Its been over 5 months since I left Port Moresby. Before leaving, I remember something said to me by a friend as a parting remark “ Su, hope you are able to retain what the island life has taught you”. This is after an hour long conversation of what personal evolution we have felt after living in a city like POM. I didn’t think that within 5 months of moving back to the city life, I would be grappling with holding on to my self from what I was back then. Each day I stare out of my city window, imagining myself back in my island home, one with nature, one with myself. It wasn’t that it was easy, it was very tough, living in conditions like those. But I had done it before and I knew I could manage it this time around too.Its the most jostling of times in ones life which brings out the best in them. So it did for me. So before I start forgetting what it was to live in PNG, I started documenting some incidents as I remember them. Here is one incident I had written about at the time that it happened, during a brief timespan of 1-2 weeks when the pandemic seemed to have receded.
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20th July 2020,Thursday- Papua New Guinea
The last week has been an eventful one. Just when the whole world struggles to grapple with a pandemic, my city decides things need to be spiced up a bit.
The school week started with a bang!! And literally so. Finally after months of serving the cubs and Mister, initially under lock down and later under various permutations and combinations of them being at home , they are all packed off to their respective schools/office, something I was half heartedly looking forward to. I was happy to finally have some ‘me time’ yet knew that it would feel a bit lonely too. But as is the fun of going to school in PNG, schools start their terms mid-week. So the kids looks forward to the weekend after a flurry of fresh activity.Anyways the night before , while we ready ourselves and our bags for school and discuss uniforms/ lunch boxes, somewhere out of the blue we start hearing gun shots. We come out into our balconies and within a radius of 1 km hear people rioting and then more gun shots. This was 7pm in the evening. We indulged in the customary video sharing with family and friends who find these situations exotic. The ruckus went on till noon next day, while no press release had yet revealed the ‘big’ reason why it happened.We just knew that members of 2 different tribes were initially the warring Parties and then a 3rd joined in after spectator-ing for a bit. The police weren’t far behind. The’ Black lives matter’ agendas didn’t really make it to my city so my curiosity was caught between it being a case of honour killing or domestic violence or witchcraftery. The reason for almost 20 hours of ruckus between what sounded like atleast 100-150 people……….as finally revealed …………..was………..wait for it…………legendary……….a case of theft………of a mobile phone……….by a member of one tribe from another. The experience of this event was nothing short of witnessing the Mahabharata yudh.Well we had a similar vantage point as that of Dhritarashtra and Vidur, with swirls of dust rising up from the war zone visible from our building and both wars being fought in the name of honour. 😆
Anyways this was just the beginning of the promising school week. My 5 year old who usually sees a drop in immunity every 1st week of school after holidays decides that she likes school and keeps her health in check. 4 more corona cases appear in the city with 1 fatality. Nothing much changes in the city by way of public health policies. But the week decides to get more interesting and builds to a crescendo.
On Friday after an argument with my dad on phone over why he thinks I should not go to the nursery to get new plants as I could catch covid, something for which i couldn’t come up with a more effective argument beyond a ‘ Pappa, but Mann kar raha hai”(Father,I feel like doing it), karma for arguing with the parent comes knocking at my door. My house starts shaking! Within seconds my building is swaying and i realise that I am in the midst of an earthquake, and a decently massive one. I gather my keys, phone and passports (the soaked almonds work for my presence of mind🤔) , take the flight of stairs down to the outside of the building. Yup that was definitely a big one . 7.3 on the Richter scale they told us later.
Now I was only glad , that the ruckus outside and the gun shots had stopped well in time to give the earthquake some limelight, or I would have been fearing for my life both inside and outside the building. Talk about Catch 22s!
Well by now the “Mann kar raha hai” changed to “ maybe my last few plant purchases in this lifetime, go for it Su,Jee le apni zindagi” so I brought home some new plant babies.
The Earthquake left an initial Tsunami warning which was later withdrawn, but it did leave a little damage to the city buildings with gaps in tile spacings, aircon ducts falling off , bottles and photographs falling off desks, etc etc. But nothing too significant!
My darling daughter comes home to tell me that when the earth quake happened the music teacher made the kids lie down on the classroom floor. I wonder how in an earthquake prone city teachers don’t remember to take the kids out in the open. But thats probably because they don’t eat badam (almonds)🤔🤣
In a nut shell ,what started with a bang ,ended with a jolt!
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For many months after this we kept feeling tremors (mostly caused by the cars moving about and into our building), but it would be enough to get our instincts up with us ready to bolt.Over the next couple of weeks following these incidents , our kids were trained as to how to react in the situation of earth quakes. My elder one was instructed to pick his sister, the nearest phone available, our easily accessible passports , toothbrushes if possible ( my neighbour inspired me to add this , nobody wants to be caught with bad breath the next day after an earth quake😉) and go down the flight of stairs. This was apart from the otherwise training the kids recieved on a regular basis. My kids knew better then to roll down the car windows when we left our building. car jackings at gun point was a common possibility in Port Moresby, my husband and a few colleagues were chased at the golf course by gun bearing thugs, one of them misfired his gun in frustration at not being able to catch up with his victims ( my husband practices his chase run every day😆). This incident of course was relayed to me many weeks after its occurrence, as I was still dealing with the frequent visits of snakes to our building. This may sound very overwhelming to my readers, Port moresby may sound like a very dangerous city to live in. But this is what I have learnt through my experiences there. You don’t know whats going to happen tommorow, live a good life today , live a good moment today, help who you can, ask for help when in doubt. Live and love by instinct. Live and try to flourish in the space you are provided. I stopped to exist in any other experiences that I had previously been living*. live the experiences with people physically around you, your neighbours, your helpers, your colleagues, your children , your spouses, your parents, because that’s the most you would get sometimes, and that’s quite a lot. Make the best of what you have in front of you today.Pick yourself a little by little when you are beaten down, even if that’s the most you have done on that day. For you don’t know when you may be caught in the midst of a riot or an earthquake or a pandemic if not all 3 🤪
*currently I may be holding on to my island city, but that’s in gratitude for all the personal evolution I underwent there. I am very much present and flourishing in the city and moments in which I reside in today.
ExpressionsBySu 