Ruth Chen’s Blog

Of handicraft and food (02/03/2009 2130 GMT +10)

It’s pouring, finally. The feeling of having the
rain can almost be likened to having my first
bowl of bak chor mee after I touch down from
London. It’s been a really hot day here in Kapuna
today, and I was just wondering when it was going
to rain (it hasn’t rained in a couple of days).

So, since my last entry, I’ve been quite slack
with hospital stuff – nothing much has been
happening (I’m quite sure now that I’ve said
this, things will pick up tomorrow, as with all
things!). Patients are all getting better, which
is always good news. The weekend was a quiet one,
with no mothers wanting to pop. Since my last
entry though, I managed to do a couple more of
deliveries – multiparous mothers(had previous
pregnancies), hence quicker labours. I still
haven’t quite gotten the hang of it. After all,
babies all come out in their own unique way! I’m
guessing that it’ll probably take me 10 or 20
deliveries to get the hang of it? Ohwell. The
patients all come in waves – one minute all the
moms decide to pop, and all the kids in the same
village come down with pneumonia or bronchitis,
and the adults all come in with some sort of
nasty illness (read: malignancy. See previous
post). And then, they all get better at the same time.

Anyway, I’m not complaining. It’s nice to have
some time to do other things. Things like buying
wool from the local store to make friendship
bands for the girls as parting gifts (yes, I am
reminded of primary school days where we would do
countless of friendship bands after exams!). Or
learning how to make a bilum bag using the wool.
Bilum is the Pidgin word (Pidgin is one of the
main spoken languages in PNG, after English) for
string. So bilum bag = string bag. It’s a
traditional PNG custom for daughters to learn how
to make bilum from their mums, and the girls here
(by girls I mean the CHWs/nurses who work at
Kapuna Hospital) have all learnt it well.
Basically you take two strings of wool, roll it
together, and using the metal bit of an old
umbrella as your needle, you thread the wool in,
and start your bilum (quite a lot of complicated
stitches). I’m learning from the girls at the
moment. Every evening at half 5, we meet them
under the Old Dorm, and they have been teaching
us, bit by bit. It’s not as easy as it looks, so
we’re progressing quite slowly. The girls are
determined for us to finish a bilum bag before we
leave Kapuna, so they show us the stitching, and
after we do a bit, they take the bag to continue
the stitching! Yes, not the ideal way to learn.
But at least we’ll get a bag each! Heh. One of
the girls teaching us will be heading to Kikori
with us, so hopefully when we start on our new
bilum bag, she can correct the mistakes we make!
(Mum, you should probably youtube it! If by the
time I get home I can still remember how to do
it, I will definitely need to show you how to do
it! The wool here is about S$1.40/ 0.70 for
25grams. Not sure if that’s cheap/expensive, but
the girls say that wool here is much cheaper than
at Kikori, so I might just get more so that I
have something to occupy myself with.)

**

How time flies, its March already! Another 3
weeks here – its going to be hard to leave
Kapuna! At church on Sunday, we had communion
with sago bread and lime juice. And compared to
back home and in London, it’s interesting to see
how different ingredients can be used to signify
the very same thing, of Jesus Christ dying on the
cross for us to save us from our sinful ways.

The girls here really love singing so much – if
they really buy my laptop from me, I’ll leave all
my Christian songs in the laptop for them! I
think they’ll bring Kapuna down with all that singing and dancing!

**

The rest of the Sunday was spent hovering over
the fire stove again. We got the fire going
again, and we’ve established a system around here
– Grace does the fire, and I cook. This time, we
cooked the chicken that Dr Ovoi kindly sent over
from Kikori with 5-spice seasoning, maggi
seasoning + oyster sauce, and using the chicken
skin and a bit of ginger, I fried the rice. We
were smarter this time, and decided to cook the
rice using the microwave. When the power came on,
we put in the rice to cook straightaway. And for
the first time in PNG, our rice turned out just
right. (The last time we cooked pineapple rice,
the rice became really gunky – we tried to cook
rice over the stove, you see. And given the fact
that we normally use the rice cooker to cook
rice, we obviously failed miserably with cooking
rice using the stove, whatmore a fire stove.) At
one point, I had to use my headlight to see what
I was cooking because it got quite dark before
the power came on! So anyway, we’ve got warm
water to shower with today (which is good
considering how it’s pouring!) and that’s the
nice thing about starting the fire.

[Warning: I’m a foodie junkie, so more Food Talk below]
I think I can perish the thought of losing any
weight here in PNG. I’ve gotten accustomed to the
food here – bread with peanut butter for
breakfast, followed by weird lunching habits like
eating papaya, pineapple, guava or
coconut/sago/crackers/more bread, and then sweet
potato/pumpkin/tapioca/pitt pitt + beans and
greens + crabs/fish for dinner! I love the sweet
potatoes here.. they are actually quite sweet,
and make very yummy sweet potato porridge! Crabs
here are good too, and I don’t think I’ve ever
eaten so many crabs in a month before. The
coconuts are great too – the locals keep telling
me which ones are the good ones, but each time I
go back and break it, the meat is too hard. Then
I realized that their idea of a good coconut is
for scraping to make coconut cream. Not mine
though – I want young ones because I love the
soft succulent coconut meat! So I’ve learnt my
lesson to ask them, which one is young, instead
of which one is imau miki (= very good). Today, I
intended to return to the market to buy a coconut
after ward rounds at 9. When I came back at 1,
they were all gone! And they were all young
coconuts! Tsk. So that’s my coconut story.

Other than coconuts, papayas, guavas (the guavas
have decided that they don’t wanna bear any
fruits, so we’re running low on them), bananas
and pineapples, we finally had our soursop
(yummy!). They take awfully long to ripen, and at
the moment there are 2 soursops sitting in the
kitchen, and everyday I look at them and press
them. But too bad, not ripe yet. Sigh. Oh, and
eating papaya with lime is very yummy. Looks like
I’m over the gastroenteritis that I had with the papaya milk already!

**

I think it has been decided that we’ll be able to
go for patrol after all. Patrol is when
healthcare workers go out to a village, and carry
out clinics for child immunization, antenatal
clinics, TB checks, etc. Patrol will be leaving
Kapuna next Monday. And this one that’s going to
happen (we hope it does! In typical PNG fashion,
things can always change!) will be over 3-4 days.
Since the patrol is going towards Kikori, we’ll
get dropped off at Kikori after the patrol. So
I’m guessing by Friday next week, we should be in
Kikori. And we’ll spend 2 weekends there, before
heading back to Port Moresby on the 24th.

So yup. Hopefully the next time I blog, I can
tell you my first bilum bag is done. I shall go
back to doing the friendship bands now.