We survived our bush orientation

Every new Samaritan family goes through a “Bush Orientation” which sounds like a formal thing, but it’s not. Basically it goes something like this: the family gets flown to the bush, kicked out of the plane, and temporarily adopted by a missionary family who lives in the village. A week or two later, the plane returns to find the family standing on the river bank covered in mosquito bites and with sticks in their hair, more grateful than ever to see a portal back to civilization.

What’s the point? Well, for one thing, it knocks some of the annoying optimism right out of new families so they are more tolerable for the rest of the team. But really, it’s to help new families understand where our patients are coming from and to see firsthand what life is like in the Sepik villages.

Families are meant to go early in their first term. We didn’t do ours until now. This was because every time we were scheduled to go, we found ourselves stricken with some kind of calamity. So we kept waiting until we were calamity-free because it’s stupid to voluntarily jump into more than one calamity at a time.

In September we finally managed to go to a place called Samban, right in the middle of the Sepik region. We went for a week and, all in all, it was enjoyable.

We were going to take two of our floatplanes out to the bush. The plan was to take a twenty minute flight to a place called Kambaramba, which was the closest body of water to Samban that we could land the planes on. Then we'd take a boat ride up the river from there to Samban.

That was until our departure was delayed because we got a call about a child who was bitten by a snake in Samban, the same place we were just preparing to visit. When your flight gets delayed because the plane is busy saving a child’s life, it’s not good taste to complain about it. So we didn’t. But it did make us a bit nervous about snakes.

After the child was brought back to Wewak and taken to the hospital, we refueled the plane and took off.

Obviously Adi, Elliot, and Oliver were excited to get a chance to fly on the planes. I was happy they got the chance because they never really get airplane rides. However, I did notice that when all my kids are loaded on an airplane I’ve worked on, it makes me mentally regurgitate everything I did to it just to double check I've done it right. Suddenly maintenance induced failures become a lot more personal.

But nothing bad happened. Once we landed in Kambaramba, we unloaded our children and boxes of stuff into a thirty foot motor canoe. We weren't going into the bush without supplies, after all.

Here in the Sepik they found that if they use fire and axes in a persuasive manner, they can convince a tree to pretend it's a canoe. Some canoes are more reluctant than others to be canoes and, in fact, still look a lot like floating trees, but this canoe was a work of art on a grand scale. You could've held track and field events inside the hull, it was so big. The tree it was carved from must have been hundreds of years old. We rode the canoe for about two hours, listening to the the two-stroke engine bleating like a goat being sat upon by an elephant. I really shouldn't complain since listening to a bleating two-stroke push a thirty foot canoe is still better than pushing the thirty foot canoe without it.

The river winds through the grass plains of the East Sepik. The grass on each side of the river can grow to be as tall as a man. The sun baked us as we sat unprotected in the canoe. Huge flocks of herons, ducks, and assorted waterfowl flapped out of the river just ahead of us, leading us up the river as if to announce our coming to the next flock. Here there's no such thing as hunting licenses, fishing licenses, bag limits, hunting seasons, or game wardens. You could harpoon a dolphin if you wanted and no one would care. I bought some sea turtle meat at the market and it was pretty good. Crocodiles are revered by some tribes but eaten by others. You just wander out into nature and are congratulated on any living thing you can kill. Here nature does outnumber (and, quite often, overpower) humans anyway, so it's a fair fight. This being the case, a couple men sat up front at the bow of the canoe with slingshots and volleyed dried balls of mud into the air every time a wave of birds passed overhead, but only with limited success. Occasionally they would forcibly change the trajectory of a panicked duck, but it only managed to motivate the duck to fly faster, no doubt breaking some of its own personal airspeed records.

Finally we reached the end of the river where Samban is located.

We stayed with Jesse and Kari Pryor, a missionary couple who’s been in PNG for two decades. They are a wealth of cultural information. Since Jesse's parents started a mission, a clinic, and a school in Samban, Jesse's childhood has the imprint of the Sepik culture permanently pressed into it. Later in life, Jesse and Kari took over the operations of the ministry his parents started. Jesse's a unique guy.

Above: Jesse and I wrestle a tractor axle in an attempt to replace an oil seal.

Jesse is the kind of person who will do something against the grain of accepted cultural expectation, like, say, just for example, belching in a restaurant. And, as he catches you staring uncomfortably at him from across the table, he will grin with delight at your discomfort, bask in it for a few moments, and then make a persuasive case to you that it's actually a better way to do things. And in five minutes you'll find yourself agreeing, wishing you too had the courage to belch in public, even just quietly, but still cringing at the thought. Jesse thinks differently and he has the courage to do so in public without apology. You don't have to wonder what Jesse thinks because Jesse will tell you. I wish I was more like that.

Kari is the kind of woman who puts up with such notions with grace and class, and who's not afraid to use an elbow to let her husband know when he's talked too much. Kari is also instrumental in managing the school. They were very generous hosts and let us stay in their guest house, which felt a bit like cheating because it had a proper toilet. It even offered a shower that didn't come from a cold pail of water. It definitely wasn't a bush house but I didn't find myself complaining about it.

Above: Samban school

Even though we weren't in a bush house, we were still in the bush. There's really not much that happens there, except for the occasional soccer game or tribal fight, which sometimes can be hard to tell apart. It's a shame when you wander into one expecting the other. Jesse was trying to change that by coaching a local soccer team so they could fare better in an upcoming tournament. But generally our week was without drama. The phrase “I’m booooored” echoed through the jungle like the mournful call of some exotic bird but by the end of the week, the kids had found some friends and were enjoying themselves.

Above: Elliot shows off his favorite sticks. He even found a bamboo shoot to store them in. He was very excited about taking them back to Wewak.

A woman named Susan (along with plenty of bystanders) taught us how to make “saksak,” a starch that they harvest from the Sago palm and is a main staple of their diet. They begin by finding a Sago palm and chopping it down. This can be challenging at times because, as we wandered through some of the villages strewn about in the middle of the spacious grassland, there wasn't a tree to be found.

"Where do they get the trees to eat?" I asked Kari.

"They float them down the river from other villages," she replied.

That's a lot of work to eat something that resembles unflavored gelatin. But it's better than starving to death, as I'm sure you'd agree. It seems that a single tree will feed a family for a month! So in that sense it's a very sensible thing to eat.

So anyway, once they have a tree lying down on the ground in front of them, they split the skin and peel it back on both sides exposing the soft inside of the tree. Then they use something like a pick axe to chip away the inside into little piles of mulch.

They carry the mulch to a washing station. A washing station is a framed contraption that holds up several layers of screens and tarps. You'll see them scattered along the riverbanks as you go up and down the river. They dump the mulch on the very top screen and pour water over it as someone squeezes and works the mulch. The water carries the starch down to another tarp where the heavier woody pulp and other waste is allowed to settle. The "good stuff" floats on top and is washed down to the next tarp where the water is allowed to dry, leaving only pasty starch. They scoop this up and prepare it in a variety of ways. The two most popular ways are fried and turned. Turned saksak looks like a blob of gelatin. Fried saksak looks and feels like a rubbery pancake.

After the saksak is processed, the woody pulp that is leftover is thrown on a pile beside the station. There's a certain kind of mushroom that grows on the piles and so they will add them to their meals along with the saksak.

It's fascinating but I would've still been more excited to see a McDonalds.

Later in the week, we went to a villager's house and ate a meal of saksak as their guests. As we were sitting there, I had an opportunity to study a bush house up close, which gave me a little clarity to a problem that had puzzled me since I arrived.

Sometimes, since we use our floatplanes to do medivacs in this area, we get calls about people falling out of their houses, which strikes us Westerners as quite a strange problem to have. It's hard to fall out of our houses, if not downright impossible. 

But it's not that way here. To avoid bugs, floods and to catch breezes (I'm assuming), they build their houses off the ground. Way off. Sometimes they build several stories, which makes us Westerners yawn because we imagine 2x4's and screws and zoning regulations. But these houses are built with trees and vines and being up two stories is no small thing, let me tell you - especially in an area of the world that gets a lot earthquakes.

To get to our meal, we had to climb a ladder up to the second story and then walk across an open area about ten feet wide. This area had a wall of pitpit (woven bamboo) on one side and a ten foot drop on the other. There was no railing. But I wasn't concerned about falling off the ledge, I was more concerned about falling through the floor. The floor was made from the springy skin of the Sago palm laid flat on the floor. Occasionally there was a gap in the floor which had nothing under it but a generous helping of air. I doubt the air would slow me down much before I hit the ground under it. This made walking across the floor an emotional investment. You had to step on a sapling and commit to it while it was still sinking, not knowing at which point - if ever - it was going to stop sinking. I was mentally calculating how much more I weighed than the average bushman as each sapling creaked and stretched. I didn't like the numbers. And of course, the children thought they were in a giant treehouse in which to romp and play. This caused a great deal of gasping and twitching from Janice and I. At any rate, I understand why people here fall out of their houses and was actually surprised it doesn't happen more.

Once we were in the dining area, which had a fire pit built into the second story floor, we all sat cross legged on the floor and ate our meal. After seeing the dirty pond water they use to wash the saksak, you don't decide to eat it without a certain amount of fear and trembling. Praying before a meal takes on a new urgency. But the mushrooms were delicious and it was the best saksak I had ever had. Adi actually asked for seconds.

Above: Turned balls of saksak

As we sat and talked to our hostess, we found out that cultural decay isn't just a Western phenomenon. It's happening in the bush too, the symptoms are just a little different.

"Before a man gets married, he needs to build a house," she said. "Men used to build strong, straight houses. Now they just build crooked ones that fall down easily. They are getting lazy."

Later in the week I met two guys carrying a homemade shotgun and was too intrigued by the trigger mechanism (which was made out of a Stanley staple gun) to be nervous. Later I was told they were probably up to no good although we never heard any reports of anyone being shot, so they must've passed through without incident.

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting the child who was bitten by the snake earlier in the week - the one that delayed our flight. His name was Osman (or “Ozzie”). He had recovered and was home again in the village. He lived just a couple houses over from where we were staying and so we went and hung out with his family one afternoon. There was nothing else to do, after all. He eagerly showed us the prick marks in his foot where the snake had bitten him. His cousin was hanging out in the shade, listening to Ozzie’s solar audio bible.

Above: Hanging out with Ozzie's family. Ozzie is right beside Janice.

Now, we give solar audio Bibles to all our patients and that's because this is an oral culture, meaning everything is communicated through hearing and speaking, not reading. That's especially true in the bush villages. And so giving people a Bible they can read isn't nearly as effective as giving them a Bible they can hear. And since sunlight is far more abundant than electricity in the bush, a solar powered device makes a lot of practical sense.

Ozzie's mother came over, shook our hands, and thanked me for being a pilot. I explained I wasn’t a pilot but that instead, I fixed airplanes after pilots broke them. She seemed a little letdown (a common reaction when locals find out I’m not a pilot) but still gave us a heap of produce from her garden to show her appreciation.

Standing there in the shade of the house I was struck by how different this scene would be if the airplane wasn't flying that day. At this exact moment, I would be standing right in the middle of a "haus krai", a traditional PNG funeral. Mourning and wailing would be heard throughout the village. Relatives would be coming in from all corners of the jungle. Instead, a family was reunited and God’s word was being heard in the cool shade of the palm trees. It was just another normal afternoon.

We fly people out when there's no other option. Often times there are other options, thanks to places like Samban where the Pryors run a clinic. The clinic has a birthing clinic (called a "Haus Karim" in Tok Pisin), two examination rooms, a small store of medicines, and a small veranda where patients are triaged. They will see a hundred people a day at times. There's a couple there that helps run the clinic; Eva (the husband) and Wona (the wife), both nurses. Both of them were born in the Gulf Province (on the south side of PNG) and got medical training through a missionary hospital there. Both are believers and eventually found their way to Samban where they help deliver babies, stitch appendages, triage the patients in an orderly and efficient way (a rare phenomenon in PNG), deliver vaccinations, diagnose TB cases, and sometimes find themselves performing medical procedures that they admit may be a bit above their certification level (I've heard some airplane mechanics admit the same thing). But that's the reality of working in the middle of nowhere. When someone is dying, you try your best. And Samban has clearly been successful at what they're doing. Samban is the best clinic in many miles. Eva credits God and coffee. Lots of coffee. "Black," he says, "Black and strong. Nothing else is worth my time."

Now the internet has its downsides but one of the upsides is that you can reach across thousands of miles and directly help missionaries out there in the thick of it. If you wish to be a part of what Jesse and Kari Pryor are doing in Samban with the clinic, school, and community development programs they're running, click here to do so.

While we were there talking on the front porch, customers were already queuing up outside the fence for morning office visits. Then we spotted two men carrying a stretcher fabricated out of saplings lashed with vines. An elderly lady was lying on it with her leg wrapped in bandages.

"Wow," I said, "Look at that."

"Yea," Eva says, "Sometimes people will carry patients for several days to get here."

That Sunday we went to a church in the village. The churches are built like the houses. I sat nervously against a post, figuring it was the strongest part of the church. A group of women were enthusiastically jumping up and down and singing, God bless 'em. It was like trying to have church on a trampoline. I would watch the waves travel along the width of the floor until they reached where I was sitting, causing my head to bump the post behind me in a rhythmic way. Even the most stoic church member was involuntarily bobbing along. I was sure that any second the floor would split open and swallow people up. It would be very Biblical but I wanted no part of it.

Above: Walking to church on Sunday morning.

That didn't happen. Afterwards everyone was very friendly and welcoming, probably because they thought I was a pilot. At some point I had stopped trying to correct them.

Shortly after we left, Susan, the lady who was teaching us to make saksak, was bitten by a death adder. We flew her to the hospital where she received anti-venom and was discharged only a day later. If people get anti-venom in time, they can turn around in a matter of hours. More often then not, our floatplanes are the only link between life and death here in the Sepik. And that’s not being dramatic.

That's why it drives me crazy when I can't fix them fast enough.

Seriously, If you're an aircraft mechanic out there looking for something stressful and different, boy do I have a job for you. Contact me right away and I'll give you the brochure.

Anyway, the airplane returned that Tuesday and found us standing in a canoe with sticks in our hair and bug bites on our legs. We were happy to see our portal back to civilization!