Another world

A family welcomes us to the village (the baby peed on me as a special gesture). The children eat kau-kau, the sweet potato that formed the staple of the village's diet
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Stowing ourselves and our stuff in the back of a friend's pickup truck, we were whisked from Goroka to the village we were staying in a couple of miles outside Kainantu. Mountains flew past us. Landscape so green and vivid I had to blink. Villages of waving people, whose children bathed in sparkling streams silhouetted by the sun.

And then we arrived. Cars can only get as far as the edge of the village, so we walked through the fields with all our stuff, teetering between rows of sweet potatoes. The villagers waited for us on the other side.

Groups of women patted our legs, a welcoming gesture (we guessed) which added to the whole bizarre experience

The pastor's daughter's house, with us peeking out of the door. The shed was for showering (ie throwing a bucket of cold water over yourself)
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Some of the older ones described later how they remembered years ago seeing their first white face. Our meeting had some of that intense curiosity and cultural strangeness that first one must have had. The villagers surrounded us, some of them helping us with our stuff and others simply staring (we stared back - the curiosity was mutual). I had never felt so gangly and white.

Groups of women patted our legs, a welcoming gesture (we guessed) which added to the whole bizarre experience. We carried on walking through the fields until we reached the main part of the village. The rich green vegetation of the valley, surrounded by the rainforested mountainsides, reminded me of movies I'd seen about Vietnam. Heck, it felt like I was in a movie.

The loo. It looks way, way better than it smelled.
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And then they showed us our house.

The beautiful wicker creation on stilts had been built especially for us (well, specificially the guys - us girls were staying with the pastor's daughter). Which is kind of strange, considering we were there to build them a house. And the wicker house was as habitable and sustainable as anything we could build from wood.

But everyone was incredibly happy to see us, so we figured we were an encouragement at least. Although the cliche still rang true: in Papua New Guinea, we got way more than we gave.