Lou

Dear friends,

While this 8th month in Papua New Guinea has been fairly hectic, I had the good fortune to be able to return to Manus Province. This time, instead of taking a speedboat an hour north of mainland to visit Andra (as I did in August), we explored Lou island instead, an island 90 minutes south of mainland, rich with volcanic soil and abundance of friendly folk. As soon as our speedboat approached Lou, I was reminded of the way things used to be - an assorted group of whoever was present on the beach quickly assembled to help pull the boat in, irrespective of who the visitors were! We used a combination of ropes (with the cheer one, two, boo), pushing, and pulling, so I imagine this must have been what it felt like to live in joint families - only this was more or less a cooperative spirit between 4 separate townships and over 200 people on the island!

Due to the volcanic soil, Lou is known for growing all kinds of plants. Our meals consisted of freshly harvested sweet potato, cassava, sago, taro, watermelons, bananas and rice. Delicious. Accomodation was modest, we were kindly put up by the brother of one of our colleagues. While there was only an outdoor shower (water tank + bucket), there was also a diesel generator which was powered up from 7-9pm every day, mainly for lighting but also occassionally so that the villagers could gather round and watch a game of rugby on tv! They also talked about how they had gathered in a similar fashion to watch the World Cup in the wee hours of the morning. The people at Rei village who we interacted with had interesting views on religion - they were all Part of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and felt that it was religion which had allowed them to peacefully join together as an island and work together. Previously, the 4 villages used to have tribal wars, and missionaries who came to Lou were eaten! But it is a lesson that persistence does pay off...eventually, and not always for the individual who wants to help, but now Lou is a fairly homogeneous island which seems to work well together. Another interesting experience I had was going through Sabbath, the day of rest that began at sunset on Friday evening and lasted until sunset on Sat evening. They took this very seriously - no cooking, swimming, or any activity at all - even a walk for 20 mins was considered too far. It's been awhile since I had an entire day of rest, and spent most of the time speaking with a variety of people who lived in the village. Visitors are a welcome but infrequent addition to the community, so we had plenty of people stopping by for a chat, both to share about themselves and to appease their curiosity about where we were from and what we were doing in Lou.

Before we left Lou on Sunday, we had some good fun playing football with some of the kids in the village. We also got the chance to take the boat around the island - not only did we get to take the boat through a bat cave, hang out on an island with plenty of obsidian (cooled lava without crystals), have a look at some huge wild fowl eggs and check out some Japanese wrecks from the War, but we also managed to take a quick dip in some hot springs on the side of the island close to the volcano.