For those of you who followed this blog during my time in
Alexandria, Egypt, you may have noticed (or, perhaps not) the rather extensive
hiatus I have taken from adding to this site.
It was not due to my usual excuse of writer’s block or to being too busy
and dynamic to take time to organize my thoughts. It was primarily because we moved back to
Washington, DC and I really didn’t have anything interesting to add to the
constant media barrage coming from our nation’s capital during an election cycle. Well, perhaps I did, but it was never
anything that I thought worth writing about or sharing with a wider
audience. Besides, the idea here is to capture
some of the flavor of living as an expat in an exotic location, and, as bizarre
as it sometimes is to live in the United States (especially after living away
for a number of years), it just didn’t seem like a compelling thing to do.
Now, however, it looks as if I will have enough grist for
the mill to last a long while! Last
Friday, after what seemed to be an excruciatingly long wait, we landed in Port
Moresby, Papua New Guinea to begin a three to five year posting, again with
USAID. Truth be told, what I knew about
PNG prior to moving here came from 1) having advised Egyptian high school students
as they represented PNG in a Model United Nations simulation at the Hague, which
in itself made me realize that PNG is a very small, extremely impoverished country
since our high school never represented any of the larger, well-heeled nations;
2) Jarod Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and
Steel where he postulates that the Highland natives of PNG are still living
as hunter-gatherers because of really crappy “geographic luck”; and 3) a visit
to the National Geographic’s recent exhibition on PNG’s flamboyant (and as a
national symbol, ubiquitous) Birds of Paradise.
All of these sources provided facts, images and theories that are
helpful in understanding the poverty, culture, history and fauna of PNG from an
academic perspective but gave me little insight on the more mundane things that
now occupy my world. What’s the daily
weather like? Where is the best place to
live in Port Moresby? Is it safe to walk
in the streets? What kind of food can
you buy in the grocery store? Are the
people friendly? Can I ever manage to learn
to drive a right-hand drive vehicle? Will
the international school hire me? What
can you buy with a ten kina bill?
So I sit here in the Grand Papua Hotel while I wait for a
realtor to call back to schedule a trip to look at apartments and wonder what
we have gotten ourselves into. While I
wait, I note a couple of early observations based on two shopping excursions and
several days of hotel living:
·
The Gulf
of Papua and the Coral Sea are spectacularly beautiful. While the view is somewhat marred by the harbor
full of cargo ships and industrial vessels, by looking beyond them it is easy
to see why people fall in love with this area of the world. Just before a morning fog lifted a few days
ago, I caught myself humming “Bali Hai” and half expected to see Emile LaBec’s
plantation house appear on the mountains surrounding the bay.
·
Port
Moresby is a city designed for men, both locals and expats. My support for this statement is thin, I’ll
admit, but I think it may bear up over time.
The hotel is predominantly populated by men, mostly Australian men,
presumably here for the mining and extractive industries. Apparently, many expat men live here, but
their wives and families live in Cairns, Australia, which is a short plane ride
away. The local women who work here are unusually soft-spoken and lacking in
confidence. But most telling in my mind: the biggest shopping mall in the city has
multiple electronics stores, restaurants, and sports equipment shops, but no
shoe stores.
·
Living
expenses will be high/quality and speed of service low. From an initial look, both groceries and
alcohol are expensive. I expected as
much for imports from the US and Europe, but thought that, at the very least, Australian
Yellow Tail wine (the stuff they sell for $5 a bottle in the Safeway) would be
cheap. Not so at $15 bottle . Not unexpectedly, the service from sales
staff, even in this high end hotel, is fairly insipid. The people are nice enough, but slow and
inattentive. Not a huge problem, but as
the workers at Steph’s office have been “fixing” the AC for three days and the
realtor who promised to get back to me yesterday still has not called, I am
setting my expectations low.
·
Spontaneity
will be limited by security concerns.
It is hard to know how concerned to be, but it is clear that this is not
a place where I will be able to just walk out the door of my house, jump in my
own car, and drive myself anywhere. The
haves and the have-nots are visibly delineated, more so here than in any other
country I have lived in. As a Westerner,
even if I am dressed modestly, sans jewelry and purse, I am still a potential
source of consumer goods and/or target for pent-up frustrations. So I will likely have to find a driver and
plan my travel accordingly.
·
There are
opportunities and things to do here.
All the above being said, this is not the barren wasteland that some led
me to believe awaited my arrival. There
is a tennis and sporting club, a yacht club, swimming pools and reportedly some
of the best diving in the world. I have
an interview on Friday with the principal of the Ela Murray International
School and I have an apartment to find.
Oh yes, and I have this blog to write.
Just not with the aid of buai (betelnut)
at least as long as I am in this hotel!
