A Day in the Life Shaneel Pathak August 2002

I landed in Wewak, North Western part of PNG and was greeted by the WWF staff. I am excited to be here and to help WWF. Seeing the projects they have, really makes you feel like your making a difference.

Some of the projects include vanilla farming consultation, eco-tourism, sanitary water supplies and conservation awareness. A key mandate for them is to ensure the environment is protected while development can occur – at times it’s a race against the loggers.

A new type of wood discovered, eaglewood is very high in demand, a few thousand dollars per tree. The oil from this tree is used in perfumes, but only 1 in 30 secretes the oil. The oil indirectly comes from a fungus. Loggers are using the “cut-and-see” approach to find the few trees with oil. WWF is investigating how they can detect trees that have this fungus growth and training the villagers to ensuring that only they get cut down. They plan on using GIS – global information system software to map the ecosystem and assist researchers. This is where I will be helping. In 2 months, once the field base in Ambunti is operational I will be going there to set up the computer network, install internet access and software so they can do the research onsite.

In the meantime, computers were stacking up that needed to be fixed. Bad floppy drives, corrupt HDs to Windows errors. Slowly their network is getting stable.

I had an opportunity to visit their most remote location in Ambunti. Ambunti is a rural village in the East Sepik province but one of the central communities for the surrounding villages in the Hunstein Range. The field base will also house a resource center, which will provide the regions first post office, bank and Library.

I assessed their computer requirements, training and tested if Internet access is possible. We took my managers laptop and after some tweaking dialed up and connected. The expression on their faces was worth it. Villagers have heard about the internet but haven’t used it. It was a challenging place to work as we only had electricity 6 hours a day, had to bring in our own food supply – which was noodles, rice and canned tuna. The only way to travel is by boat ride up the Sepik river or flying in a small 6 seater Cessna.

Last week, a few volunteers and I decided to head to the Highlands to see the Mt. Hagen cultural show. Tribes from various regions from the Highlands come together for the festival and perform for the public. It definitely was a performance and a wonderful display of their costumes and face paintings. From Mt. Hagen we took a PMV – private motor vehicle to Mt. Wilhelm to do some climbing. Basically it’s organized hitchhiking. We were hesitant a first, as the highlands have a high crime rate and known for highway robberies. With the elections completed, heading south to South-Highlands is dangerous – also they blew up a lot of bridges in protest. There are many tribal fights going
on even today.

The trip was a rough one as it was though hilly terrain. We had 28 people in the back of a landcruiser. After 3 hours going on a ruff road we made it to Betty's lodge at the base of the mountain. We were amazed - and pleased; the lodge was like a chalet, fireplace, pool table, and hot water. It
was great!

The next day we made the 3-hour hike to base camp, which is 1/3 of the way up. Base camp was a tin shack. I never climbed with a backpack - takes a bit of energy. Anyway, we got up at 2am for our early morning departure, the rain
stopped (we were really lucky with the weather on the entire trip). We started hiking at night, you pass some pretty scary cliffs but you can't see them at night. The night hike was worth it, as we saw the sunrise form the top.

Seven hours and many false peaks we got the base of the summit. We were having altitude sickness by then, my head was pounding, and my friend was on the verge of vomiting. He decided to stay back, and Pat and I continued the last hour the summit. The summit was cold; 50km/h winds made it feel like 0C. We left our packs at the base and scramble on all fours to get the top. The top was
narrow and only had space for one. We took turns, got some photos and then headed back down. We met up with Dave who felt much better after a rest and continued to basecamp.

We got to base camp with big smiles on our faces, rested then headed to Betty's lodge for some fish and chips. - Betty has a trout farm at the lodge is known for their fresh fish.

From Mt. Hagen, I returned to Wewak and started to pack for Port Moresby. POM is like any other city, and looking forward to the spicy food. Unfortunately it is also ranked as one of the top ten crime cities in the world.

I will tell you more, when I get there!