The pig fence

Pigs are a big part of life in Kovol and Papua New Guinea in general. Pigs are a valuable source of meat, and the meat is an essential part of any important social event. If you apologize publicly to someone for wronging them, but don’t kill a pig to give meat, was it even a real apology? If you don’t kill a pig to celebrate a successful marriage in the pennam ceremony, your words and actions don’t match. You’re saying you have a good marriage with the celebration, but if you don’t kill a pig, then your actions are saying the marriage isn’t worth celebrating.

Raising pigs is an essential task for every family, but pigs are also a nuisance. Having not grown up near pigs, I’ve discovered that they can be quite clever and form a bond with their owners. They enjoy belly rubs, come when called, and happily wag their little tails. They have a voracious appetite though, and that is the source of many of the “hevis” with pigs.

A huge problem would be a hungry pig getting into a food garden and in short order digging up all the food. The Kovol people have to put immense effort into building strong chest-high wooden fences hundreds of metres around their gardens every year.
Pigs make a mess of the village too. They defecate on the trails and open areas and dig up the ground.
When it is your pig, it’s something you deal with, but when the pig belongs to another family, there can be real friction.

Informal agreements exist that small, young pigs are allowed in villages, but larger pigs need to be kept away from the village. If a pig gets into the habit of travelling to a particular place and causing problems, the owner is supposed to gouge its eyes out to stop it from being able to get there to cause problems.

Over the years, the area around our houses has had pigs coming, going, and causing problems. We initially had a little garden and had planted some food. The pigs destroyed it. Several years ago, this prompted village leaders to declare that they would empty the village closest to us. Everyone would move further away so the pigs didn’t disturb us. Not ideal at all for language learning! The village emptying out to leave us on our own was the last thing we wanted!
We managed to talk people out of it and got a pig ourselves. Our own pig wrecked our own area and that put a stop to the talk for a while.

For years, we have been telling people that pigs digging up our area is not a big issue for us. We value the community more than having a nice lawn around our house. We can live with the pigs

This wet season, however, a trio of pigs has made it a habit to come most evenings and root around outside our houses. I’ve been waking up in the mornings, and for months I’ve been filling in holes, replanting bushes that have been torn up, and digging out ditches pigs have filled in with dirt. The pigs have consistently been coming to root around. Some areas are a quagmire of mud and puddles, with all the grass torn up. The road into our area became a slough of mud.

For years, we’ve been saying it’s no big deal, but these pigs have pushed it too far! Our land owners, who don’t own the pigs, are upset with the family who owns the pigs and are ashamed that the area where the white people live is ruined. Status is a big deal for them, and as high-status missionaries, we are expected to have a nice area. If the area around our houses is a mud pit, it reflects badly on them. It suggests they are not caring for us well.

We decided it was time to do something. The cultural thing to do would be 1. to shoot the pigs in anger and face the village court afterward, or 2. build a fence. We decided to go with the fence. The Kovol way to do it would be to gather sticks, a lot of sticks and build a fence. This is usually possible because they’ve just cleared an area of jungle for a garden by cutting down trees. There is a lot of wood lying around that needs to be cleared up anyway.

This was not the case for us since our status meant people would expect us to have a wire fence . So we purchased 300m of pig-wire fence.

The day the fencing arrived, people got straight to work. It was time to finish the “hevi” once and for all. 1½ days of work later, the Kovol guys had completely enclosed the area around our houses. We’ve got a stile at two different ends of our area for people to get in and out, and the community is being very clear that climbing the fence anywhere else is “bad”. Hey, that wasn’t our influence; we try to let things play out the way the Kovol people want things to work. They are the experts after all!

It’s been really nice to be able to fill in the holes and dig to drain the swampy areas knowing that a pig won’t come back that very evening to wallow again in the mud and undo all my work. The Kovol people are busy planting decorative plants along the fence. They are also tying on chest-high lengths of bamboo to make it impossible to climb over apart from the designated gates.

It’s a great improvement, and we hope it lasts a long time. On the flip side, it has already had some predictable side effects. The first is that the community is now referring to the area around our houses as the special “church” area. We’re not keen on that idea as our final goal is to plant an indigenous church. We want a church led by and totally in the hands of the Kovol people. We want a Church that grows and takes the gospel to other Kovol villages. That could potentially be hindered if the idea is that people should come to the Church area, rather than the Church going to the lost.

Lord willing, his word will grip people’s hearts, and they’ll be able to shake off the powerful cultural expectation that the road forward is to build a large, well-equipped mission station. We solved the pig problem (for now), but did we create a more significant problem for later on? It is impossible to know, only the Lord knows! We’ll just fumble and limp onwards, trusting that God can use us despite any misguided decisions we make along the way!

It is very nice not to have pigs turning our lawn into a mud waste though!