The town experience

Lord willing, next week we will be returning to Kovol. Oscar has another clinic appointment to examine how well his wrist is healing, and if all is well our scheduled flight in will be on Tuesday. With next week’s blog looking like a good opportunity to write about the “bush experience” perhaps today it’s time to write about the “town experience”.

Goroka town has become very familiar to us, but a moment’s reflection makes me realize how different it is to life back home. Just over a month ago we were in the Netherlands and the UK. Shopping there, when it isn’t done online, looks like this. Drive the car to a large supermarket or shopping centre, park and then quickly get what you need and get home.

Shopping in PNG is different in a few key ways.

You need to visit a few different places

We can’t one stop shop in Goroka. To get everything on the list we need to hop between different stores and the market. We’ve gotten to know which stores stock oats for our breakfast. A different store stocks larger boxes of Weetabix. Eggs from one store have a higher probability of containing rotten eggs. Frozen vegetables are always a good find, but different stores stock them at different times. One of the pharmacies sells protein powder and the other sells sun-tan lotion. We’ve accumulated a knowledge bank of where to look for different things, but that isn’t exhaustive knowledge.

Philip got in touch recently to let me know that our Ethernet switch powering our network in Kovol that we use for sharing work has failed. That’s quite a niche item to go looking for and required a bit of hunting around.

I also find it interesting that while we do need to hunt around there are also dozens of stores where if you have seen one you have seen them all. Stores can be quite cramped with clothes, basic tools and cheap toys.

I do love to see the tinned fish aisle in the supermarket. They stock up on the (culturally) important things!

You need to keep security in mind

We feel quite safe in Goroka, but we do need to be aware. Opportunistic theft is a real problem and we have been victims before. One time we had parked the car at Goroka West. We bought a supply of nappies (diapers) from a store and we stashed them in the car before heading to a store a few shops along. We returned to find that the back door had been popped open and the box of nappies was missing.

There were two things to note there. Firstly, we were driving one of NTM’s Land Cruisers. Land Cruisers are quite easy to get into with the skilful use of a coat hangar as a wire. Secondly, Goroka West is a location where bus passengers are getting off buses and there is no dedicated parking for the stores. There are a lot of people milling about.

When we go shopping we have to think about the relative safety of where we park the car and plan accordingly. The market is a riskier place to park a car, so that goes first. A bag full of fruit and vegetables is also not as tempting a target for thieves. As our shop progresses we gradually move to safer stores that have dedicated car parks with security guards employed to watch the car park. Even then, if we have a big shop it’s best for one person to stay with the car.

There is no such thing as a quick visit to the store

Shopping takes time, and you had best brace yourself for it. “I just need nails from the hardware store” can turn into 1 minute grabbing a bag of nails followed by a 20-minute checkout. Power cuts and lack of 3G signal can cause all the card machines to be down. There can be long queues. There can be involved processes of manually checking each item you have purchased against a receipt (sometimes twice). Whenever I have in my mind that I just need to make a quick visit to the store I’m setting myself up for a frustrating time! It’s best to allow time for it and adapt to the way things work.

Our kids get a lot of attention

One of the things we enjoyed the most about being back in Europe was anonymity. In PNG our children attract a lot of attention. They constantly hear “Hi, nice baby!” as people gush over them. This can be combined with ruffling of hair, pats on the back and handshakes.

Alice and Millie are a little bemused being called “babies” all the time. They are quite enjoying putting on a show of shaking all the security guards’ hands as we leave the store though.

If you want to chat you can spend a long time doing so

Papua New Guineans are incredibly friendly. It isn’t hard to get into conversations and pass the time. Town is a crowded place with all the security guards and people milling about. I lost interest in the 2nd-hand-clothes store quite quickly and spent an enjoyable 20 minutes chatting to one of the security guards from Okapa. Thinking of what it is like for our Kovol friends to travel to town and stay there it was interesting to get his perspective on the difference between life in Goroka and life in his village in Okapa.

A visit to the hardware store to buy some wire to make a new guinea pig cage resulted in an invite from the employee helping me to come visit his village.

You will probably see something unexpected

It won’t necessarily be dramatic, but there’s always sure to be something that catches your eye. This last visit 3 things come to mind. I saw white smoke billowing out of an open manhole (watch your step!). As we walked past it turned out to be full of burning grass. I saw (or heard) a crane drive past a lamp post and clip it with it’s unsecured hook. I also spotted a new restaurant advertising “Hamburg” and other Western food.

It’s remarkable how tiring it all is. Our trip to town lasted most of the day and we returned feeling like we’d done a full day’s work.

The biggest thought I have coming away is how blessed we personally are. I think about my Kovol friends and the hike they have to do to get to town, and then how limited they are and how out of their depth they feel in town. We have a very different experience of town. We get to hire a mission vehicle for our own private transport. We can buy the luxuries we want. We’re treated with respect and high status. It’s a completely different experience to that of the people we came to reach when they go to Madang town. It can seem so unfair, that we have so much and others have so little. How is it possible with such a gulf between us that when we come to teach God’s word they can truly hear the truth and not mishear what we are saying because they can only see our status?

I fear that the gap in status is so great it swallows everything we might say. Our desire is to teach God’s word and have people engage with that. I fear though, that people will engage because deep down they are hoping that some of my economic privilege rubs off on them. I fear an attitude of “well it has obviously worked for these white people, so let’s do what they say so that we are materially blessed like them”.

How do we combat that? What behaviours of ours implicitly reinforce that? Should we share our world as educated, privileged people with them more or less? Should we never talk about what life is like back in Europe? Or should we talk about the reality of life there with all its blessings and challenges? As we share God’s word with people should we also occasionally share our favourite chocolate with them? Would that be genuine sharing of life together, or just teasing people with a taste of a life they can never have (in this world).

It’s a difficult thing to bridge such different cultures. Yet we’ve adapted to town life out here in Goroka once again, and I’m sure we’ll adapt to life back in the bush. I’ll need to remind myself to be constantly in prayer for wisdom. It’s so easy to just go along doing what I feel like doing in the moment, but real wisdom is needed to be able to serve as an ambassador for Christ; not an ambassador for Western living.