Hands and Feet

All around me, the Highlands town of Mendi goes about its business, unaware of my attempts to get into the van. Women wearing colorful laplaps around their waists head to market balancing baskets on their heads. Men in holey shorts loiter on the street corners, their black skin looking gray from the dust of the streets. With my eyes, I follow the main road of town as it skirts the airstrip and heads off into the murky distance towards Hagen. In even the smallest of towns, there’s always an airstrip. Papua New Guinea’s notorious violence forces everyone with money to fly. But I haven’t any money. At least, not any I’d want to waste on an airplane flight to travel just 60 kilometers. And anyhow, the Koogka and Opoka are at war with each other, not me. I must convince myself that their fighting is none of my business.

Willy still waits, determined to prevent me from going. I again try to get in the van and he blocks me with his hand. “It is very dangerous,” he says, as if I’ve missed the point.

But what Willy doesn’t know is that my three months in Papua New Guinea have made me incapable of being astonished by danger. Rather, I’m smiling. Hands and feet on the road. The other people waiting in the pmv, smile back because violence-as long as it’s happening to someone else-is an hysterical subject for most P.N.G. nationals. Humor is how they cope, and the sheer volume of violence stories complete with bizarre twists-someone getting their ears cut off during a robbery, say-tests one’s capacity to believe. But you must believe, because suddenly Mr. Galo walks down the road without any ears! And everyone knows why.

At first it threw me that the people in Papua New Guinea talked about violence like the weather. I started to think that P.N.G. suffered from a bad case of machismo, was in fact a country of compulsive liars, until I realized that everyone had so many stories to tell that they constantly tried to out’do each other. An assortment of scars could always substantiate even their most outrageous tales, and you could never go wrong if, during a conversation, you brought up the most trustworthy topic: the never ending matter of weapons, security guards, and surveillance equipment. Instead of an “Arts and Living” section in its nationwide paper, this was a country with a “Security Review” section devoted exclusively to the issues of safety and defense.

I want to tell Willy now that according to the laws of probability, I’m not due for another robbery or assault for at least a few weeks. I’ve already been chased and attacked in Port Moresby. (A violence story I’ve been shy to tell because I broke away from the “rascals” with nothing stolen and no noteworthy injury.) I have also had my wallet stolen from me at knife point with some $100 dollars inside, which is barely worth mentioning at all except to say that surely my odds are slightly better in the case of armed robbery.

But I sense that none of this would matter to Willy. He is determined not to let me go. He keeps running a smooth black hand up to pat his hair, trying to delay me for as long as he can so my seat will be taken. And because I’m used to being delayed, am conscious of being a strange sort of phenomenon as a lone white woman traveling around for no discernible reason, I’m patient with him. I ask again, calmly, if I can get into the van.

Willy clucks his tongue. “But, Miss, it is very bad. You are tourist, too. Not good. They will see you.” I can’t help thinking that Willy wants them to see me. Having a violence story to tell about a white woman caught in a Highlands battle could be the stuff of legend. Anyone seeing Willy could ask him for that juicy tale about a young American woman falling prey to warring tribes. Violence stories involving tourists are notorious-which probably explains why tourism is essentially nonexistent in P.N.G.

I remember one story in particular. The Swiss Couple story. An Australian expatriate eagerly shared it with me as I was first arriving in P.N.G.:

A man and woman from Switzerland decide to come to Papua New Guinea to hike the famous Kokoda Trail through the jungle. They’re newlyweds, and this is their dream, hiking the very trail the Japanese made during World War II to try to defeat Australia’s stronghold in the Pacific. They almost make it across. Almost. It’s one hell of a trail. Downpours, heat, leeches. Toward the end, they camp out a bit too late into the morning and some “rascals”-the all’encompassing word for thieves and social misfits-find them. They each wake up to a gun in their face. Of course, they’re robbedÉ

At this point, my Australian storyteller gasped and shook his head. “One of ‘em was raped. Guess which one?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Guess!”

I said I’d rather not guess.

“The man! The bloke was raped!”

I don’t know why, but the tale of the Swiss couple stays with me. Perhaps because of the Australian man’s reaction, his obvious shock that, with a young Swiss woman right there, they had the audacity to rape the man instead. I was reluctant to admit that I rather liked the fact that P.N.G. violence, at any rate, doesn’t discriminate.

Willy is telling me again that it is not the place for a white woman inside this pmv. Where is my husband? I’m alone? But the Koogka and Opoka are at war with each other, he wants me to know. The route we are taking, the only road there is, takes us through the fighting.

What Willy doesn’t realize is that I’ve been sick for a week, a fact which leaves me both stubborn and strangely irrational. I will get in the van. I will get to Mt. Hagen, to a certain guest house run by an Australian man who knows how to make chips. I swear to God, all I care about is having a big plate of french fries with ketchup. I’m dizzy, my head pounds, I can’t turn my neck without excruciating pain, yet my appetite is mercifully intact. I will risk my life for those chips.

As a joke, I pull out the foot’and’a’half long bush knife from my daypack and show it to Willy. “I’m armed,” I say.

Which reminds me that I actually bought the thing with the intention of being armed. Owning and wielding a bush knife is an extraordinary thing: suddenly, quite unexpectedly, I feel a part of the P.N.G. fraternity of self’defense. Strangely, no one regards it as surprising that a young white woman should walk around the towns and villages of their country with a large bush knife sticking out of her daypack.

Willy, I see, is on the verge of relenting. He fingers the dirty blade and hands it back.

“Okay, yes,” he says. “Get in.” And because I do start to get in, he adds: “Oh...they are fighting, Miss.”