Soccer: Finding a Team

It was a massive bummer to leave my beloved soccer team back home and I had very little hope for being able to find any women that played in Alotau at all.

To my surprise and delight, Soccer is the number one sport among women here.

And a side note to the die hards and tragics out there; you’ll be pleased to know that they call it ‘football’

My first day of work had come and I decided that I’d try and make conversation with the Driver when he came to pick me up for the first time. I mentioned that I was keen to find a team and he obviously made it his personal mission to find me one.

And find me a team he did!

Thirty minutes later he said they had been thinking of some options.

One hour later they presented the team options to me depending on where I was looking to live and each team had been contacted to ask if they would take me.

Amazing how efficiently some things can happen here when others, not so much…

 

Getting recruited right, left and centre

All of a sudden everyone wanted a piece of me.

They had no idea whether I could actually play or not, but that didn’t seem to matter.

On my first weekend, I went out to watch a game. Several people approached me to ask what my story was and the all-important question – did I have a team!

It got to the stage where when being introduced to people on the street I would be met with responses like:

 “Yes I know you, you were the one who was going to play for our soccer team, but now you’re playing with that other team, why are you playing with them? You should be playing with us.”

I had never seen that guy in my life by the way.

The Original Market Economy

We are very fortunate to have an excellent open air food market, where you can get some great produce. But again it largely comes down to luck of the draw with what’s available. This can be exciting, but it’s hard to plan what you’ll be eating and disappointing when the options are limited.

But above all, the market is a great experience. Fresh coconuts for around 30-60 toaea (approx. 15-30 cents Aussie) each… AMAZING. Given the complete Adelaide lack in this area, I was drinking a coconut a day for at least my first two weeks!

The market sells plenty of goodies; bananas (of ALL varieties, even those I didn’t know existed), coconuts old and young, an amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing variety of tropical fruits; paw paw, star fruit, sugar fruit (passion fruit?), ‘Lemons’ also known as grapefruit!. I will never, never get sick of eating delicious fresh tropical fruit everyday… and so cheaply!

While it can be difficult to get the types of veggies were accustomed to back home there are plenty of veggies on offer at the market; Taro, pumpkin, an array of root vegetables I can’t tell a part or even begin to try and name, hoardes of ‘greens’ of different varieties some of which look like they should be in the garden not on your plate but they are delish.

There’s also a range of seafood on offer – including giant fresh mudcrabs for around $5 Aussie dollars. Incredible.

And of course, there is the Buai…. Always the Buai….


 

Foraging for food in Papua New Guinea

Foraging for food has been a part of PNG life for thousands of years, and is a custom I have become quite familiar with… My foraging however takes place not in the mountainside, off a canoe or in the village, but in the aisles of Alotau’s various ‘supermarkets’.

Food shopping in Alotau is… different to say the least.

For an itty bitty town it seems to have more supermarkets per capita than anywhere I’ve ever been.

The problem is that no one supermarket stocks everything, so I find myself zigzagging amongst them non-stop just to get basic food items.

The stock is also completely unpredictable. Alotau relies heavily on imports which means that all of a sudden random products disappear from the shelves for long periods of time.

Finding fresh foods in the supermarkets can be really challenging. You can generally rely on being able to scrounge up some browned cabbage and some blackened carrots for extortionate prices but that’s not terribly inspiring day to day.

One of the supermarkets plays top 40 music really loud, so whenever I’m in there I feel like I’m shopping in some kind of really well lit PNG night club.

The stores are almost exclusively owned and run by Filipinos (there is quite a large Filipino community here) and a large percentage of the food available in the supermarkets is Filipino.

There is also a range of products that look deceivingly familiar to what we would be used to on the shelves back home (twisties, coke, etc) but they all sport the logo ‘PNG Made’ which means they taste completely different and are much worse for your health. There is also heaps of Malaysian knock offs (Tim Tams, Oreos) which means that a lot of these foods have the comfortable familiarity, mixed with mild disappointment.

Some things I have found about food shopping:

1)      Absolutely nowhere in this town can you buy fresh milk, yet you can buy lavish items like cocktail strainers and (if you’re willing to shell out 400kina) TEN KILOS of Mozzarella.

2)      The meat here makes a very compelling case for vegetarianism.

3)      No item is too small or too minor for a plastic bag.

The obsession with knowing where everyone lives….

In Australia, if you were to ask someone you just met where they live (I’m not talking what suburb, I’m talking geographic coordinates) they would think you were a creep and perhaps even report you to the local authorities.

Here, “where do you live?” is just about the first question people ask me.

I tried to play dumb about not knowing all the names of places and being a little bit vague to try and gloss over the question. But I’ve found that there is generally some well-meaning Papua New Guinean within earshot who tries to ‘help’ the poor foreigner out by saying my exact address. All of my “Ummm, ahhhh, I don’t know the name, we’re about to move anyway, it’s next to that place where those other people live” are interrupted with a ‘helpful’ “she lives at ***** Lodge, Unit 20.” Face palm.

People aren’t satisfied with a simple I live in this suburb, or I live at this guest house. No, they want exactly what residence, how much rent you pay for said residence and what your cooking facilities are like.

The below is a fairly standard type of conversation for me, but I certainly had a bit of a giggle at this. My boss was asking me about a friend of mine, this is how the conversation went:

“Your friend, where does he live?”

“Middle Town”

“Middle Town? Where in Middle Town?”

“Not sure”

Then with an extremely serious tone in his voice, he ACTUALLY said this, no joke:

“We must trace him”