May 11, 2005

Last Saturday we went in to Goroka for their annual Coffee Festival. It was a very interesting event. Various different groups from lots of tribes were there dressed up in their "traditional" wear and doing their dances, songs, chants and whatever. They all seemed to enjoy themselves, and in spite of all the activity and noise most of them seemed to be in their own world doing their own thing.

There is a certain duplicity to it, because they would not dress like that normally but they did slip back into "tribal" mode fairly easily. There are people who hold government jobs in Port Moresby, who have university educations, who have said that they purposely revert back to their native tribal dress and customs when they go visit their familes - just to be accepted and fit in. It's hard to imagine living in two worlds like that, but for these people it's perfectly natural because it has happened.

In some ways this country is trying to catch up with a modern world, and in other ways it is still clinging to and controlled by age old customs and traditions. And in the midst of it there are people living to some degree in each of those worlds. Some have sort of spanned the two, and some continue to live completely in the old.