Wom: Tucked
away in the remote reaches of the Sepik River Valley is the village of
Wom. It's a place where all the houses are built on stilts
and
people are one with water. It's a place that few people see
but
one of my favorite places in the country.
Day One:
The Sepik River was
wide, muddy, flowing fast and filled with logs
heading downstream. So many logs I can’t figure out where
they came from! The guide was always watching out for
them. Our boat went up the Sepik a while and turned up a
tributary. The further up the valley, the more you saw people
paddling and poling canoes, carrying goods and passengers. We
came to the village of Kambaramba and stayed in the hut of a friend of
the guide. My guide was absolutely useless in helping with
the village and his friend seemed to completely ignore me except when
hitting me up for money. It’s an uncomfortable situation to
be in someone’s house where you distinctly feel unwelcome. In
fact, it was the feeling I got from the entire village. I
basically hid from everyone and waited it out until the morning
departure.
Day Two:
I was pleased to be moving on and continued upstream. The
banks were muddy, the water murky, white herons were
everywhere. We passed several villages and the occasional
solitary home. The rivers had lots of people paddling their canoes as
this really was the only viable mode of transportation considering how
wet the area was.
After several more
splits in the river, we passed through the village
of Wom. The village was entirely on three-meter tall stilts
and partially flooded. Kids were swimming in the river and
people paddled their boats about. What was striking is how
these people were basically half-fish. There was something
about the village that appealed to me. I told the guide to
turn around as I wanted to stay there; he was reluctant, but I
insisted. We were directed to an empty house but I wasn’t
allowed to leave the boat. The villagers got straight to work
and fixed up the ladder to the hut, replaced some logs on the porch,
and rebuilt the boardwalk across the water and only then could I get
out. How could one feel more welcome than that? I
didn’t know what would happen here (well, except for my guide being a
certified dud) but this was the right place to stay.
Before long, twenty-five people had gathered on the porch wanting to
meet me. There were two people, Joseph and Francis, who spoke
English and they would help out immensely. The people seemed
stunned that I was staying there. A few mentioned that I was
the first “whiteman” to stay with them. It’s not unknown for
people to pass through Wom and to even stop and buy a few trinkets, but
they mentioned I was the first to spend time there and stay in their
huts. Good heavens, this was like Mengino again.
They were extremely hospitable and were pleased that I was
there. We spent the afternoon chatting and asking questions
of each other. They seemed very interested to hear about my
home and to tell me of theirs.
Wom is an unusual place. It’s built on a vast, flat plain
with mountains far off in the distance. It’s subject to
frequent flooding but this doesn’t seem to be a problem as they’ve
adapted their lifestyle to accommodate this. I was told that
for about two months a year, they have hard, dry ground, the rest of
the year they are either partially or completely flooded, hence the
huts on tall stilts.
The houses have walkways built of logs between them to facilitate
movement over the muddy ground when the water isn’t too high and when
it is too high, a canoe is used or I imagine you can swim to your
neighbors. They gather food from the surrounding valley or
catch fish. It’s an interesting mix of water and land and the
people of Wom seem to have figured out a lifestyle that is sustainable
long term. I don’t think of PNG as a paradise but people have
been living there for 50,000 years in a manner, that while it has had
environmental effects, it is less than the societies of many places.
Day Three
It had rained very
heavily during the night and in the morning, the
entire village was flooded with not a single bit of dry or even muddy
ground visible. Yesterday, there were some walkways between
houses, but today, if you wanted to visit your next door neighbor, it
was into a canoe you go. For them, taking off in a canoe is
as natural as walking.
This morning I watched people preparing sago, a palm-like tree that is
a staple of their diet. They used a funnel-shape setup in
which they would pour water through the sago, pound it, pour more water
through and repeat. It was common to hear these sounds
echoing through the village. The end product is a starchy
powder which is used in all sorts of foods. Some things they
make are similar to pancakes and others like a pudding. The
importance of sago in their diet cannot be overstated. The
entire floodplain is pretty marshy and not everything can grow there
but sago is widespread.
People wandered over
to visit and talk as the morning
progressed. It’s such a pleasure to be around them.
I see them wide-eyed at the stories of my home. I suspect
they look at me the same way when I listen to them. After a
while, Joseph takes me out in a boat. These dugout canoes are quite
simply “dug out” from a log. They often carve an alligator’s
head into the front end for protection from the alligator
spirits. They are totally round and for the inexperienced
(i.e. me), quite easy to tip over. That said, as we paddled
along, I sat down in the front and Joseph stood, steady as a rock, in
the back. We went around the houses in the village and
upstream a ways with a number of other canoes following us
around. Out of one of the houses someone yells, “blah-blah
whiteman blah blah” and laughs. A short time later someone
else yells “blah-blah whiteman blah blah” and laughs. After
hearing this a few more times I asked Joseph what they were
saying. He said it was nothing and I replied, “I can only
understand one word and that is ‘whiteman’ and that means
me.” After another person said the same thing, “Joseph, you
have to tell me.” He said, “When we paddle, the man stands in
the back and the women sits in the front. So with the way we
are in this canoe, they’re yelling ‘The Whiteman paddles like a
girl!’”
Well, ah, well….I guess they’re right and they did seem to enjoy poking
fun at me and for good reason. After recovering from that ego
blow, we paddled back to the hut and sat with a group of people,
passing the day in conversation. They told me that the
village was severely damaged in a earthquake in 1982 and the government
didn’t do a thing to help. They were absolutely unanimous,
without a single exception, in considering the government completely
corrupt and completely useless. They are content to live
their lives and the farther the government stays away, the happier they
are. That’s a common sentiment among Papuans, especially in
the bush. They asked me what causes earthquakes. I
gave them a quick lesson in plate tectonics and based upon the
follow-up questions, they really did seem to understand
it. They were also able to connect earthquakes to a
tsunami that hit the north coast a few years before. Yep,
they were getting it. We talked about all sort of
things. They were interested when I told them how
we lived on a lake and described the local animals. I
contrasted our lifestyles in that we live next to the water while they
live with water and actually, in the water. It’s a whole
different approach to nature.
In the afternoon, the
group took off and said they wanted to give me a
rest. When one is in a large group, you can drift in and out
as you want, but when you’re the focus of the group, you have to listen
to every word, so as much as I enjoy our conversations, it was good to
have some down time. It also allowed me to watch the rhythms
of the village. The thud-thud of someone preparing sago and
the kids playing in the water. At home, if anyone below the
age of ten goes near the water, parents flip out. Here, two
year olds are swimming with three year olds. People paddle to
another hut, sit on the porch and laugh with their
neighbors. A group of people circled up as they walked in the
river, each equipped with a woven basket, beat on the water.
They are scaring fish toward the center of the group. When the group
gets close enough, the folks will all scoop into the middle and see
what's for supper. This action was accompanied by a
swish-swish sound that I would hear all during my stay. These
aren’t life-changing observations but it is the relaxing rhythms of
Wom. An hour or two later, people start drifting back to the
porch and we sat and talked again. The sun was getting lower
in the sky, reflecting off the waters and the distant mountains were
bathed in the fading light. About that time, the owner of the
house came back to the village. He greeted me and picked up a
few things and went to someone else’s hut. The fact that
there was someone else staying in his home, well, that didn’t seem to
phase him one bit. You know, I like these people a
lot.
Somewhere in the distance, a man was yelling. I don’t know
what about, but no one took much notice of it. As the
darkness approached, the mosquitoes come out and we have to call it a
day. Joseph sat and talked alone with me. Sometimes
you meet someone when traveling and as soon as you meet them, you like
them. It was like that with Joseph. He’s a gentle
soul with a pleasant laugh and our times together were some of my best
in PNG.
Malaria is very prevalent in the area and I sleep on the hard floor
under a mosquito net. Underneath is a woven mat on the floor
to ensure that the mossies don’t get at me through the cracks in the
floor. I have to say, it’s not the most comfortable sleeping
arrangements, but it’s not as bad as how people used to sleep before
mosquito nets: under a tightly woven basket, with no air circulation,
in the equatorial swamp. These mosquito nets weren’t so bad
after all. Later on in the night, I woke up and could hear
the man still yelling. I went back to sleep.
Day Four:
Early in the
morning, I awoke to the sound of that same guy
yelling. I don’t know if he was squawking all night and
actually didn’t want to know. One factor of village life is
how intimate it is. The houses aren’t particularly close
together, but walls are thin and when your neighbor’s baby is crying,
you know it. I have found people in villages, in a number of
different countries no less, to be extremely tolerant as far as noise
and intrusions that I find difficult to deal with due to my
upbringing. I’m used to very quiet neighborhoods and would
never make the amount of noise that is often present in such places but
people there don’t seem to fussed by it and sleep right
through. Whether they were nudged by the noise or passage of
time, Wom slowly awoke.
People wandered over to the hut and Francis and Joseph were there to
translate, as usual. Those guys deserve a medal for being so patient
with all of us. Instead of merely telling them of what lay in
the world beyond PNG, we discussed the stars. I told them of
a solar eclipse, of galaxies, and what might lay at the edges of the
Universe, but closer at hand, it was interesting to hear them describe
their daily lives, which are so different from mine. One
feature of Wom was the richness of the social life.
Everywhere you looked, people were together with their
neighbors. Their attention is focused on each other rather
than various electronic devices. It’s kind of ironic that as
this is written, I have music playing and I’m writing on a
computer….Note To Self: Go take a walk outside
We spent the day talking about all sorts of things, paddling the canoe
around, taking a welcome break of an hour or two, sitting, watching
this part of the world pass by, then we passed the evening until the
sunset.
Day
Five:
I was awoken by the
sound of a woman pounding sago.
Whap-whap-whap. She went on for a long, long time.
I looked around the village, watching the children swim and the people
fishing. I had a feeling that the whap-whap-whap had been
going on a very long time in a broader sense too. People
started to gather on the porch and we spent the morning telling stories
and jokes. As the day went on, we all knew that it was my
last day. I could tell that some were going to miss me and I
was going to miss them. Not being able to change plans is one
of the downsides of traveling with a guide and schedule.
As I was leaving, a good part of the village gathered round
in their
canoes. Joseph told me how to say goodbye in their local
language: wafaiolo. I heard that word many times
and said it back to them. I especially said it to Joseph and
asked him to give a “wafaiolo” to Francis also. Joseph told
me how glad he was that I stopped to visit them. It was an
eye-opening experience for all. Our boat took off and a few
canoes followed as far as they could and soon we left Wom behind.
On the first day, Joseph said, “Take our pictures, do whatever you
want, and tell our story.” I told him I would and I have,
given that you’re reading this. I did tell at least a small
part of their story.