The Sort of Dilemma not worth Losing Sleep Over

I have my own chef. More specifically, the Lodge that has been my home for the last three months has its own chef, but seeing as I’m the only guest on any given night … I have my own chef. Almost every night we play out our routine skit whereby I examine the menu and decide on one of the twenty different options (in reality nineteen as I don’t eat the prawns anymore), so Tim can move off to the kitchen and bang about for about an hour, then return with a semi-decent meal, and stand in the corner watching me eat. After dinner he’ll quickly gather the dishes to wash-up, and then return to the dining hall to sit and ‘tell stories’ (chat) with the guests (me). But his English isn’t brilliant, neither is my pidgin, and I’ve the suspicion that even if there were no language barriers the conversation would still be prosaic as we really don’t have much in common, so most nights we sit in silence – absorbing whatever shit happens to be showing on EM TV. I’d rather escape to go and read or write, but I feel somewhat obliged to stay and ‘tell stories’ (i.e. sit in silent sufferance through horribly out of date re-runs of ICC Cricket World ‘… and coming up next, Pakistan Cricket Coach Bob Woolmer supports his team following the dramatic forfeit of the first test at Lords…’), as Tim is bound by the lack of transport to also have to stay at the lodge overnight. So if I leave for my room, poor Tim is stuck down there alone, probably understanding neither the content nor the irony in what he is watching (see postscript).

Truth-be-told, I’d much rather be cooking for myself, if for no other reason than to lower the calorie count of my evening meal below the low ten-thousands it currently sits at. But as Tim is on a ‘no work no pay’ type deal, without me he’d be pretty much unemployed. I’d feel awful about cutting off his income. So, as I watch my waste slowly expanding – now resembling more of a proper middle-aged gut than the bulbous manifestation of beer that was my university fat – I’m taking small satisfaction out of being a ‘good person’, which is something I’ve always aspired to.

I find it hard to grasp the concept that my evening meals alone (costing around $12 - $17 Australian a night) are enough to pay the salary of one whole person, especially when (I assume), the price of the nightly meal must cover foodstuffs and utilities as well. It’s one of those bizarre quirks of the international market… my volunteer allowance – wholly insufficient to sustain even the most basic life in Australia – can be worth so much here. The truly sad part of the equation is that things like electrical goods, travel and petrol, cost as much here as they do in back home, so most of the local workforce (and these are the ones lucky enough to have work – there are plenty who don’t) are more or less trapped in cyclical poverty.

This isn’t to say they are ‘poor’ as such. There is an abundance of food and water, and – from what I’ve observed – medical supplies are affordable. And there is a social richness in extended family support that far exceeds anything we have at home. But it’s hard to see where the next generation of technological innovators is going to come from when things we’d take for granted, like TVs, are so completely unaffordable… let alone personal computers.

Where this leaves me I’m unsure. I’ll keep doing my Town Planning job to the best of my abilities and hope that some good can come out of it, and I’ll keep on playing my part in the nightly meal routine (until my permanent accommodation is finished, whenever that may be) in order to provide Tim a stable income. But the longer I’m here, the more I realise how far away true advancement really is. Strangely though, I’m really not losing any sleep over it. The problems of PNG belong no more to me than they do anyone else, and I don’t see the population of the western world rushing over to sort things out. And besides this, the people themselves don’t seem too concerned, so why should I be? At the end of the day I’ll do the job I’ve come over here to do and will hopefully be satisfied with the result.

And if I’m not satisfied with the result… then I’ll look down at the protrusion that used to be my rippling six pack (ha!) as a reminder that, if nothing else, I created a job for one whole person for three whole months. There’s some satisfaction in that, after all.

Hope you are well wherever you are,

JRB

(Postscript: I’m probably being a little harsh on poor Tim here. He is actually a decent bloke and a decent chef, and without him I’d have even less conversation in my life than I currently do. But... well, you know when you’re flatting how you go through the Flatmate Cycle? When the initial honeymoon ends and you start to get irritated at your flatmates character traits, then you start projecting the negative shit happening to you onto your flatmates because they are the nearest permanent marker in your life? Well, although my chef isn’t my flatmate in a traditional sense, he’s still suffering through my ‘negative projection’ phase. The good news for both of us is that I generally grow out of this phase and into the ‘acceptance of situation for what it is’ phase relatively quickly (it’s a lot like the adaptation ‘U Curve’, which will make sense only to my volunteering compatriots reading), so he shouldn’t suffer my angst for too much longer. I know it probably sounds all a little bit childish, but what can you do? I’ve got a lot of time on my hands to be thinking about this sort of thing at the moment).