If looks could kill

Anyway you look at it, I was a bad student; my commitment was atrocious, my marks terrible, my conduct inappropriate and my attendance either tardy or non-existent.  By the time final year had rolled around, there was little to save me from the end of a dole queue.  But after a stern chat from one of my more conscientious lecturers (at the pub, as I recall) I was left with no allusions about my future, “Lift my game, step-up my commitment, or I was out”.

The message must have been delivered with considerable fire and brimstone as it cut through my inebriation sufficiently that upon sobering up, I tidied-up my act and set about trying to catch-up on years of missed learning.  At about the time my commitment started to kick-in, I recall having to work with a group of my fellow students to research and deliver an instructive presentation on the role of body language in practitioner-patient communication. 

I remember finding it surprising at the time that this concept of non-verbal communication embodied a significant breadth of scientific sociological and anthropological research, and some kind of academic curiosity deep within my semi-functioning brain was momentarily tweaked.  Still, old habits die hard, and I took to the assignment with the derision deserved of any un-graded elective.  Together with my fellow indifferents, I delivered a puerile, immature but amusing role play about young, drunken students trying to pick-up in a bar (fertile ground for yer old mate, Donkey, as you can imagine … aside from the picking-up part). 

Perhaps you’re thinking that this was yet another squandered opportunity for me to learn something new and to get serious about my studies.  But let’s face it, it wasn’t as though being able to read and understand body language was ever going to save my life, right?

True enough, I’d say … that is if I had knuckled-down and studied my nuts off, in which case I would have been making mega-squillions right now cutting the toenails of bored millionairesses like all my former peers, and would never have needed to understand body language to make my way in the world.  Given the choice, I would happily succumb to deafness induced by the substantially more boisterous language of money, rather than having to strain every fibre of my impoverished being to catch the allusive whisper of the body. 

The bitter irony is that because of my academic laxity, I was denied the moneyed path, and instead ‘chose’ the more modest pursuit of saving the world, within which one’s success, and indeed one’s very survival can at times rely on one’s ability to recognise and respond appropriately to people’s non-verbal communication.  If only I’d studied!

Anyone who’s ever travelled to a new country will know how it feels to have accidentally committed some cultural faux pas such as shaking hands, walking through the wrong doorway, helping oneself to a meal reserved for someone more important, grabbing your host’s wife on the arse and so-on.  More often than not, these innocent mistakes are taken for what they are, and usually the most adverse outcome is simply a sense of shared embarrassment amongst all parties.

But here in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I’m discovering that recognising and responding appropriately to the signs and signals of people’s bodies, facial expressions and actions is my only defence against finding myself as the main ingredient in a pot of Highlands Donkey Stew.  In particular, one thing I have learned pretty quickly, and which is a significant departure from other Melanesian cultures, is that looking a stranger directly in the eye is not a chance to exchange a friendly smile, but rather a challenge which can generate an extreme response.

Jared Diamond, in his laborious Guns, germs and steel, explains that when highlander strangers meet, a lengthy discussion ensues, sometimes lasting many hours, during which the strangers attempt to identify whether they are related to, or know anyone in common, simply in an effort to avoid having to try to murder each other.  So ingrained in their culture is the mistrust of strangers and non-kin, that they will kill out of obligation, rather than to simply pass each other by.

What Diamond failed to cite is that their patience and ability to engage in such detailed and lengthy familial exploration are significantly diminished by the presence of two unrelated factors, both of which are found commonly in the highlands these days.

The first is rugby league.  Papua New Guineans are mad for it.  During the recent State of Origin match between Queensland and New South Wales, every woman, man and child in the country did whatever they could to get to watch the game on TV.  In the villages of the eastern highlands, satellite TVs aren’t that easy to come by, so that means getting to the nearest big town before the game.  Goroka is one such town, but as the transports only come to town in the morning, literally hundreds of thousands of highlanders had descended upon the two-block municipality by mid-morning, to watch a game that was not due to start until 6pm.

All day long, scores of people thronged the pavements in large, protective family groups.  Many of the men and women had painted their faces, admittedly in either NSW-blue or QLD-maroon, but utilising traditional, highlands war-paint designs which further increased their menace.

The other factor set to strain inter-clan tolerance in modern-day Papua New Guinea highlands is alcohol, and with nothing better to do for eight hours in the lead-up to the game, SP beer was flowing out of the bars and bottle shops of Goroka like a monolithic highlands god suffering from chronic, supernatural incontinence.

As I wandered through town on my way home that afternoon, I glanced at the menacing, slurring, war-painted faces of the highlands warriors crowding around me, and despite my incomprehension, I felt both fear, and the stirring of something unfamiliar in the pit of my brain.  I meandered cautiously through the crowds and noticed that groups of angry men were moving towards me.  Suddenly, as if a chamber opened in my mind to release latent information from the distant past, I became acutely aware that these hard stares and menacing faces were telling me something.  They were telling me that there was no need to sit and work out who we both might know, because clearly I wasn’t related to any of them … and they were telling me without words, but in no uncertain terms, to get the hell out of there.

I hurried through the crowd and made it home just before the sun went down … just before the game started … and just before the highlanders started burning everything in town. 

So to my stuck-up alma mater I say, “Screw you and your exams, your supplementary exams and your withdrawal of enrolment notices”, it looks like ol’ Donkey learned a thing or two after all.  It just goes to show that there is no need to concentrate all the time at school, and that you really can learn more in two hours at the pub than you can in a whole life time in the classroom.

Picture this, in a hue of blue or maroon, and fueled by alcohol and boredom … and then run!  

Pic:  http://www.pinterest.com/edstok/body-art/

Aversion Therapy

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JB. You've done it again

Despite the changin' times, there are some things in life which have, at one time or another, been so much an enjoyable part of who I am, that even if I don't do them as often nowadays as I might like, they still make me feel fantastic, as soon as I embark upon them.

Case in point; I really love a visit to JB HI-FI.  Sure, I might only drop-by once a year these days (instead of at least once a week, as of yore), and sure, the majority of the titles in the CD racks (not to mention some of the CD rack categories) are completely foreign to me, but still, the sense of excitement and anticipation I get when I step across the electronic sensors into that world of yellow, plastic sticky tape just gets my consumer juices going.

While I was only really ever into the CDs side of things at JB, I know there's always been something for everyone there; music DVDs, TV and movie DVDs, hi-fi systems, TVs ... and now a pretty comprehensive range of computers and i-pads – these latter items not really being my bag, but the fact that they are the bag for so many others merely adds to my enjoyment of the place.

But there's something I need to make very clear from the outset, given my observations from today's visit to JB Hi-FI.  While I love/d spending hours and shit-loads of cash on the acquisition of eclectic music from their copious range of fine reggae, dub and alternative rock, and while I even occasionally wandered through their DVDs and hi-fi equipment for a bit of a poke and a giggle, I never once lost sight of the fact that everything in that store was comprised of items that I may WANT, but never constituted anything that I, nor any other member of humanity could ever honestly believe they might actually NEED.

So today, as I was wandering through and having to chase Hambones along isles that I never really knew existed (who knew JB sold turntables, or "decks" as I believe the young folk call them?), I eventually found him after a few, heart-stopping moments of lost contact, in front of a massive array of flat-screen TVs (or should that read, "...an array of massive flat screen TVs"?).  As Hambones proceeded to place is grubby mitts over every one of those impossibly large, shiny screens, one couldn't help but be blown away by their amazing colours and picture clarity.  To enhance this, as these places often do, they had a DVD playing on every one of the thousands of screens, flying you over Antarctica in a balance-altering helicopter one minute, or riding across the African savannah on an abdomen-jolting elephant the next.

As I struggled to pry Hambones' vegemite-smeared paws off an IMAX-sized screen before I got caught by one of the black-clad Easter Island statues which moonlight as JB security staff, I noticed that each of these amazing images were punctuated with writing over a blank screen, which on further investigation, constituted facts and messages about environmental degradation and conservation, climate change, population explosion and other determinants of the health of our dying planet, and I gotta say, it really stuck in my craw.

Here I was, surrounded by walls of massive, shiny, black, plastic, electronic devices, any one of which would probably feed a whole family for a year amongst two-thirds of the world's population; basically the epitome of consumer-driven greed and superfluous acquisition, and they were using messages of peace, conservation and global socialism to sell them.  Surely someone was taking the piss?  I might have thought so, if the footage between each message wasn't so brilliantly drawing my two-year old son under its spell, not to mention a number of others who may have had more years under their belts, but seemingly equivalent intellect.

I get it ... we've gone too far.  While on the one hand, the screaming, talk-back radio listening mobs of Western Sydney Aussie Battlers surviving on the poverty line are leading a national outrage directed at a government which, simply because there seems to be just no other way to tackle the urgent global crisis of climate change, is threatening to "tax us within an inch of our incomes", on the other, everyone still seems to have enough disposable income to purchase a television which is so large that one needs to knock out a wall to get it into their living room.  We're so sick, twisted and confused with our own wealth and greed, that even messages of reduce, recycle and reuse, punctuating breathtaking imagery of what we'll lose if we don't, actually spurs us on to consume more.  Get me outta here!

You can just imagine how big the telley is!  Pic: http://www.realbollywood.com

Park Life

I much prefer being at the park with Hambones when the prevailing activity around us is other young families with children playing on the equipment ... rather than transactional sex!

Visiting the local parks for a daily play on the equipment is new to me; as a kid, my parents were all, "You must not go to the park by yourself or with your friends ... only with us".

"OK", I would nod uncertainly, understanding the instruction, but not the sentiment behind it.  "Can we go to the park?"

"No!".

So there was pretty much no park at all for young Donkey, but we lived in the outer 'burbs anyway, and compared with the postage stamp that Hambones has to run around in today, our backyard when we were growing up was as big as any park going.  Still, one always wants what one can't have, so I continued to nag.

But to be honest, compared with today's facilities, the park in those days wasn't really that fantastic; just a couple of metal-coloured, metal bars and a metal slide baking in the harsh midday sun (and guaranteed to cook my young, supple Donkey butt into a couple of toasty-burnt muffins).

So while I could appreciate that the park was pretty boring, and a little bit painful, I didn't really understand what my parents had against it.  When I was a bit older, I suppose in an effort to put an end to years of incessant nagging, I was told that the park was to be avoided because, "it was a dangerous place where strange people went and did dirty things".  Unfortunately for my folks, this off-hand explanation ended up causing a bit of a social scandal within the local primary school community and had to be publically retracted after our driving past the park one day and me seeing Sam D'Mond (one of our neighbours' kids) playing there on his own.  I went to school the very next day and told everyone that my Mum had said that Sam D'Mond (already a bit of a social outcast due to a penchant for the taste of his own snot) was "a weird little twerp who did dirty things at the park!".

Still, despite the red-faced retraction, I remained unaware of the dangers of the park.  As nearly as I could ascertain, apart from a burnt ring, boredom and Johnny Butler and his gang alternating between dishing-out common, schoolyard, Chinese-burn-style bullying and experimenting with cigarettes and soft porn magazines in the bushes in the back corner, there was not really all that much to fear from the park.  Besides, Mrs D'Mond didn't seem to mind old 'Snot Muncher' playing there on his own!

But as I mentioned, the facilities and surroundings in today's parks are another thing altogether, and especially here in the high-density, inner city, it's no surprise that families turn out in droves to play on the colourful, non-heat-conducting plastic slides, rubber swings, flying foxes, non-splintering wooden beams and airborne-child-cushioning, bouncy-floors, all situated beneath wonderful, shady oaks and gum trees, and surrounded by well-manicured, grassy lawns.

In most of our parks, there are also free gas barbeques and picnic chairs and tables for the public to use, as well as necessary, disability-accessible public lavatories.  Our friend Mr Belfast still can't believe the barbeques, "If this was in England or Ireland, people would piss and shit all over them - there's no way I would use one of those things!".  "Ha Ha", we laugh, humouring his European naivety.  He clearly doesn't understand that such things don't happen here in Australia – no, Australians would never shit on a public barbeque in a park when there is well-moulded, designer play equipment easily on hand!

Recently, while playing at the park, we were approached by a gentleman whose firm had been contracted by the local council to survey park users about the facilities.  T'was an interesting experience to be approached by this supposedly impartial surveyor, and to watch him get increasingly animated and agitated as the survey unfolded;

Surveyor:          How would you rank [1-5] the cleanliness and tidiness of the park?

Donkey:            Yeah good.  It's pretty clean.  I'd say 4.

Surveyor:          A 4?  Are you kidding me?  What do you call that over there?

Donkey:            Oh yeah ... there's some rubbish.  OK, a 3.

Surveyor:          You don't think a 2?...

Surveyor:          How would you rank [1-5] the state of the play equipment?

Donkey:            Oh.  Really great.  4-5, I reckon.

Surveyor:          Were you aware that a child broke her arm here last week?

Donkey:            Um ... no.  Maybe a 3?

Surveyor:          [smiles and nods].

And on it went for about half an hour.  He said that this was his first day of surveying, and that he was going to be there all week (obviously I stayed away for the rest of the week), but no doubt he was, through his Woody Allen-esque neuroses and generally judgemental disposition, single-handedly responsible for the play equipment upgrade just a few weeks later, which included a quaint little cubby house with chairs and a little table ... just perfect for little kids to sit in and share a picnic and, as it happens, also a pretty tidy place for young people to start experimenting with each other's bodies.

Look, I'm all for a bit of experimental teenage safe sex, but it might be nice if they could deposit these 'Agents of Protection' in one of the nearby bins when vacating the premises – after all, what we don't know won't hurt us ... or our tea-partying toddlers.

So maybe these were the kinds of goings-on at the park that our parents were trying to protect us from all those years ago ... or maybe it was something else again ... maybe it was what Hambones and I were exposed to yesterday afternoon.

As we approached the empty park, I noticed a couple of people about fifty metres ahead of us wandering towards the recently established disability-accessible public lavatories.  I wasn't really taking much notice, but only became aware that something was not right when, on arrival at the play equipment, neither person was in sight, and the only sign of life was the urgent blinking of the red "occupied" light on the lavatory door, silently screaming out like an emergency distress beacon pleading for assistance, "Danger!  Warning!  There are too many people in the loo!  Please assist.  Danger!".

But you know how you get all irrational when you're scared?  I thought to myself, "Oh look, Donkey.  I am sure it's all legit.  He's probably a man with end-stage colonic cancer and she's his carer, and they've gone into the disability-accessible lav so that she can help him to change his colostomy bag".

Time dragged on and on, and still no one emerged from the toilet.  While others may have viewed this as suspicious, I took it as further confirmation of my very plausible scenario.  "You're onto it, Donkey," my delusions continued, "Those bags can be pretty tricky to get off ... and sometimes they leak and have to be cleaned-up.  It's all good."

After about half an hour, by which time another couple had arrived at the play ground with their infant son, the carer emerged from the toilet looking every bit the qualified health worker that she obviously was; a big-haired, gum-chewing "lady" in a professional ensemble of dirty white crop-top above (which showed-off her massive falsies) and low-slung black tracksuit pants with matching runners below. 

Seeing the park occupied by playing children and wholesome young families, she immediately turned to go back inside, only to find the door locked.  "Can ya hear me?" she shrieked to her patient within, "We better get going".  

About five minutes later, out stepped the tumour-ridden gentleman; a dirty, lanky and very skanky dude in jeans (no belt), runners and a long pony-tail, and would you believe, he was actually scratching his [no doubt, greasy] nuts!  "What the fuck are ya yellin at me for?", he politely enquired of his carer, and off they took themselves (walking along the fence-line, rather than on the designated path), conversing (read: arguing) loudly to each other.

"I guess those anti-cancer drugs can make you pretty narky", I thought to myself.

Within moments of their departure, the park was full of oblivious families, laughing and playing with their children on the wonderful equipment, in the shade of the swaying oaks.  That's Park Life, inner-Melbourne style!

Breaking Bad's Wendy the Crackwhore demonstrating her new career caring for terminal cancer-sufferer's in Donkey's local park yesterday. Pic:  http://remotelyinterested.blogspot.com

Give ‘em an inch…

It’s great being back in Melanesia again.  Apart from the joy in being able to communicate with people in [something resembling] their own language, I have come to remember a few of the wonderful, and occasionally baffling things about these people that I’d previously known and loved, but of which I had completely forgotten.

“What am I, hard-of-smelling?”

Within an hour of hitting Vila, I was waiting on the dusty roadside for a “bus” to come along to take me into town.  Beside me was an old lady with a massive ‘fro and a brightly-coloured, Mother Hubbard dress, unashamedly staring at me with a massive, toothless grin.  I nodded, smiled, said “Halo”, smiled again, nodded again, winked, smiled again … but she wasn’t done yet; there’d be no looking away from my amusing spectacle.

Eventually, a beat-up, rusting old van with clapped-out suspension and bald tyres rocked-up and the mad old hag and I climbed on board, squeezing into the remaining two seats.  From this you might deduce that the bus was packed, but in truth there were only two others - young guys - on board.  The rest of the seats, comprising the back half of the bus, were taken up with two ridiculously-sized woofers which bashed out gut-thumping, island reggae beats.  I settled into the groove, and sat back to enjoy the ride.

As soon as we pulled off the curb, I received Repressed Melanesia Memory #1.  It is a fact of island life that fresh water is a scarce commodity for many communities, and as such, it is not uncommon for people to bathe only once ortwice a week, and this rarely with soap (an unnecessary expense for poverty-stricken households).  And so, as I sat in the sweltering bus, I remembered the all-pervasive, musky tang of Melanesian body odour.

To be honest, though, this is not a completely unpleasant odour – it’s actually quite a sweet smell, which is rather odd.  How is it that Melanesians - women and men alike - despite rarely bathing, and even more rarely with soap, they still smell a damn sight better than those fat blokes in the Australian public service who, despite sitting all day in climate-controlled offices, still exhibit great, wet, yellowing under-arm stains and smell like turds rolled in ground cumin?  Same goes for those pot-bellied, balding types in stubbies and blue singlets you sometimes get stuck next to on the train – ew!  Never mind the “poor, primitive natives of the Pacific with their backward cultures and heathen ways”, maybe island hygiene (or the lack thereof) is still far-and-away more advanced than your average Australian male?

Strange misconceptions.

It must be all those Hollywood blockbusters like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, not to mention the harrowing footage we see on BBC World every night from regions as far flung as Sudan, the Congo, East Timor and Haiti.  Whatever it is, I am ashamed to admit that the sight of a Toyota Hilux racing along a dirt road with a spear-bristling pile of young, black, male faces staring determinedly over the cab fills me to the core with cold, mortal fear.

What a wave of surprised relief I experience, though, when these young men turn that menacing grimace into a big, white, toothy grin, and a laughing “Halo” as they make their way across the island to their circumcision/initiation ceremony.  This is Vanuatu, you idiot, not Sierra Leone!

Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile.

There’s nothing quite so uncomfortable when, as a waetman (foreigner) with comparatively shitloads of money, you’ve just opened and are ready to tuck into a packet of Twisties (a luxury food item, given average household incomes) when the seventeen year-old guesthouse maid walks by for a chat.  Clearly she’s not in a hurry to get back to work, and the stilted conversation seems to drag slowly by as the Twisties waft their tantalizing scent throughout the room.

Giving into my cultural inclinations, and also as a result of the guilt this have, with my great, big bag of corny, deep-fried snacks, feels before this young have-not, I course extend the packet for her to share my tasty treat.  “Thank you”, she smiles as she reaches for the pack, takes it from my hand, turns, and wanders off into the guesthouse.

Oh yeah, Repressed Melanesia Memory #3, one doesn’t share, one gives away.  Bugger!  I really wanted those Twisties.

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

I arrived late in the day to the quiet town in the remote southern island, and all the stores were closed.  In the dark, I found my guesthouse, and was feeling a bit freaked-out at the grotty, shoddy surroundings which would be my home for the next ten days.  With nothing to eat, and only a cold pipe for a shower, I fumbled through the gloom to my sleeping bag, tired, hungry and miserable.

Sometime in the night I was startled awake by a group of staggering men returned from sloshing kava at the nakamal, and I lay quiet and still, fervently mouthing my prayers for deliverance from being stabbed in the night by a pack of wired, tribal warriors, and done up the bum while my corpse was still warm.

In the morning, I staggered out onto the guesthouse’s mouldy, crumbling balcony to see two fat, old, greying men sitting before a well-set breakfast table.  They offered for me to join them and shared their bread, which I gratefully accepted and ate quietly while they farted, scratched their protruding tummies and chatted away in their local dialect.

While cleaning-up in the disgusting kitchen afterwards, the third member of the party, who’d been making the breakfast for the others, informed me that one of the two sitting out on the balcony was none other than His Excellency the Honourable Minister for Foreign Affairs, here on an official government visit to meet with his constituency!  Let that be a lesson to all those who think that national budgets in the islands are all blown on five-star holiday resorts for corrupt government officials.

Lord Voldemort in a Penis Gourd?

Vanuatu, like a number of other Melanesian countries, remains one of the last great tribal cultures of the world, with many people still practicing and following the tribal customs and beliefs of their ancestors.  Rather paradoxically, it’s also staunchly Christian, but like many parts of the world where a kind of hybrid Christianity has sprung-up, much to the chagrin of missionaries both past and present, so too Vanuatu enjoys a rather bizarre mix of belief in both the magic of the Holy Spirit, and the magic of the mountains, trees, rocks and sea.

And to further add to this crazy soup of beliefs and practices, modern technology has been well and truly embraced by all, so that today even the remotest communities have access to satellite TV, internet and mobile phones.

The clash of these ancient beliefs and modern technology was brought to my attention one day while out in the field with one of the engineers responsible for bringing essential water and sanitation facilities to remote communities.  This wiry, weathered bloke is one of the few of his countrymen to have completed both high school and tertiary education, and for the last twenty years, has travelled to every province and island in the country guiding communities to implement these positive changes for their health and well being.

Did I say every island?  Sorry, that should have been ‘every island but one’.  It’s hard to get information out of this bloke sometimes; he being always on his mobile phone, banging away in a number of different languages to someone or other.  One day, I was standing by him when his phone rang.  He looked at the screen before swearing and muttering something in his own dialect, and then turned the phone off.  I realised then that I’d seen this happen quite a few times over the previous days, so asked him jovially whether an old girl friend had finally caught up with him.

Rather than smile at my joke, he gravely explained to me that he will not answer a call that the phone display lists as an anonymous, ‘Private Number’, as this, he said, is likely to be a local sorcerer trying to put a curse on him.

Surprised by this response, and the fear in his eyes when he told me, I asked a few more careful questions and came to learn that the reason he’d never, in twenty years, visited the island of Maewo, was because it is a place of black magic, and he will surely be cursed by a local sorcerer if he goes there.

With that, he picked up his bag and headed-off to church.

But mostly it's the people that make it great.  Pic: Hagas.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign...

...Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

Five Man Electrical Band

Here I was thinking I'd come a long way since I was fifteen years old, travelling through Germany, and breaking-out in adolescent hysterics every time I saw a sign denoting an exit.

"Ausfahrt! You gotta be kidding me, Ausfahrt?! Hey! Hey! Pull my finger. Pull my finger ... I'll show you how an Aus Farts! Woo hoo! Yuk, yuk, yuk".

On my return to Australia, my teacher repeatedly asked me to bring my Germany trip photographs to school to share with the other students. In order to hide my embarrassment (given that every second shot was of me doubled-over in fits of hilarity beneath an exit sign), I conjured excuse after increasingly implausible excuse to throw her off the scent; "Our cameras were taken from us by East German border guards and they strip-searched me to get the negatives I'd hidden up my arse ... despite the stench, my substantial, numerous ausfahrts were still not enough to deter them from their merciless quest".

She stopped asking.

But anyway, those juvenile days are well and truly behind me now, right? Right? That's what I thought, until on a recent trip to Tibet.

It's bad enough having to prepare yourself, both mentally and physically, to visit a Tibetan toilet. For starters there's the negotiating one's way around the disgusting piles of steaming turds that accumulate over a year or so between cleans, but it really does make the experience completely inaccessible when one faces fearful confusion over which cubicle is for the fellas, and which is for the ladies.

Believe me, it can be quite an uncomfortable, and potentially life-threatening ordeal to have daintily picked your way through the stinking smears of nomad excrement, placed your feet carefully either side of the over-flowing hole in the ground, be squatting in vein-popping agony as you push-out last night's yak steak, only to have an attractive, young Tibetan village girl wander in on you as that brown bear pushes its way into the world!

Funny, maybe, but I can vouch for the fact that things can rapidly deteriorate into a public health disaster as you suddenly reach for your strides with one hand, accidentally twist sideways, slip on a fresh coat of gravy and reflexively reach to the floor with the other hand to steady your body's downward trajectory. Splat!

So it was a great boon to me on my most recent visit, to approach one of these fragrant, rural outhouses, and be provided with some assistance by [I suspect] local youths with a piece of charcoal.

Very helpful indeed ... and yes, I love the artist's impression of the gash! Pic Hagas

And while I'm in the middle of this incredibly mature missive about amusing foreign signs, I'd like to share with you a label I found about ten minutes after viewing this sign, in a local dining establishment characterised by the same standards of hygiene displayed in the bogs.

The label was attached to a most remarkable piece of Chinese engineering and manufacturing; a plastic, automatic toothpick dispenser in the shape of a German country house [there, ya see, this post's gone full circle], on which the pressing of a small button forces a single, clean, round toothpick into the hands of the eager consumer. A tremendous feat of modern, scientific research and development.

And the label read;

AUTO TOOTHPICK CASE. Design with meticulous care the external appearance beauty is generous usage convenience.

That's all very well, but you know what they say, "Self praise is no praise!".

Hair envy on the islands

The last week of the last millennium saw the rest of the world gathering tremendous caches of canned food products and heading to ground in reinforced concrete bunkers in order to shield themselves from the effects of the treacherous Y2K.

By contrast, the Samoans, who are somewhat accustomed to having a holocaust-surviving collection of canned meat and fish under the kitchen sink at the best of times, and for whom the electricity was hardly ever operating anyway (thanks to fifteen years of ineffectual foreign technical assistance and ongoing, bureaucratic bungling within the Samoa Electric Power Corporation), were disregarding the global call for disaster preparedness, and were preparing instead for the biggest, f’-off fiafia (party) the country had ever seen.

Each day, as the electronic, Millennium countdown clock ticked off its last 604,800 seconds, the Samoa Observer was awash with double page spreads announcing a growing line-up of exciting events and performances, the hurried opening of new bars taking advantage of the anticipated relaxing of the usual midnight curfew on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and international donor assistance to ensure that the last millennium celebration on the planet went off with one of the biggest bangs of them all (quite literally, as it transpired, thanks to China’s kind donation of a NASA-sized payload of expired, unsafe fireworks, which left at least one Samoan citizen looking remarkably like The Thing – but that’s another story for another time).

And amidst all this exciting, noisy anticipation, an additional entertainment option slipped quietly into Apia Harbour one evening, completely under the radar of the Millennium Celebration Organising Committee, in the form of “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa” boat.

Like the grand old travelling road shows of the American Midwest in the forties, Bruno’s steam vessel was painted in garish primary colours, complete with a striped, barber-shop smoke stack and a flapping pennant promising the “Greatest Show of the Millennium”.

No one really took much notice of the circus boat until, four days later when we’d all recovered from our almighty, nation-wide hangover, the local daily decided that as the world had not ended, they probably ought to resume production, and went looking for a story that wouldn’t require them to travel further than across the street. And the story they ran with was none other than the international scandal that was “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa”.

Every day for well over a month, the Observer ran an ever-revealing expose of this nod to old-world family entertainment. First it was that Bruno kept animals in tiny cages in the dark hold of his floating menagerie. Later, it was revealed by an international animal rights watchdog (of which no one had previously heard) that Bruno and his floating extravaganza had been refused permission to dock in Fiji on account of alleged inhumane treatment of his performers.

Over the coming weeks, the opinion pieces and letters columns of the Observer moved from one spectrum to the other in support of, and against the travelling, magical circus, with as many prominent local celebrities and politicians throwing their popular weight behind the “great and magical Bruno” as those who renounced him as a shyster and exploiter of innocents.

And through this barrage of newsreel and opinion, whether for or against, there was one act within Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa which managed to captivate and thrill the entire population. It was not Bruno’s somewhat malnourished, leaping lions that stole the show, nor was it the Vitamin D-deficient Russian bear with the balancing beach ball on his schnoz. It wasn’t the clown with the narcotic-shrunken pupils and the visible twitch which so melted the hardened hearts of the naysayers, nor the hind-legged walking of the mange-ridden pig which had the supporters up on their feet at intermission. No, the act which really got Samoa talking was Bruno’s incredible enigma, known colloquially as the Hairy Man.

Was this creature man or beast? Was he some prehistoric throwback, or the result of a pharmaceutical company’s genetic experimentation gone wrong? Whatever the answer, it got all the tongues in the country wagging, and everyone, whether doctor or patient, banker or client, lawyer or accused, land owner or tenant flocked to the Magic Circus to view the follicular spectacle.

And like the freak shows of old, Bruno knew how to give a crowd what they wanted. The Hairy Man was available for viewing after every show, where screaming children would writhe in their parents arms in fear of the hairy arms reaching for them through steel bars as the camera snapped away into the night.

And then, perhaps after two or three months, after the crowds had finally lost interest in the Hairy Man, and just before all of the animals expired from the heat and cramped conditions, down came the big top one evening, and just as it had arrived, Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa boat chugged silently out of the harbour in the dead of night, never to be heard from again.

Or so I assumed in a world where cruelty to animals is less tolerated than it once was, where unusual looking people are free to participate in society along with everyone else, and where laser surgery exist for even the most hirsute. So imagine my surprise on Day 1 of my return to Samoa, when driving through town, my saucer-like eyes were drawn to a massive sign advertising … wait for it … “Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa Training Academy”!

Training Academy!!? What could anyone possibly learn there? Bruno’s circus never had acrobats and trapeze artists; it never had Houdini-types escaping from straight-jackets in glass water tanks; and there were no contortionists or fire eaters. Bruno’s Magic Circus of Samoa only ever showcased a small number of performing animals (which he’d presumably bought for a song after they were forced out of circuses in other countries with laws prohibiting such cruelty) and of course, the Hairy Man.

So what’s really going on up there on the hill, behind those substantial Academy gates? Is it simply an online booking service for acquiring circus animal cast-offs? Or is a somewhat greying and thinning Hairy Man running a whole bunch of new recruits through boot-camp style drills for effective comb-overs? Or perhaps more plausibly, is it simply an international training camp for like-minded entrepreneurs to master the art of media manipulation? - Lord knows that in this pursuit, Bruno has proven himself a true talent of magical proportions.

Samoa continues its fine tradition of superior tertiary education … and sign-writing! Pic: Hagas

Enema Time

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this some time ago, when I was last visiting; I’ve been um-ing and ah-ing about whether to post it … but here it is.

Ever been constipated? Ever had that tight, bloated feeling in your guts that renders your every movement … your every thought inert as you try to circumvent the ever-growing, gurgling, hardening mass of excrement inside you; trying to ignore it and to get on with daily life, but ultimately, inevitably succumbing to the constant discomfort, not to mention the fear of excruciating agony when it does decide to expel its way out of your comparatively tiny anus?

Constipation renders you a non-thinking, non-acting vegetable … and on top of that, the idea of putting anything else in; anything that might add to the malignant poo-tumour in your colon, more or less disappears.

So spare a thought for poor Ol’ Donkey. I’ve been constipated for near-on two years! That’s right, two years of this growing mass of pain and anguish inside me. Two years of fear that when this finally does come out, it’s gonna smart like fire. But it’s time to purge – this pain and suffering within has stopped me from being able to think straight and to act decisively. It has given me a victim complex, and it makes me whiney and unappealing to people I meet. It has also made me irritable to those around me, and thereby is starting to cause pain and suffering for others … it’s time for an almighty, soap-and-water enema up the jacksie … and here it comes.

I haven’t written much on this blog for nearly a year now. For some of that time, I have attributed my lack of creative output to the birth and parenting of Hambones, but my recent circumstances have made it clear to me that this is just an excuse; it’s not lethargy and a lack of time that has stopped me, it’s my constipation, and its life-deadening impact upon me, that has made me creatively turgid.

In my Donkey way, I have always been careful not to reveal too much about myself on this blog for fear of those I work with and know becoming harmed in some way. I’m not talking about, “Errrr, Donkey said I was fat and dud root, and now all my friends on Facecrock know and I’m a laughing stock” kind of harm, I’m talking about real, physical retribution for people and their families.

But storing all this up in my guts has made me creatively constipated. How can I be expected to come up with jolly frivolities when there is such a horrible story to be told? How can I keep banging-on to the world about new cars, coffee machines, my trip to the dentist, when someone I know has been imprisoned for life on dubious charges for actions that most of us would consider an everyday occurrence? This constipation is painful, and the pressure ever-present. It has resulted in me closing my mind to the intake of new ideas, and new experiences. It has made me bitter and stale, and a shell of the Donkey I once was.

Those who have orchestrated this constipation have done so in their clever way, as they have been doing now for nearly sixty years. But as I again return this week to the place where it all started, I have decided I want my old life back. I want to be Donkey again, so it’s time to tell the tale.

I write this post from a place way up high, but I will not be able to post this from here – it is forbidden. This place is renowned world-wide for its peacefulness, and I lived here once, working with a group of dedicated young people who, despite the obstacles and civil restrictions which control and block their thoughts and actions every day, work for the good of their people. But when their fellow citizens had finally had enough of being told how to think and act last year (as seems to happen every ten years or so), and things went awry for the authorities, Mrs Donkey and I were “asked” to leave almost immediately after we stood, horrified, as a massive line of armed soldiers, armoured vehicles, people movers and tanks (all with their distinguished markings covered in newspaper to avoid identification on film or photograph) moved into the city to “subdue” their own people. What happened that evening, and over the following weeks has never been told, and indeed will probably not be unless something changes in the world of international politics.

But I know some of what happened. I know of three men who were dragged from their families by soldiers, one of whom has never been seen again. He was a colleague of mine, and after many months of no word about his location or welfare, or even whether or not he was alive, it was revealed by the authorities that he had been charged with separatist activities, and has been imprisoned for life.

Another colleague was also taken into custody, where he underwent physical torture and abuse for eight weeks. He has been released without charge, and his scars and bruises have taken the place of his once sunny disposition. He no longer participates in society.

And these are the “sensational” stories. For everyone else, there are the six-men, armed patrols which walk in single-file throughout the city, day and night, overseen by high-tech, infrared Closed Circuit TV cameras (in stark contrast to the ancient buildings on which they are mounted) and armed, roof-top snipers on every corner. There are the constant demands for producing of identity papers on every other corner, and there are the late-night raids on homes under the dubious guise of looking for some unknown person, during which the residents are forced to line-up outside in the below-freezing temperatures, sometimes for hours, as the authorities check and re-check identity papers and ask the same series of questions they asked only nights before.

It must wear people down to be exposed to this on a daily basis. But who would speak-out when there are families and friends to consider if one did? And anyway, who will come to these peoples’ aid? Certainly not the international community; that has been clearly articulated.

I return to this place every so often for short visits, to continue my work with those colleagues who remain. We continue to work for the good of their people – nothing to do with politics, just addressing basic human rights such as poverty, education, health. Since my first return after being ejected, things have become less tense, but still the menace remains, and still people, if you’re fortunate enough to have them whisper a story here or there, will tell you that they are far from happy with their lives.

I was right, it wasn’t easy passing this through my sphincter … and the fear of more pain will exist for some time, as I worry about whether this post will create problems for me or for others. But it is an important story to be told … and I hope it will allow me to start feeling less backed-up, and more open to receiving nourishment. We’ll see…