A visit to Paradise High School

                                         The motivation to write

Principal Safak Deliismail and students of Paradise High School enjoying the talk given by Russell Soaba during the National Book Week festivities.

Storyboard felt deeply honoured to be invited by Paradise High School to their National Book Week festivities Wednesday 10^th August. The atmosphere felt at the school could easily be likened to an established writers’ seminar if not a session at a P.E.N. international congress. It was the good questions asked of a writer by the students there that made storyboard feel that way. In a way, the whole afternoon became a “success story” for the school itself.

The first question asked, was: “What motivated you to write and become a success story?”

The answer provided by storyboard was standard enough. It was the same sort of answer any successful writer would give the world over.

The thing that motivated storyboard to write, came the reply then, was that in all his lifetime he had been nothing but a failure. It was that sense of failure that motivated him to write. Even today he has not abandoned the idea of seeing himself as such. And so he must write: not so much to publish and sell as to satisfy a certain curiosity deep within us that gives us the signal that we are not doing enough. But the greatest challenge to all this comes to us when we see what failure means face to face. It is that moment of realization that compels us to go on writing. And we will go on doing this forever.

The second question called for clarification on the notion that storyboard was a “failure”. “Sir, if you regard yourself as a failure, how is it that you are famous, here and overseas?”

To which the response was that storyboard never won any major literary prizes for all that he had written in his lifetime. If there were any reward at all for his work, these came in the form of fellowships and interns that enabled him to pursue his writing career at certain private schools around New England area of the United States when he was in his thirties; and at certain universities as a Writer-in-Residence.

                                                                                     

“How old were you when you first published?”

“Sixteen.”

A wow swept through the head of the crowd.

The Principal of the school, Mr. Safak Deliismail, asked if there were any organizations or establishments in place to honour the country’s writers with awards and prizes. Storyboard answered that there were none in PNG, and those elsewhere had their own programs and policy guidelines to follow. “But that should not deter us from writing,” he continued, “from being writers and artists, which is what we are. So then, if we keep on writing, the chances are that we might reach that anticipated hour of success in our art, in our craft, which, if understood and appreciated well enough, will surely raise the whole world to its feet with salutation and cheers.”

Another question, possibly from the Grade 10 section of the crowd, had something to do with storyboard’s favourite myth or legend. What was it? The cassowary story, came the reply. The cassowary story? Where is it from? From the East and West Sepik Provinces, said storyboard. There was a huge round of applause. The student asking the question was from the East Sepik.

“And sir,” asked another, what is your usual reaction when someone says that he or she likes your books very much? I’m talking about Wanpis and Maiba here.”

“I get worried,” replied storyboard. “If my books are described as likeable, or enjoyable, then I begin questioning my own worth as a writer. And this in turn leads me to realize that all good writing is subject to objective literary criticism. It is good criticism that determines the true value of a book. That calls for quality as well. I tell this to my students of literature at the University of Papua New Guinea. And I am telling you this now: your best reader is not the one who says, “I like your books,” but the one who says, “Your books intrigue me.”

“How many books have you written, sir?”

“Just four: two novels, and two volumes of poetry. But now we come to the “success” part of our meeting this afternoon. This should ease your minds a little. Reason why I am well known is that this small number of books is proof enough that I am a very good writer. There is your success story.”

At this point we all realized that time was running out on us. Ms Bronya Kaine, conducting that afternoon’s book week session, announced that there was time for one more question.

                                                                             

The question was: “How long did it take you to write Wanpis?”

“Ten years,” came the reply.

Whistles of disbelief, perhaps; a little of fidgeting here and there. This can’t possibly be the right answer?

“All writing is art, scribbled in a diary that we keep visiting over and over. It starts at an earlier age, such as where you are now. And then we grow up with our writing. Let Mum, when cleaning house, store those diaries in a secure place. Keep on creating those diaries now until you reach your twenties. At that point, come back to all that you have written, arrange and re-arrange them, and there you will see that you have written a novel.”

The applause received then was resounding – an almost standing ovation.

Then the principal rose and thanked his school for choosing to share that Wednesday afternoon with a writer. He pointed out that writers were a special group of people; that you rarely saw them in public places, except at book fairs signing autographs; and that what they thought and wrote was useful advice to people of all walks of life, from ordinary people up to statesmen and leaders of countries.

The faculty of Paradise High School consists of Papua New Guinean and Turkish teachers or patrons and mentors. A student there finds himself or herself in a prestigious position of being a member of an international community of scholars, writers and artists. As he looked around, storyboard was mindful of the fact that the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature was Turkish, an important reflection on the academic potential of this new school.

And as he sat down to autograph the school’s copy of Maiba, at the kind request of the principal, he could sense that there was and there is no greater reward, no greater prize, for the writer than to see his books placed in the libraries of those young people so eager to know what writing is all about, such as the student who asked: “How old were you when you first published?”

SBKMC Comp ‘11

Some of the Mooters in the SBKMCC 2011

By Nou Vada 
 
I spent the whole week preparing for Round 5 of the Sir Buri Kidu Moot Court Competition. The nerves and the stress of preparing written submissions and then oral submissions had gotten to me by the middle of the week. But this is what I had signed up for, and I couldn’t complain and wish for everything to go away; I thought ex nudo pacto non oritur action; and that as such the stress is a part of the consideration in the agreement. I laughed at the thought. Such is true about all things in life, and the Sir Buri Kidu Moot Court Competition is no exception.

So what is the Sir Buri Kidu Moot Court Competition? It is a yearlong Competition where registered UPNG Law students from second year to fourth year go against each other in mock courtroom battles. Students form firms of two to four members and get them registered. 

This year, the competition was revived after a one year hiatus. Twenty firms registered as soon as notices for the inception of the Competition were put up; among the ranks was my own team, CR Legal.

The first round kicked off midway through first semester. All twenty teams were pitched one against another. The moot problem given for the first Round was one on defamation; it was an appeal case where the appellant, one Kepas Bigmaus, Member of Parliament was appealing against the decision of the court of first instance which found the respondent, Ruts National Nius Korporesen not liable for allegedly damaging Hon. Bigmaus’s good name and reputation pursuant to the Defamation Act 1962 over a news report and a corresponding editorial about allegations concerning the Appellant’s conduct at a Hotel. In Round 2, teams dealt with a case concerning property law where the plaintiff, one Jenny James was claiming that the defendant’s bank had unfairly settled the mortgaged house she had defaulted payments on. 

In the third round all teams were informed that eliminations would begin. For the third round, the case was in the area of Family law, where the appellant, an expatriate was appealing against the decision of the Court of first instance, in awarding the custody of his daughter to her Papua New Guinean mother, the respondent. Every team had, for every round, gone against another, either as plaintiff against defendant or as appellant against respondent. After the third round the bottom four teams were sent packing. 

The remaining 16 went to battle in Round 4, where the case at hand was a tricky one. It was about a highway robbery. The trickiness of it was in the course of action that was taken; the victim of the robbery took the Village Leader of the village next to the area where the robbery happened to Court, claiming that the village leader could’ve prevented such a robbery as the culprits were from that village. The case, which was an appeal, dealt with one of the most complex areas of Law in Papua New Guinea – the Underlying Law. The Underlying Law is a branch of the laws of Papua New Guinea that is to be developed chiefly by the Courts. Ideally and in a nutshell it is to use the customary law of the Peoples of Papua New Guinea and the common law of England, as well as case law from similar jurisdictions as Papua new Guinea to develop a dynamic body of laws that is uniquely Papua New Guinean; an integral part of what the Late Bernard Narakobi often referred to as the Melanesian Jurisprudence. Round 4’s case required the Moot teams who were appealing for the victim to invoke the custom of Papua New Guinea, successfully plead it and justify its use with the help of real PNG cases, and then convince the court to modify the Tort law of Negligence which is a product of the Common Law of England, to create a kind of composite law that descends from both PNG custom and English law, that would find the village leader liable for a civil wrong based on customary duty of care. We joked that it was a House of Lords meets Haus Tambaran scenario.

This week, only twelve teams remain. Behind the scenes a lot of meticulous planning is involved in keeping the competition running. The Competition is co-ordinated by the Moot Court Committee. Consisting of Academic staff from the School of Law and a dedicated team of students, the Committee oversees co-ordinating of teams and ensures teams get their problems and hand back in the written submissions on time. The Committee then makes sure that the Moot Judges, practicing lawyers who volunteer their time and skill to preside over each session in a Round arrive at the venue and get properly briefed. The committee organizes logistics and refreshments for each round and also co-ordinates the Judges Associates’, mostly law freshmen, who assist the Judge during sessions.

In Round 5, the case in question is a criminal matter and the remaining twelve teams will either represent the Appellants or the State, which is the respondent.

 The Moot Court has many benefits to those who’ve signed up for it. It builds confidence and gives an opportunity to practically engage the concepts, processes and rules that students study every day. As one of the Moot Judges once put it to me, “It’s not about winning or losing the case, it’s about how well and how efficiently you can assist the court in finding Justice because that’s what it’s really all about, finding Justice; the stress of the profession”.

I thought about this ‘stress of the profession’ in contrast to this stress I was going through preparing to represent the State in this imaginary case. A flurry of different feelings came; silliness, pride, happiness, satisfaction, fatigue, and then silliness again.

UPNG 2011 and Wanpis

By Nou Vada

                                          

This week I scheduled an interview with Laken Lepatu, the charismatic Vice-President of the Student Representative Council at the University of Papua New Guinea. My questions to him were about the Student Allowance system that has been proposed by the Government, and why he thought it was necessary. Of course on campus a popular petition has been in circulation seeking signatures from registered UPNG students to petition Parliament to have the system passed in its November seating. 

“If the Government is really serious about obtaining the 54000 university graduates a year as it envisions in the Medium Term Vision 2010-2015, it must invest in its students”. Lepatu continued, “Students are state assets. The government must completely subsidize all the school fees for tertiary students for the year 2012 and onwards. The fortnightly student allowance of K13.00 must be re-introduced to help these students; these future leaders of the country augment whatever little rations they can afford with whatever little their wantoks assist them with”. The revelations are nothing new and have been stated and restated countless times by countless student leaders, nevertheless, the truth and more so the urgency in these statements do not diminish.

Laken described the scenario unapologetically, “It is necessary to have this thing in place. Many of us here on Campus come from the villages and it is very hard to support ourselves.”

The model student that Lepatu describes is as it happens, the protagonist in Wanpis, who starts out his humble journey in All Saints’, a boarding school in Oro Province. He has a step-sister in his village in Milne Bay and a mother, both of whom he leaves away from for 9 years as he attends two boarding schools in succession. After his last year of school he returns to find his mother has died, and his half-sister, a frail woman at just nineteen, fearful of the future. The protagonist never knows his father. And this is one of the silent, maybe subliminal themes that the story addresses. Only at the end of the book does the question of who the protagonist’s father is sneaks up on the reader. The result is a beautiful distortion of emotions that rush to you almost as an onslaught of loud, topical afterthoughts.

The 176 page book has 3 lengthy sections. Each can almost be read as a stand-alone short story. The section titles are Lusman, Split-yolk Nostalgia and Wanpis. These three almost short stories come together to form a novel that is philosophical and poetic and yet so honest-to-God. The protagonist’s rigid approach to an admirer of his, Sheila Jivi La, who is to later become his wife, is as comical as it is apprehensively helpless. Characters like Just-Call-Me-Joe (J.C.M Joe or Joseph Bikman) and Sophie, the white expatriate student who reviles her expatriate status and her whiteness are what could be regarded as unrounded characters – that is, characters not fully formed and developed, but in the attitude of the book, the reader is expected to leave bona-fide literary analysis at the door, that this is Papua New Guinea where you expect the unexpected, in the people and in their stories.

Just-Call-Me-Joe becomes a student politician, an undergrad revolutionary, one of the leaders of the Nationalist Black Power Student Movement, but at the end all he wants, all he ever really longs for, with all his revolutionary philosophies and his firebrand leadership is fame and fortune. Soaba presents UPNG as it was in the 1970s when Wanpis was written and as one who studies there right now will acknowledge, not much has changed. There are still student forums held at the Forum Square and there are maverick student leaders, maybe without (maybe with) the ambition distorted intents of Just-Call-Me-Joe. 

I met up with Laken fresh off a meeting with the Government. He was very local about the hardships that ordinary students face on campus. He told me about the 8% increase in tuition fees and the 21% increase in Board and Lodging fees that the students had to pay for this academic year and he stressed the fear that the school fee would indeed increase again next year. I asked why the SRC of UPNG was targeting the Government and not the UPNG Council. 

“The University Council pointed fingers at the Government.” 

According to Lepatu, it was the former Finance Minister and current Works Minister Hon. Peter O’Neill’s encouraging statements that prompted the SRC to act, not in civil disobedience, but in support of such an initiative hinted by the Minister on the 19^th May edition of this newspaper where he was quoted as saying “Our economy is growing at 8% and we need quality human resource to put this economic growth into reality... I see no reason why, with such money, we cannot give back fortnightly allowances and subsidize school fees for students in tertiary institutions”.

After meeting with Laken, I stood around the Forum Square for awhile. This small arena has been the sight of many a powerful student rally. In Wanpis, the protagonist after walking back to school from Hohola where he falls from the door of a moving PMV, and arrives to find a student rally in progress at Forum Square. The protagonist of course is a freshman and finds the atmosphere tense. The tense atmosphere of student rallies at the Forum Square, with all its now-or-never sentiments and emotional flare is a uniquely UPNG experience.

Wanpis, in its first two chapters deals with UPNG and the hope and despair it can represent. These two chapters deal with the philosophical musings of someone who has come to University as an elite, a lusman still, but an elite. Wanpis deals with the UPNG experience of broadening one’s mind, engaging in drunken philosophical arguments with friends, fighting in the name of your race and ethnicity, on campus romance and the contemplation of leaving school – things all students at UPNG go through. At the heart of all this is the concept of the Lusman, someone who is on transit to somewhere, someone who is looking for his identity and the meaning of life, who has left his village beyond the hills of Port Moresby and has come to create a destiny and recreate a context for his past. The Lusman as presented in Wanpis is so much more than a mere description a student; it a body of philosophy that the regular UPNG student thinks, experiences and derives himself from and it is that thing a former UPNG student in the workforce misses and reminisces over; a split-yolk nostalgia of some sort. 

The Lusman of Wanpis is the student Laken Lepatu and like-minded student leaders have in mind to be the beneficiaries of these proposals the SRC is pushing for.

Norway's fearful Friday

What a sad day!

I was in my car all day, driving home from friends in Sweden. I followed my plan to stay north of Oslo, and passed that area an hour before the bomb went off. I even drove by the shore of the lake where many youngsters were shot and killed two hours later. My radio was on all day and the continuous updates just turned more and more horrifying and unbelievable as I was driving westward. Now I’m back in my house. It’s just before midnight and I have seen the Prime minister and others giving their comments, condolences and reactions on TV.

This day is going to affect the whole nation in several ways and for years and decades. In the next few days we will find out who are among the victims, and in a small country like Norway so many will be personally affected. I also know people working in the buildings that were bombed in Oslo. I keep my fingers crossed.

That is Jan Hasselberg writing close to midnight, Friday, 22^nd July, in the quiet of his home in Bergen, Norway.

By midnight and Saturday morning 23^rd July he will have emailed that message to friends and acquaintances everywhere, including storyboard and many others in Papua New Guinea.

A sad day indeed for Norway, a country as small as ours.

Readers will remember Jan Hasselberg. He was among that little group of writers  gathered at the Tufi Dive Resort upon a weekend of March earlier this year (4-6/03/11). See The Literary Marvels of Tufi. Jan (pronounced Young) described himself then as “itinerant Tufi resident” when storyboard met him and as always was busy at his lap top in between conversations that sometimes touched lightly on the similarities of fjords in Norway and those of Tufi.

 “Is Norway as peaceful as our Tufi surroundings here?” storyboard asked Jan once. No, came the prompt reply, my country is just as bad as any story you hear about corruption in your country, and away he would go. There were the logging disturbances at Collingwood Bay, he would maintain; where is there peace anywhere on this globe for us sad writers and artists. Are we way out? Are we odd? He was a nice man to meet and strike up a conversation with. All the more nicer to hear that he is safe and sound where by this time the varying theories on this notion of the “terrorist” entity is further engulfing the norms of ordinary human concentration. And then again all sorts of questions are being asked and slung as weapons by one group of humanity against another, one religious sect against another, one extreme against another, and so on and so forth.

In Papua New Guinea we are not quite used to such threats of “unrestful silences” as Conrad would put it straight from the “heart of darkness”, or violence, if we can describe them as that. But oh, yes, we do have our own notion of civil or social differences, and nine times out of ten we deal with them successfully, almost every day of our lives – but not in as horrifying a manner as those bombings and wanton slayings as in Norway or elsewhere which, unfortunately for us, require a lot of theorizing. And these theories lead nowhere else but to utter confusion which the so-called civilized parts of the globe regard as rational thinking. One needs only look up the blogs, read the newspapers and view various channels of the TV box to see what all that is about.

When Jan Hasselberg sat down to write at his desk in the peace and quiet of Tufi in March earlier this year he felt he was far removed from the hum drum of intellectual noise that affects much of Europe today, at this very hour. We see a man carrying on with his life upon the age of retirement, going out to open sea, tasting the salt air, scuba diving or fishing, then coming back to a lovely evening and a dinner table laden with crabs and oysters. The only moment of disturbance he felt there and then was the way humanity began to meddle with ancient and ancestral land marks such as Keroroa (Mt Victory, so named after Lord Nelson’s battleship). He even wrote a nice coffee table type of article called “Keroroa is weeping” which covers much of the logging activities that go on around Collingwood Bay area.  A full text of that article will appear shortly in one of the storyboard blogs.

Some of the information regarding the tragedy of Norway mentioned here comes from Jan’s fellow Norwegian citizen, Aslak Sira Myhre (guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 July 2011 13.25 BST). There we get into the inner workings of such modes of “unrestful silences”. That in turn forces us to wonder, as a very small country and far removed from the rest of the world, if what we hear about Norway will eventually reach our shores one day. Those premonitions we are not in the position to see, but we do have our own moments of uncertainty and doubt. And though we are often described as “the land of the unexpected” our choice of taking the middle ground of things seems to be adamant. But that should not mean we have a fate we will never know.

A further reading of Aslak Sira Myhre’s lamentation leads one to some sort of conclusion that Norway’s tragedy affects us all in one way or another. Those awkward yet indefinable moments of “unrestful silences” become our mystery as much as any other cultural group or setting. But as we read Myhre’s opinions as well as others we take particular note of the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s remarks that what we all need in times like these is “more democracy and openness.”

Now as writers we should know how to interpret such a phrase: that we must talk about things that bother us; that we must be alert about the next step we take; and that in this modern age of hi-tech distractions, it is best we keep our fingers busy with every strum of the guitar chord, with every turn of the pen on paper. And out of all that comes the anticipated poetry and song. That is where the dance is.

                                                                   

Hollywood’s misconceptions about Papua New Guinea

By Nou Vada

  “I’m finished with this crap. I’m going to Papua New Guinea. I’m outa here. I’m going off the grid. No more franchises. No more botox. No more ‘Oh, let’s clone another sheep’... and certainly no more sexual harassment suites...”  

These are the remarks made by one of the characters in the 2008 Hollywood flick Accepted, starring Justin Long (Die Hard 4.0), Jonah Hill (The Rocker) and Maria Thayer. The character in question – what I’ll describe as a cynical old man – speaks of Papua New Guinea as a care-free, backward country where progress and civil ethics are irrelevant in society. To another 2008 Hollywood flick, The Condemned, starring World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Stone Cold Steve Austin, Papua New Guinea is the host country to a globally broadcast free-for-all reality show where the contestants – hard-core criminals from around the world – are let out into the Sepik jungles to kill each other, the last surviving contestant winning his freedom. Accepted and The Condemned are examples of film that portray a bad image of Papua New Guinea to the world. These films impress on movie-goers everywhere that Papua New Guinea is an outrageously dangerous place to visit. 
 

Then there are films which completely distort Papua New Guinean culture. There are so many I’ve seen and would mention if I had the time to properly research them, but I’ll mention two. I suspect many Papua New Guineans did notice that in the cannibal Island in the Caribbean that Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) deserts to in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the face-paint worn by a couple of natives is distinctly Papua New Guinean; the most obvious of these is the bright yellow of the Wigmen of Southern Highlands and Hela, which in the film, is worn by one such cannibal native of the West Indies. One more film comes to mind. Bruce Lee in New Guinea, a flick made after the death of the real Bruce Lee and was a product of the Kung-Fu craze that had engulfed popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. In that film, the Bruce Lee inspired protagonist sets off to investigate a special type of martial arts practiced in the New Guinea Islands. The film’s depiction of New Guinea Islanders is awful. Papua New Guinean natives are played by Asians. The bilas these ‘natives’ adorn themselves with are those of American Indians. I recall now my father in a movie-buff’s rage taking the disc out of the VCD player and breaking it.

There are so many more examples of inaccurate and ignorant portrayals of Papua New Guinean society and culture in motion pictures. The issue I put forward to whoever else noticed was why this was so. General awareness of Papua New Guinea around the world is poor. Those who have heard of Papua New Guinea will usually say the things films like Accepted and The Condemned present; that Papua New Guinea is a primitive and dangerous yet beautiful exotic paradise. Our efforts to turn this country into an international tourist destination are made difficult with such an existing global perception of our country. I wondered why big budget Hollywood film franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean would make such ignorant blunders and so I raised the question with one of UPNG’s Art and Culture experts; the image of the ‘Asian-apache’ New Guinea Islanders and the touch-down of a G6 private jet aircraft in what could only be a fabled international airport in the bush of Aitape as in The Condemned were fresh in my mind.

The expert’s response was as enlightening as it was heavy. “Papua New Guineans are partly to blame for all this”, he said, referring to the mis-portrayals of our country in film. I asked him how it could be. “Well, you people haven’t done enough films about yourselves and your country,” came the response. I felt the devastation of this truth hit me hard. Harder still was this confused feeling I felt that I was somehow personally blameworthy for this truth. I had championed the chorus of condemnation against Hollywood and film industries elsewhere for portraying Papua New Guinean society and culture so negligently, never once had I stopped that this negligent portrayal was simply the by-product of our own inability to show the film makers of the world and the world at large on film what real Papua New Guinean society and culture is. Film makers and screen-writers aren’t cultural anthropologists; the most primary knowledge of content they’ll have recourse to is the work of other film makers rather than academic sources. The thought was profound. Papua New Guinea hasn’t made enough films about Papua New Guineans and Papua New Guinea for film makers elsewhere to know exactly what Papua New Guinea is and looks like.

The gloominess gave way to a feeling of urgency. I returned to my dorm, determined as ever to settle a screen-play the general idea of which had been sifting around in my mind for quite a while. The setting of the story is UPNG in the present. I imagined it would be at its core a love story, but I’d throw in a bit of socio-political undertones as well. In all honesty, I hadn’t decided how this love story would unfold. To that extent some of my friends came in with different angles and plots and twists to these plots; mostly derived from their own experiences in UPNG. Over the next few nights we discussed this as a yet unwritten screenplay. We thought of the quirky characters we could put in, the contemporary and political symbolism and imagery we could deploy. We decided a policeman would be a character and in honour of the Major we were studying, we’d put a Law student in the story – a kind of tortured soul. I was interested in the music we could use. I thought Wass Kadoi’s Vaisi would be a good soundtrack for a montage scene in the film.

The screenplay is still not written. Like many other good ideas Papua New Guinea literary artists wish to pursue, there is no clear future for such a screenplay if I finished it tomorrow. We need a film industry in Papua New Guinea. The true fault of the current inaccuracy and ignorance in portraying PNG in film lies with Papua New Guinea itself. Not to pardon the blunders of film makers, but this is the true gist of the issue.

                                                                    
Nou Vada is our regular guest writer on this blog and the National Weekender.

The Unforgetable Yonki Dam

By Lee Whiejin

Photo courtesy of Malum Nalu

  The Yonki Dam, located in the Eastern Highlands, has become a household name in Papua New Guinea. The hydroelectric power plant on this dam has supplied electricity to five neighboring provinces. In my imagination the dam itself did seem to be huge and impressive. In fact from afar the seeming enormity of the dam was not even visible, and the dam was ensconced in the surroundings. The dam did not seem to evidence any feel of artificiality.  The construction of such a big dam would usually show a stark contrast with the backdrop nature of mountain hills and river.

   The embankment used as a road was not seen to be elevated, but on an even level with roads on both edges of the dam. I could barely notice its artificial shape and enormous size only when I stood in the middle of the dam and looked down upon the clear water falling down at the edge of water slope. The water did not flow over the steep downward slope, but under the slope due to dry season. It would be marvelous if the floodgate were open and let water run down the slope. The flow of water would have made a big noise. Though it was a man-made installation, it did not smell of any unbalanced, unnatural aspect. The location of the dam became part and parcel of the nature, assimilated into the mountains and Ramu River. I marvelled at the design and construction of the dam. People did talk about the Yonki dam not as much because of power generation, but because it contained natural elements as part of the river and valley.

   Electric power is considered as one of the main pillars in economic growth. Needless to say, without power factories cannot be run, and people might have to live in darkness once the sun sets. Formerly economic development has entailed environmental destruction, the shadow in its wake. But now it is to be long-term, taking into account the possible side effects upon the posterity, and should be economically sustainable and eco-friendly.  Among the various ways of generating power, using wind, tidal wave and sunlight is still under development and costly, though regarded as the power of the future. While the current main mode of power generation is hydroelectric, fuel and nuclear and has its own strength and weakness, hydroelectric power seems to stand out. PNG is blessed with plentiful rainfall throughout the year, adequate natural environment for hydroelectric power. It is anticipated that several other hydropower plants like the Yonki could be built, and benefit spread to every corner of this country.

   The Yonki hydropower plant was built 20 years ago by the Hyundai Construction Co., then the flagship of the Hyundai conglomerate led by the late mythical businessman Chung Juyoung. He had natural talent for business, though of short schooling. Underpinned by his vision and leadership, the company had made a great leap forward, working miracle in the business world. The Yonki dam was part of his great feat.

   Speaking of power supply, most dwellers in and around Port Moresby have heard of the Hanjung Kanudi power plant, whose power generating capacity is 24 MW, meeting about 30 % of electricity demand in NCD. The Kanudi plant, currently operated by Hanjung Heavy industries, is expected to be transferred to the PNG government in 2014.

His Excellency Lee Whiejin, our guest writer this week, is the South Korean Ambassador to Papua New Guinea. 

Election Fever – A Rower’s Song revisited

                                                                       

“Elections in Paradise

Beer, rice and tinpis

The vote enticer”

Steven Winduo summarises election fever in Papua New Guinea in that one stanza. The stanza gives me a flashback to the last General Election, where in my village, maverick campaign managers came around with packets of rice and sugar to buy votes. The image of one such maverick manager comes to my mind so clearly. He was one of those villagers who disappeared from village-life years on end and spawned around at times when you only began to miss them. This campaign manager gave my mother packets of rice and sugar. I remember him now all these years later because he had such a skill justifying his bribery.

He said the goods were not bribes; rather they were gifts and even before Mother could say something he added that rejection of these “gifts” would adversely affect what I’ll now term as social and cultural efficacy. His reason was that every other household in our clan of houses had accepted the “gifts” and for my mother not to do so would cause scandal and possibly conflict. He spoke of the latter so tactfully it was impressive rather than apprehensive. The proposition as a whole was clever. My mother at the end accepted the gifts, and indeed we all saw them as gifts rather than bribes.

The poem Elections in Paradise is taken from A Rower’s Song, which is Dr. Winduo’s third book of poems. It is just 1 of 104 poems in the book which were written between 2000 and 2009 and capture the essence of this period in Papua New Guinea’s history. It was a period of deconstructing hopelessness that had become so structural in nature, and in our endeavours to do so our country entered “once more into the breach”, as Shakespeare would’ve put it.

The book carries in its poems stories of life in Port Moresby. Stories of settlements and villages like the one I lived in last election, of city suburbs and betel nut markets, and of those who long for the light, ideologically even literally (yes, city blackouts).

The characters in the poems are the characters of Port Moresby. These are Betel nut vendors, second-hand clothing merchants, charismatic street preachers, vulgar-tongued drunkards, church-going mothers and hangover fathers and little street seller kids.

The poems have that essence of contemporary Papua New Guinean society that everyday Papua New Guineans, especially those of us in Port Moresby live in. The cacophony and the stillness of these poems are moving because they are distinctly Papua New Guinean and Melanesian. Few pieces of Western literature come close to capturing this essence. Sir V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street is one novel I know that does.

Succession and destiny is one of the over-arching themes you’ll find in A Rower’s Song. In Little Star, a father wonders if his son could be the next leader. In Beggar, a tale of Papua New Guinean election culture is told. In One Nation, familiar laments of everyday Papua New Guinean are echoed. One particularly moving line in One Nation goes,

“Stand up for your future

The ones your children and mine

Will Judge

In their own time”

Next year is election year in Papua New Guinea. The Storyboard revisits A Rower’s Song by Dr. Steven Winduo and reminds everyone that whatever happens to this country, we can be sure of two things; firstly, we will only have ourselves to blame as voters of Public Office and secondly,

Papua New Guinea’s literary artists will document the moods, the emotions and the stories of the times in their work.

To that effect, we can say there arises a third certainty; that whenever such work is published, we at the Storyboard will discuss and dissect it for you.

Whatever happens and whoever you vote in Election year 2012, let us remember the last stanza of Elections in Paradise:

“Election is on everyone’s lips

As if politicians are the only ones

Who build a country?”

 

By Nou Vada

The writer is a keen follower/guest writer of the storyboard and is a second year Law major at the University of Papua New Guinea.