The other day Janice told me she didn’t like the faucet on our kitchen sink.
“Why?” I asked. “You don’t like getting sprayed every time you turn on the faucet?”
Sometimes I get out of work by downplaying whatever problem Janice is trying to get me to solve. This particular problem was that someone installed a faucet in our sink that had a little too much reach and so it came pretty close to the edge of the sink, right in front of your waist. If you rinsed a dish a little too aggressively, it splattered water all over the front of your wardrobe. Janice only knows how to rinse dishes aggressively so it’s a problem that presented itself several times a day. Admittedly it does got tiring having your children pointing at you and telling you it looks like you peed your pants but I wasn’t ready to fix it just yet.
“It sure beats carrying buckets of water around on your head, like some women in this world do everyday,” I said to Janice, trying to give her some perspective. That’s another trick I use to get out of work – giving extreme examples to make our problems seem so insignificant that they disappear altogether.
“It’s fine. I’ll just get you to wash the dishes,” Janice said.
“Whoa!” I said, “let’s calm down a little bit. I think I remember seeing some plumbing stuff in one of the stores. I’ll see what I can find.”
Sometimes you try so hard to avoid work that you just create more for yourself. I sensed I was getting close to that line.
The inventory in stores around here is as fluid as a liberal’s gender and so maybe the perfect faucet rolled into town since ours was installed. I decided to engage in an activity that I generously call “fixing” things.
But of course I waited until Saturday, which is a sacred day in the religion of “fixing” things. Followers of this religion mark the day by rushing to hardware stores where they give offerings, hoping that by doing so they find miraculous solutions to their problems. Plus, I decided looking for a sink would be a good cultural exercise so I walked down Wewak Hill (we live on top of Wewak Hill) to Tang Mow Hardware and Hardware Haus, two local hardware stores.
Along the way I noticed a strange phenomenon. People walking the other way kept glancing at my feet. After a while I become a little self conscious. I started glancing at my feet too. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked myself. “Why are people looking at my feet?”
I began studying other people’s feet and found some differences.
My feet are unusual around here in that they are white and soft. They have been wrapped in expensive suits of armor all their lives and, until recently, have only been let out of their protective barriers for a few months every year. Even then, they were covered in a slab of sunscreen so thick that they were left gasping for Vitamin D. This has resulted in my feet looking rather delicate and white, like porcelain.
So it makes sense that people would notice them. Melanin levels on the island are high enough that you’d only ever see feet as white as mine in a leper colony. Also, the local population has been barefoot since birth. Their five year old feet have fought and triumphed gloriously in battles that would horrify and cripple my adult feet. Sending my feet to Papua New Guinea has been like sending an optimistic, patriotic eighteen year old into the trenches of World War II. My feet are stumbling shell shocked over volcanic rock while Papua New Guinean feet are flicking burning cigarette butts from between their toes and muttering, “You’ll get used to it, kid, if you don’t die first.” Papua New Guineans are tough, man.
Take several weeks ago as an example.
Shortly after I had attained freedom to drive by on my own, my family and I decided to go on an outing to find a waterfall I’ve been hearing about. It wasn’t far away and this would be good cultural exposure and a chance to try out some shiny new Tok Pisin phrases. The kids could play in a creek and experiment with some shiny new tropical diseases. So we piled in a rusty Toyota Hilux and set off to parts unknown. Well, unknown to us at least. The locals seemed to know where it was. The problem was that they talk fast.
“Inap yu tok isi isi?” is a phrase I learned to use. It translates to something like, “Can you speak slowly?” Still, as they slowed down, I found that it wasn’t their speed that was my problem – it was my own ignorance. So I developed a method where I would ask a person for directions and then follow those directions up until the point where my comprehension had failed me. Then I would simply lean out the window and ask another bystander for directions. Ideally, the closer we got to the waterfall, the shorter the directions would get. It’s kind of like using sonar. If the sentences got longer, I was moving further away. If the sentences got shorter, I was getting closer. It’s not foolproof, but soon we found ourselves parked next to a house on the outskirts of Wewak.
It is a typical Papua New Guinean house, built up on stilts with woven bamboo, pit pit (sugar cane), or sago walls, much like a giant basket. I don’t what they used to build this particular house but imagine a house built with sugar cane. My children would gnaw it to the ground and I’d be left with nothing but a stack of dental bills so large I could thatch my roof with it. But instead of using dental bills to thatch roofs, Papua New Guineans use a narrow palm leaf and weave them between sticks then lay them on top of each other like rows of huge shingles. It’s effective and much cooler in the tropical sun than metal, though they must be replaced every few years.
Right behind this particular house were the tops of tall trees, indicating an abrupt change in elevation. We could hear the water crashing down somewhere behind the tree tops. Here the road had stopped and a little footpath meandered around the side of the house and abruptly fell down the cliff. No problem. I had a few backpacking trips under my belt so I was not deterred by a little footwork, or so I thought.
We had involuntarily picked up a few tour guides who wanted to see what would happen with this strange white family asking about falling water. As we got out of the truck and prepped for our walk, they began advising us to leave the children in the car. It was muddy, they said.
“Who cares about a little mud?” I asked Janice. Still, we decided I could go check out the condition of the trail to the waterfall and then, if it wasn’t that bad, I would come back and bring the rest of the family. I set off with the self appointed tour guide.
Four strides into the trail, and I realized I was in trouble. Adrenaline had taken control of my legs and was stretching them into an impossible widths, trying to outflank the muddy footpath and find solid ground on either side, all while whirring them around like my wife’s egg beater. Despite this, I couldn’t gain the six inches of elevation I needed to be on solid ground. Eventually I settled into a strained squat at the lowest point of the trail and looked up at my tour guide, who was standing there as if by levitation. He indicated I should take off my sandals. I gingerly reached into the slop below me, not wanting to set off another embarrassing display of stationary panic, and fished around to see if my sandals were down there. For all I knew, centrifugal force had flung them into the tree tops.
I found my sandals attached to my toes like they were the clinging to the last chopper out of Vietnam. I removed them and felt the cool earth ooze up between my bare, wiggling toes. It was like a turtle crawled out of it’s shell for the first time, and suddenly realized what a bad idea it was.
The earth tapered slowly downhill until the edge of the cliff where it plunged to depths known only by the foliage hiding it. As I began following my tour guide, I grew increasingly concerned, mostly because following him was completely involuntary. I could have turned around and run for the car and still my deliberate trajectory towards the precipice would have remain unchanged. Just before I plunged into the jungle below me, I bumped into a rock protruding from the brink of the trail and used several of my more expendable toes to anchor myself. I caught my breath, not realizing I was holding it the whole time. My tour guide was levitating again, waiting for me to catch up. Now I could see the rest of the trail which zigzagged down the embankment. Along the trail were several houses. How they stayed there I have no idea. Out of one of the houses a young boy appeared and stared at me with curiosity. Not satisfied with the distance between us, he came closer. I noted that he avoided the mud by walking on the volcanic chunks of rock that stuck out of the trail.
“Ah,” I thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I planted my barefoot on a rock and hoisted myself up before my other foot could ski down the trail by itself. I noted with some alarm that the volcanic rock I was perched on was made from razor blades. I quickly tried to removed the weight from my foot by lowering the rest of my body onto the rock like an overweight sparrow on an electric line, deftly disguising my grunts of pain as sighs of delight.
“Ooooaaa,” I said to my tour guide from my crouched position on the rock, “Maybe we’ll come back when the sun dries up the mud.” At least, that’s what I think I said. He nodded like he understood, and not only understood, but heartily approved. Neither one of us wanted him to carry me back up the trail and we both understood that if I went down the trail, I’d be in condition to come back up it on my own power. Here in Papua New Guinea you have two types of dead: Half dead, which ranges anywhere from having a headache to experiencing seizures, or Completely Dead, which as you may have guessed, is ranges from being in a coma to being completely, 100%, no pulse, old fashioned dead. If I went down that trail, I’d be “ded olgeta,” or completely dead.
Meanwhile the little boy was prancing around on the rocks in his front yard while grinning from ear to ear, impervious to the razor blades under his feet. Yes sir, his feet have seen a thing or two. He had thick, calloused, wide feet that were formed from years of barefoot adventures. Mine were made of porcelain, had no callouses, and were as well packaged and preserved as an Egyptian mummy. This meant that our feet didn’t look the same, which is probably why people were noticing them. It’s not just a race thing, it’s just that they don’t see feet like mine. It’s like me walking into WalMart and seeing somebody painted entirely blue. I’d probably steal a glance or two as I walked past. These are the kinds of things your mind thinks up when you’re walking to town.
I asked around at the store and eventually found some faucet fixtures. They all required three holes in my sink to be installed. I only had one hole in my sink and was unwilling to put more in it. This turned out to be somewhat hard to communicate but finally I crossed the right wires and the salesman’s eyes lit up. He turned to the storage racks behind him. The hardware store was in a big warehouse and there was four levels of metal storage racks holding pallets of knickknacks. To my surprise he grasped the metal rack and climbed rapidly up onto the third level, which was maybe twenty feet up, and rummaged around a pallet. He hollered in victory and shimmied back down again, holding a dusty, rusty faucet fixture. His flip-flops never left his feet. And as I requested, this fixture only required one hole. We were getting somewhere!
I asked how much it was. After much discussion behind the counter, it was determined that the faucet should cost $250 Kina, or about $70 USD. That was too much but after witnessing his act of heroism I felt a bit guilty for refusing his offer. I wasn’t even sure if it would fit. After our group collectively tortured two languages and played a game of charades, I determined they were letting me take the faucet home to try it, and if it worked, I could come back and pay for it later. I was pretty sure that’s what they were saying but I was still a bit nervous as I walked out the front door with the faucet. I’ve seen how they treat shoplifters.
I got home and found the faucet didn’t really fit that well. Janice was pretty sure she didn’t like it. So I brought it back to the hardware store.
I voiced my complaints but the salesman was pretty sure I didn’t mean it. He wanted me to buy it. I told him I didn’t want to. He asked if I’m sure because it’s such a pretty faucet. I told him no. After several rounds of this an idea suddenly hit me.
“Meri bilong mi no laikim dispela tap.” I said, which was my attempt at telling them my wife didn’t like the faucet.
Immediately all the surrounding men nodded as if that was an irresistible argument. The faucet was gladly received back into inventory without further bickering. Apparently having your wife not like something is a cross cultural phenomenon. If you’re wife doesn’t like it, there’s no use arguing.
That same afternoon I found a sink in a corner of the basement that fit perfectly, which rendered my faucet shopping pointless. Still, it’s good to have cultural experiences.
