It's either feast or famine in the supermarket and at the moment things are pretty good. I just spent 120 kina (about NZ$50) on essentials like olives, marmalade and Weetbix and could feel the eyes of the other people in the checkout boring into me: 'Why is this crazy white man spending a week's wages on this weird stuff?'
An hourly rate of three or four kina is about standard for local staff so that really is a week's pay. Spent on processed food that won't even make a proper meal.
My brief here is to help create a system for collecting oral histories and adding them to the library collection. An interview I did this week was the saddest by far. We had agreed to talk about extended families and how Melanesian society is founded on family and clan responsibilities and obligations. We got onto one's interactions with in-laws, which are strictly controlled by a complex set of unwritten but widely accepted rules. One's in-laws of the opposite sex are off limits: one cannot talk to them, look at them, share food with them, be alone with them. If you spot them in the street, you turn away. Any contact, even inadvertent, is disrespectful and deeply shaming; it will require a public apology and compensation with food or money. Mere words of apology are inadequate.
How sad that happy and fulfilling relationships with one's partner's parents and siblings, and with one's children's partners, are not allowed.
In Buka, and here we have the local Catholic diocesan offices, meeting rooms, training centre and...BYO pizzeria! How they get hold of olives, anchovies and blue cheese is a miracle.
A quick side trip to Rabaul where the availability of imported food is almost overwhelming. I wander round the supermarket in a daze: chocolate! Olive oil! Peppers! Cheese! Fresh meat! Lettuce! Carrots!
And for dinner an oily, garlicky, salty, bacony, pasta wonder
