Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (11 page)

I have a funny feeling our hotel might have doubled as a brothel. Claudio and I were sharing a room and next to my bed was a complimentary pack of twelve lubricated condoms. Twelve! We had a great time. No, I’m joking, we didn’t spot them until the morning, honestly.

Seriously, though, there is an AIDS problem in Papua and it was good to see the hotels acting responsibly. I’m sure it wasn’t a brothel, but it was right in the middle of town and if people were going to . . . with . . . well, you know. Anyway, we’ll move on now, shall we?

Standing on the balcony outside my room I was struck by the noise, the hubbub of the place. There were so many people after the tranquillity of the islands. I was eager to get right among it all.

I took a wander along the wide and watery street where palm trees were interspersed with the tired-looking buildings. Lae was originally a gold-rush town that grew up around an airstrip in the 1920s. Food and provisions were flown in from Australia then shipped inland to the mines.

After the stillness of Thursday Island, the amount of people on the street here was amazing. It seemed to be mostly men and they thronged around me, selling all sorts of stuff - red tea and the betel nut I’d seen in India; clearly they chewed it here too. One guy in a combat jacket was flogging sunglasses. Lae is a container port, one of the main points of entry for freight coming into East Papua. It’s incredibly busy - huge crowds of people out on the street, all sorts of trucks and vans, markets dotted here and there. A bit of a culture shock after Australia.

 

 

As we’d flown in I’d noticed how green and lush the country was. The hillsides were thick with trees and there was no doubt we were in the tropics. It was also very mountainous, part of the ‘Pacific ring of fire’ and geographically unstable. A whole bunch of tectonic plates collided in this area, and the island is susceptible to earthquakes and tsunamis as well as volcanic activity.

Despite the vibrant, positive atmosphere, there was no getting away from the fact that Papua is a very poor country. An awful lot of people live below the poverty line and they leave the countryside in their droves looking for work in the towns, despite the fact that there isn’t much work available. Families become displaced, communities disrupted and people wind up in towns like Lae with no work and nowhere really to go.

We weren’t staying in town for very long. The plan was to drive into the highlands as far as a place called Goroka, where we would meet up with a Dutch guy called Marcel Pool who would give us a bed for the night. He had been in Papua for a couple of years, helping disabled people try to fit more easily into the community. Tomorrow we would spend some time with a team from Voluntary Service Overseas. I had not had much to do with VSO in the past, but when it comes to fighting poverty they are the world’s leading independent development organisation. People volunteer their skills to help others less fortunate than themselves: doctors, nurses, carpenters, bricklayers - you name it. *

But before all that we had a seven-hour road trip ahead of us. Josh had organised a lift in a truck run by the Wagi Valley Transport Company. We would ride with an old fellow called Koi, a big guy with curly hair, a grey beard and a wide smile punctuated by a missing front tooth. He told me he was fifty but he looked a lot older than that. He loved his truck. No . . . he
adored
it. An eighteen-wheeler with full bonnet and bull bars, it had been shipped originally to Papua from Brisbane. It was pretty ancient now and God knows how many miles it had done, but each time it left the depot it was checked over by a mechanic in a massive open-sided inspection shed.

On this particular sticky, hot day, Koi was carrying two containers. These had been loaded by a forklift truck and placed with the doors facing each other, a tyre squashed between them. In his Pidgin English, Koi explained that when the first road was cut into the mountains there were plenty of bandits up there. There still are, in fact, but I’ll come to that later. Back in the 1970s the bandits would wait until the trucks were labouring uphill at walking pace then they would hop on the back like something from
Mad Max
. Using bolt cutters they would open the container doors and steal whatever was inside, but with the doors facing each other and a massive tyre jammed in between, there was no way anyone could open them.

As soon as the inspection was over, I clambered into the cab. Koi sat behind the wheel while Josh piled in the back, ready to translate. When you first hear their Pidgin English you think you’re going to be fine. It’s only later that you realise you only understand about half of what anyone is saying.

Koi was a cool, laid-back guy and probably the most careful driver I’ve ever been with. He told me that he’d been driving trucks for as long as he can remember, but until he got behind the wheel of this baby, they had all been gnarly old things. This one had power steering and was fully upholstered, with a sleeping compartment tucked neatly behind the seats. He treated it like he would a favourite child.

We headed west, deeper into the country. Rumbling along, I realised that the cab’s windows and windscreen were covered with a mesh grille. I asked Koi about it and he said it was because people liked to throw stones.

‘It’s like that in Ethiopia too,’ I told him. ‘The kids throw stones. I don’t know why. It’s just something they’ve always done, or at least that’s what Ewan and I were told.’

‘Not kids here. Drunk people mostly.’

Leaving town, we headed into open country where the road was bordered by trees and banks of rich grass. The cab was bloody hot. It was hot outside but in the passenger seat the heat came rippling off the engine and I couldn’t put my feet on the floor without them burning. In places the mountains were burning too. We stopped at a roadside market to buy some bananas and I could see smoke billowing from folds in the land halfway up the hillside. Josh told us the villagers were burning the scrub to scare out pigs and snakes so they could hunt them. I’d seen a massive green snake on a small ridge we’d just passed and I imagined the thing slithering through the grass with half a dozen men trying to whack it to death.

I bought a coconut from a woman squatting on a grass mat, and she sliced it open for me with a machete. The juice was delicious, perfect to wash down the fresh peanuts we had picked up to go with the bananas. They were so sweet, like an explosion of sugar in your mouth every time you ate one - almost like sweet peas straight from the pod in the garden.

The higher we got the more the place seemed to change. We were climbing steadily now and at exactly the kind of walking pace where it would be easy for bandits to jump on board. Back at the truck yard I’d noticed the fuel tank had a bolt and seal over the cap, clearly there to stop anyone siphoning off the diesel. Koi said there was a good market for selling stolen fuel. He seemed a little nervous, not quite as laid-back as he had been in the low country. As we rattled through one pass in particular, his eyes were everywhere, and now and again he would point out someone with a gun. It was true, then: there were still bandits up in these mountains.

Gardens were a feature here: the higher we climbed the neater the houses were getting. Huts were made from woven grass, built on stilts perhaps five feet off the ground, clearly to keep the snakes out. The roofs were thatch and the walls beautifully patterned. The people looked fairly self-sufficient and they clearly took great pride in their homes. The lawns were mown, the vegetable patches pristine and growing everything from bananas to ginger and coffee. Koi told me that he had a little coffee plantation of his own. He planned to work there full time with his wife one day, when he finally finished with truck driving.

The hours ticked by and we climbed right into the high country. As dusk fell we arrived at the town of Goroka. Koi had been brilliant company, a great guide for our first full day in Papua, and we had covered a good few miles from the coast. We said goodbye and I watched him trundle off into the darkness while we made our way to Marcel’s place and, hopefully, a bed for the night.

 

 

The next couple of days were really eye-opening. Marcel had arranged for us to stay at the VSO lodge in Goroka, a white, colonial-style building where he and his colleagues lived. I really liked Marcel, one of those people you immediately warm to. Over the past couple of years he had created a physiotherapy centre for the disabled at the General Hospital and, now it was up and running, he had branched into a programme of community-based rehabilitation (CBR).

After a good night’s sleep, Claudio and I walked to the hospital, a whitewashed stucco building in the middle of town. Marcel explained that there is a huge stigma attached to disability in Papua, and in some areas disabled children are still killed by their parents at birth. I think I was more shocked by that than anything I’d heard on my travels. Marcel explained that many people believed in witchcraft and evil spirits, and disability was very much associated with that. Part of his role with VSO was to show people that someone with disabilities could not only live a fulfilling life, but be a role model to others.

Arriving at the hospital, we were greeted by a young kid who was just such an inspiration. Moloui had been born with arms that stopped at the elbows and he had narrow pads for hands with only one finger on each. Marcel explained that life for a boy like Moloui can be very difficult indeed. Many people believed that his mother must have done something she shouldn’t when she was pregnant, or gone somewhere she shouldn’t, and Moloui’s physical impediment was the result of it.

Marcel worked tirelessly to show people that Moloui and kids like him were just the same as anyone else, and not some bad spirit or the product of any kind of behaviour. He introduced us to Cecelia Bagore, a local woman who coordinates all the work done with disabled children. She showed us around the physiotherapy department and I was struck by a couple of murals, pictures of bright-eyed, smiling children under the maxim: ‘Look at my strengths, not my weaknesses’.

Now that the centre was fully functioning, Marcel had passed the day-to-day administration to a man called Bill Lyape. Bill explained how they deal with all sorts of disabilities, from things like back problems to joints, fractures, strokes and varying degrees of paralysis. When a patient is discharged they are referred to the CBR programme and Marcel continues with the therapy in their own community. That way he can not only assess their ongoing needs, but show family members and neighbours how they can get involved with the child’s rehabilitation. Marcel is very keen that the villagers do not dissociate themselves from the disabled people within a given community, helping them to understand rather than stigmatise.

‘It’s vital,’ he told me. ‘Take Moloui, he’s become an integral part of our team here, a role model not just for other disabled kids, but everyone.’

Moloui was a cool kid. With his two fingers he could hold a pen and write very neatly. I watched him use a calculator and a telephone. He could unscrew a bottle of water, drink from it and screw it up again. He’s a normal kid, he laughs and cries and has fun.

‘He’s great,’ Bill said with a smile. ‘A real asset to what we do here. He’s a young kid who is different, but he doesn’t feel ashamed. He’s confident and what he does is allow other disabled people to see that they can carry on with confidence as well.’

Marcel told us that the only medal ever won by PNG at the Olympics was in the Beijing Special Olympics in 2008, when Francis Kompaon, born with a deformed arm, won a silver in the men’s 100 metres. He was named sportsperson of the year, which was a major boost for the department in Goroka.

The hospital is pretty well equipped considering where it is and that it’s underfunded. But it’s nothing like we would see in the West. They use what they can where they can and often the simplest, cheapest tools can be the most productive.

Take Kenny Ossi, for instance. He has muscular dystrophy and when he first came to the hospital his muscles were so wasted he couldn’t even sit up, let alone feed himself.

‘He was on his back. He was in bed all the time and that’s no good,’ Marcel told me. ‘It’s very bad for the children to just be in bed, they get bored and they can suffer from all kinds of secondary conditions - lung infection is common and that can kill them. It’s important that we get them moving, not just their bodies but their brains as well. To stimulate the body you have to stimulate the mind.’

When I saw Kenny he was propped up in a sort of upright bed with a strap across his middle and one of the nurses was stimulating the movement in the upper half of his body by batting a balloon to him.

‘It’s simple but very effective,’ Marcel told me. ‘A balloon has no weight so Kenny can handle it, touch it, move his hands to get to it. And he’s interacting with whoever is playing with him. When I’m out in the community I never go anywhere without a few balloons.’

Kenny was obviously enjoying it, and given that when he came in he couldn’t move at all, I thought what they had achieved here was brilliant. Just like Moloui, this boy was slowly overcoming his disability. We found out that his mother had died when he was younger, he had one brother at home and another older brother who was married. His father, a really dedicated man called Bekki, looked after him. When Kenny was at home his father made sure he was stimulated by taking him to the market or into town, and when he was in the hospital Bekki was there every day to feed and wash him. I could only imagine the pressure it placed on the family, but Bekki told me he wasn’t ashamed of his son. Why should he be? He was proud of what Kenny had achieved since Marcel and the physio team had started treating him.

A little later Cecelia took us out to one of the villages to see a lad called Kevin who had cerebral palsy. Claudio and I were perched in the back of a pick-up with Barama and Joseph, two guys from the CBR unit. The village - a handful of huts made from wooden planks and thatched with dried grass - was a few miles deeper into the mountains, right in the heart of the rainforest. Kevin’s family brought him to meet us in a wheelchair with a little puppy perched in a basket underneath. His therapy involved lying on a mat while his limbs were massaged and stretched, a whole series of what Marcel called reflex exercises. He was attended by the CBR team, but it wasn’t just them - we were able to see first hand how his situation was handled by the village community.