friends

a bit gutted that this is my only pic of loata - she was like some kind of sweet angel - donan's baby sister.

 

cleo was one of my favourite things about tabubil. she never liked me though! I would see her mornings dropping J off at pre-school.  here she is running away from me again!

litty looked after donan after school, so we saw alot of her. here we are watching a friend play in the women's football finals. (she won!)

max and elizabeth, 2 doors down.

maxine moved in and put us all to shame with her garden. 

 janu adored donan

going to church with wonderful glenda from next door. 

7 kona

This bridge was partly washed away, but people still walked across it to ‘seven kona’ (seven corners). It was a long way to town (for me!) but people walked it everyday to work, even in the regular deluges.  Amazing to see (in the pic above) where the 2 rivers met, one quite clear until it meets the one full of sludge and silt from the mine.  Amazingly, helicopters used to fly under this bridge, but the silt has accumulated to such an extent that the river is only a few metres below the bridge.  

with no cars able to get across, people carried any materials needed for building across. ouch. 

betel tabu long tabubil - you weren't allowed to chew betel nut in tabubil town (a sackable offence!) but there were still colourful splats here and there. I should have tried some. 

some things were larger than life: these tyres were higher than 2 people standing on each others' shoulders.

We all wished we could swim with these gorgeous boys, but a preggy white lady was interesting enough without taking her clothes off!  

Adrian's world

lovely colleagues Tom & John, in the salubrious portacabin that devoured hours of Adrian's time

Adrian spent an afternoon visiting the huge, huge, Ok Tedi mine.

 

b bal

rainy day fun

home

Our house in Tabubil was new – a strange experience for us!  We filled it with hand-me-downs from other kids in town, cardboard box craft and all sorts of stones and rocks collected from exploring outside.  We lived right on the main road, just at the point where the mine trucks would change gear heading up the hill, at 4am!  Every window was over looked from the street, but it’s amazing what you can get used to (sort of). 

Lena came and cleaned the house beautifully once a week. She worked magic and I loved getting to know her even a little. She has 3 kids, one who came with her sometimes. Edna sat quietly, probably thinking how boring our house was, compared to where she lived, which was much noisier with kids and families all around. 

mini ok tedi

janu and his good mate from across the road, emanuel. This must have been one of the first times they played - you can hear E say 'what's his name again?!' He was so lovely, and wanted to be a engineer when he grows up. He's lived in Tabubil pretty much his whole life. 

We made these gardens when we arrived, and I collected lots of marigold seed from flowers all around town. I couldn’t think of any reason why not to fill each and every bed full of them. Some seeds pilched from seed heads in hobarts botanic gardens also flowered. Interestingly, in tas they were tall and willowy, and when growing in hot humid PNG, they were short and squat. great how they grew from seed this high in just a month or 2 - the beds were bare in the videos above! 

puk puk class

warrior, again

luckily we had vines growing all around the house - ample costume for playing warriors after pre school. The pringle packet is his war drum. doesn't he look mean? 

sports day!

Amazing fun watching Janu's first school sports day. In his running race, watch for the boy who - out of nowhere - leaps onto the track and heads straight for Janu! 

 it was the kapuls vs kumuls (I forget which animals they are!)

janu's good friend Donan, who also lived at the end of our street. 

I had told Adrian about what time the carnival started, and he managed to sneak away from work and arrived exactly the time Janu's one race of the day started.  Look at that proud face!