Thursday, July 16, 2009

Development: For Whom?

I heard the whisperings last year: A new mine. For metal, nickel? The Chinese. The Chinese.

I returned to a torrent of words—in the papers and in the village. On the Madang coast, the Chinese company Ramu NiCo was building a new nickel mine, Kurumbukari, a business deal brokered by and profiting Port Moresby. Compensation to the native landowners? 10 or 15% and limited opportunity for employment say my village sources. One headmaster estimated that 1 in 10 of the employees were Papua New Guinean (though the company’s promotion materials promised employment to 2,000 during this construction phase); the rest were non-English, non-Pidgin-speaking Chinese. And this, the headmaster said, was a problem. Local employees, unable to communicate with their Chinese superiors, had voiced unanswered concerns about land rights and compensation. One day last August, members of a local tribe showed up and literally beat Chinese workers over a dispute about working conditions, Reuters reported. This May, the dispute was touched off by an accident injuring a PNG worker.

The rash of violence was echoed in Moresby and moved swiftly across the country. Local groups reportedly looted Chinese stores and attacked their owners, protesting Chinese products. The long-time Chinese owner of our local station store left for good after the police stood by while his store was ransacked, our local host here reported.

In my conversation with Mater Primary’s Head Master, I questioned why it was the Chinese that where receiving the anger of the PNG community when the Aussies, Kiwis and Americans have been exploiting PNG resources for years. Even in Madang, another American outfit operates with relatively little confrontation from the local community. His answer: In a country where language means everything, absent lines of communication quickly leads to distrust and anger. It didn’t help that the Chinese initially refused to have a feasibility study done on the site to determine how the project would effect the environment and how the company would manage runoff.

The National newspaper reported that when fully operationally, the mine would treat 3.2 million tons of ore each year to produce 31,000 tons of nickel and 3,200 tons of cobalt, leaving the leftover sludge to drain through a 135 km pipeline that is reported to run along the highway and waterway, cut through villages, and stand on unsound foundations.

Donald, our host and assistant to Sumkar Minister of Parliament Ken Fairweather, regaled us with the story of the mine’s Chinese boss meri Madam Luo Shu meeting the MP and Donald after dinner at the swanky Madang Resort checkbook in hand, offering to write a blank note in return for the MP’s silence regarding a feasibility study. Apparently, he adamantly refused and eventually his campaign for the study helped to make it happen.

So, I asked, if a PNG mining company—should one exist—open a new mine, would the owners face the same difficulty? Was the problem exploitation, xenophobia, or the actual destruction of valuable land and resources? The Headmaster assured me that no such PNG company existed, but if it did, opening operations would be all right, they after all would have to be accountable to locals through other systems beside payment (notably, traditional wontok culture). They would also presumably know the right ways to protect and honor the land. (This year on Karkar, just up the hill from Taleng, the Irish company Digicel built a new cell tower at the sacred site of the mana piti (the “stone pig”) and locals claim our coverage is schizophrenic because the building wasn’t properly blessed with a singsing and kaikai.) I’m not sure how or when large scale business ownership by Papau New Guinean’s will happen, but I am hopeful the current expats will only be a passing model—and not the long-term mainstay—of this country’s economy.

Ask a Papua New Guinean if they seek development for their country and they will almost certainly answer yes. That is, “Yes, we want to improve the standard of living.” But development is so much more—and the forces that implement it accompany it are not fully understood by most.

The promise of business brings many to city centers then leaves them jobless. Their children miss the education of traditional life and find there are not equipped to make their living in town or out. (Though the new curriculum reform aims to educate children in traditional ways, including the equivalent of home economics and shop for the bush.) Those who do welcome the “developers” to their land and get employment in the mines or other businesses find their resources spoiled and themselves powerless in a foreign-run bureaucracy.

I’d like to think education is the answer. And yet, the very small number of business majors that do graduate from the country’s few universities cannot always find employment. My friend Christine, a recent graduate of the business studies program at UPNG, is now back at home still looking for a job. She estimates that only about 60% of her classmates—graduates of the top university in the country—find employment. Education is a much-needed foundation, but it will take capital and investment in PNG’s own populace if the country hopes to be more than a satellite state to China and other interests in the Pacific.

Two Worlds

My students took me on a field trip yesterday afternoon. I’m dying to learn how to spear fish so one of my grade 8’s, his buddies, and his gaggle of pikini cousins (this is not an offense; it’s actually what they call little kids) took me to their black stone beach. It was postcard perfect. Waves crashed up the steep shoreline where kids ran on the rocks barefoot playing some hybrid of freeze tag and capture the flag. (I tried, but my previously pampered feet just couldn’t take it.)
Just off shore, a beautiful baret (reef) lay just beneath the surface. A quick dip took me over channels carved out by lava flows and now alive with coral and fish. We leapt from islands of deposited basalt into crystal blue waters and the kids played a game of sink-and-seek (with everyone’s eyes closed, someone would throw a clam shell then all the kids would dive to find it—at 10 ft depths, mind you). Back on the beach, we sipped fresh green coconut milk (kulau) the boys had kicked down from the nearby grove and watched the sun settle into puddles of red and orange on the horizon. The spear never appeared for me to attempt the hunt for dinner, but I’ve been promised it will next time.

As we walked back to the village, we sang lotu (praise) songs at the top of our lungs. Father Abraham and Deep and Wide were favorites. As we passed the houses, dark except for a kerosene lamp or two, you couldn’t see it, but the smell made evident the fresh kaikai—boiled greens, bananas, sweet potatoes, and rice in coconut milk—that awaited my escorts. Above us, stars twinkled in numbers you’d never see through the haze of a light-polluted American city sky. In my own host’s house, dinner and a family game of Bananagrams (akin to Scrabble) were waiting.

It’s days like these that make me wonder why anyone in PNG would ever want change. Why leave a lifestyle where dinner is readily available from the backyard, cousins abound to splash with in a coral reef, strangers always call out their hello, and everyone makes time to tok stori?

Then today it poured. Torrents turned the roads into rivers and brought roughly 50% attendance at school. I stepped in to cover Pop’s grade 7 class while he went to the other side of the island to collect the pay for all the teachers. The lesson on linking reasons and results with conjunctions was fairly successful, if only for the 15 present students.

This afternoon we received word of alternative explanation for some of the absences. Last night, the sister of another grade 7 student died of malaria. Mama says the parents were busy with jobs at the plantation and had neglected to get her treatment—which is available, and cheap (less than $1). It’s terribly sad. If I was in need of a reality check after yesterday’s play in paradise, I’ve found it.

PNG's Next Generation

I got home late last night in the pouring rain, soaked through but utterly inspired by two of Karkar’s next generation. Yesterday afternoon, a stop at Tarak to visit the Pacific Island Heath School’s founder—and our host last year—Malek Atua, left me in conversation with his wonderful daughter Christine. She’s just graduated from UPNG with a business degree and was incredibly interested in Panango’s program and, following our discussion of environmental exploitation, offered to help create a mini curriculum on land rights and other rights awareness for our teachers. She’s also looking for paying gig with an NGO. (Aren’t we all?)

I left Tarak late—I had to wait for the servings of kaikai to be distributed (how they thought I could eat 5 potatoes, 2 plaintains, greens, and a shank of lamb is beyond me). The PMV dropped off me and Pop’s bugarup bike (the second tire went flat as soon as I replaced the first) at the base of the 20-min. path up to Taleng just as the rain started falling. The local guest house owner’s son, Sam, offered to walk up with me. Pholas had told me of his son’s new job in microfinance, and I was eager to hear more about it.

Since January, Sam has been the sole representative of PNG National Bank’s microfinance efforts on KarKar. In that time he’s helped form 5 small business groups of 25-30 members each. Group members pool their savings to get a group loan from the bank at a 1:2 ratio (so twice as much loan as savings). Currently, their projects include chicken raising and petrol, pastry, and other goods retail. Sam’s job is to monitor all the groups and educate them on savings and money management. So far he reports 100% repayment on time. This sort of micro-business is exactly what many of the Panango group had been hoping for KarKar last year; when I got involved with Kiva this past year, I too had wondered how we could partner to make such projects happen. But Sam’s already making it happen!

By the time I reached Taleng, I had ditched the flipflops to wade through three or four inches of water and mud, but I was in incredibly good spirits (despite my concern for my computer in my sodden backpack).

Both Christine and Sam are only in their mid 20’s and as idealistic and motivated as any of our volunteers. And they are in an incredible position we will never share. Through the luck of parents that valued and supported their education, they have been empowered to take action on issues in their own communities with all the local connections and knowhow to make them happen—and they are!

The First Week

Monday morning our volunteers reported for their first day of school. Unfortunately, this was not the case for most of their students. At Taleng, attendance was so low this first week that teachers called off most classes. Only the grade 8’s stayed for the first two periods to review for their upcoming exams. Friday’s class was cancelled altogether.

I’ve heard a number of explanations for the absenteeism, including confusion over the original schedule which showed this week off for teacher training (cancelled due to lacking funds) and that the high school had two weeks off, so primary students took a cue from their older sibs. But I think the strongest reason is the simple fact that the vast majority of students didn’t show up and there’s no enforcement mechanism to make them—though there will be “work parade” ground cleaning punishment for those who played hooky (that is, if teacher can keep students from vanishing into the coconut grove after school).

For those who did show, their hands were put to work cleaning the yard—and I mean hands. In the absence of rakes and a lawnmower, students pick up leaves one-by-one and cut the large grass field with the swing of bushknives.

Despite attendance problems, some volunteers did have class this week, and by all reports, first lessons were a success. At Mater Primary, Olivia and Erica even pulled off an analysis of Kanye West lyrics with their 8th graders, reportedly. At Tabel, Stephen and Yihana were already making the rounds to help individual students with their lesson converting adjectives to adverbs when I observed Tuesday.

Panango has volunteers at 8 schools this summer. We are largely teaching in upper primary English classes (grades 6-8), but also in a few grade 3 and 4 classrooms and in math, social science, and personal development/health classes. I’m happily back with my old students, now grade 8’s, at Taleng. This coming week we’ll be giving our first round of assessment to be followed at the end of term with a second round of the same test. Volunteers’ enthusiastic teaching has received praise from teachers, headmasters, and students alike in the past, but this year we hope to show our efficacy with some statistics, which these assessments will help us get.

Outside the classroom, our impact may be less measurable, but certainly not less important. By living with families in villages and washing with their kids at the beach daily, we share our experiences, culture, and language. It was amazing last year to watch our shy bathing compatriots go from silence to English sentences in the course of a summer. I’m stoked to be back helping it happen again.

A Common Goal--And Missing Link

I met him in the IT office. Like me, Exie was at the desk purchasing a username and password for Divine Word University’s wireless internet access, a recent addition to this one of Papua New Guinea’s three main universities. Exie asked for my card even before he introduced himself. He was “making a contact,” he said, and an American woman who had just introduced herself on behalf of an NGO apparently was a contact to be had. (Though I suspect, even without the NGO introduction I would have been regarded as a good contact solely by virtue of my skin—the roots of colonialism still run deep in this country that gained its independence in 1975.)

As it would turn out, Exie too was directing his own NGO: PNG Vision International, founded last year to promote development through projects in education, human rights, climate change, and infrastructure. But in his Pidgin-lilted English, at first I could barely make out his name and inquiry into mine, let alone his own position. It wasn’t until he beckoned me over to his computer in the library 20 minutes later that I learned of our similar purposes.

He wanted to show me the grant proposal he had drawn up for his project, a 50-page document replete with a green background, poinsettias in the margin, and rainbow-colored headers. Yes, the presentation was not what I would have chosen for grant request, but the 50 pages of content was sound. It was addressed to US Ambassador to PNG Leslie Rowe (who ironically, we’d just met with in Moresby). Intrigued, I asked him to send it too me in an email. “Email?” he said, “I don’t have email.”

Now, I’m fully aware that 99.9% of Papua New Guineans are without email access, but sitting in one of the very few libraries in the country, which was full of students fully enjoying the power of online communication—via chat, Facebook, Skype, and Twitter, I was a little taken off guard for a second that the director of an NGO was still relying on PNG’s post. My volunteers were waiting outside, but momentarily content to hear be listening to a Ward Member from Karkar describe his beautiful as ples (home village). I was in the ideal position to help Exie find that last link he needed to get his proposal heard: It took under a minute to get his computer online, and then, even with a slow connection, just another five to set up an email account and help him send his first email. When I walked by Exie and his friends later, the three were still huddled around the open inbox, which had already begun to fill.

Now, I was certainly not alone at the University in my ability to set up an email account. I was just willing to listen to a man’s story and give a few minutes of my time. And I find that so much of development is just that. Yes, PNG like many developing countries is faced with a gross lack of technical resources and infrastructure, but often it is small things like linking someone to email that power the greatest change.

Most PNG citizens say they want development and are very willing to work for it given the platform to make their case heard. This platform is necessarily part material, but more emphasis should be given to individual and community empowerment and their engagement with outside organizations and resources. For a century, Australia has sent supplies—and administrators, plantation owners, and missionaries—to PNG, all with their own strings attached. AUSAID currently accounts for about a third of the GDP, of which many are resentful.

Aid as much of the world knows it needs redefinition and redirection. While donations of materials, technology, and medicine are certainly well used, ultimately it takes the education, training, and empowerment of PNG’s citizens to build sustainable pipelines of these resources and to manage and distribute their own valuable resources on domestic and international markets. This is not a new idea, and I will certainly not be the last to echo it. Many organizations, including our own, are already working towards this new paradigm with education and empowerment initiatives. I am hopeful that these initiatives will enable Papua New Guineans to make use of the resources other organizations and PNG locals have worked hard to establish here.

The most obvious of these resources is technology, perhaps the most visible part of the quickly expanding development platform in PNG, though many like Exie remain unconnected. Cell phones were first introduced to Karkar just last year (we were pleasantly surprised to find on our arrival last summer), but are now widely used. In the coming years, I expect PNG will see the same with the internet.

I’m now writing this post at Tabel Primary School on Karkar, the second primary school in the country to get internet. Just two months ago, eight brand new desktops arrived for a lab here accompanied by wireless access. The computers were paid for by a grant from the local district government and set up by a team of VSO volunteers. The wireless connection is apparently bagarup (broken) at the moment and I’ll have to take the boat to Madang to get access to upload this—nothing in the land of expect the unexpected ever goes without a glitch—but a replacement part is on the way. Already, these eight computers have revolutionized lesson planning for Tabel’s 11 teachers who, in the absence of a library, are ecstatic to finally have reading resources.

It is my hope that as our volunteers teach in schools, learn in communities, and work to help individuals here find ways to achieve their own aspirations, we will be contributing to the rapidly growing platform that is development in PNG.