Ahead to Page 4              Back to Page 2        Rossputin Home Page

As I mentioned, Anis' "father" was a chief in the village.  Why is "father" in quotes, you ask?  Well, it's because in PNG they have somewhat different definitions of certain familial relationships.  I figured this out when an 8-year old boy who had suddenly started guiding me around called one man his "father" and then a different man his "father" a few minutes later.  I learned that they call their actual father AND all his brothers "father."  The mother's brothers are called "uncle", and sisters of both parents are "aunt" or "auntie."  However, the logical next step if someone is your father is that his sons and daughters are your brothers and sisters, and thus they typically called their (male) cousins if on their father's side "brother" or sometime "brother-cousin". (They rarely talked about girls and I hardly ever heard the word sister, but I barely talked to any women as their English was not nearly as good.)

So, Anis' "father", likely his uncle, had a little compound of a few buildings around a dirt clearing.  In one building, 3 of his wives cooked and slept. It was very dark and sooty, but the woman sitting in it peeling potatoes was all smiles. (There were 4 until two weeks earlier when one died.)  In the next building, the uncle slept, sometimes with his children there, too.  And in the 3rd building, his 5th wife, the youngest, slept alone. 

Anis and his "father", the chief                                         Chief's wife in her kitchen/bedroom          

I walked around the chief's "garden" area, which looked like a field overgrown with vines, but that's because the main crop is sweet potatoes, growing underground.  After some talk about village life, we went to the village's  "cultural center" which was pretty much art and artifact shop for tourists.   Despite his relatively old age, the chief was still reproducing, based on the children who he said were his when I saw them in the cultural center.

Old Chief with young progeny

I bought a very nice bilum bag, which appears to be made of string but is really pounded and rolled tree bark, as well as a nice old classic Mt. Hagen axe, like the one on the two kina note. 

Nice old bilum bag*                Mt. Hagen axe (new)*

(These are not the ones I purchased.  My bilum bag is not as nice and my axe is nicer, but old and less colorful.)

The last part of my conversation with Anis, before we drove back to Mt. Hagen town was my asking him if he would paint my face in the style of his village, and the next day, much to the amusement of many locals, that's just what he did.  It took about 15 minutes of careful application of paint with small sticks.  I was lucky because some of the other groups were using white-out for the white coloring, which apparently is really hard to remove!

Putting on the Yellow                                                    The Pale Highlander

And met my PNG girlfriend...

And finally, I can't leave my Singsing story without a couple pictures that I love, of a group of Mt. Hagen children.  Their face paint and facial expressions are truly magical...

Mt. Hagen Children

Ahead to Page 4              Back to Page 2        Rossputin Home Page