There are parts of Bougainville that transport me back to Taiwan: the crowded markets, the array of tropical fruit, smiles stained red from betelnut and the thickblanket of heat that lies over everything.
But Bougainville is unique and unlike anywhere I have been. On Monday I will meet my partner organisation and begin to learn even more about the place that I will call home for the next ten months.
