The following is a short story from my time among the highlanders of Papua New Guinea. I hope you all will enjoy it:
There is not too much to do in Herowana after dark. It is always raining or about to rain, or just finishing raining and if you go out the Poisonman will get you anyway, so people mostly sit around a smoldering cooking fire (smoke keeps the bugs down and Poisonman away) and tell stories. The men who I had hired as guides/carriers/field assistants would story, but also ask me all sorts of questions about the world, my work, my family, etc. One evening they asked the hardest question anyone has ever asked me to answer.
In order to understand why I had so much trouble answering this question, you have to know three things.
There is not too much to do in Herowana after dark. It is always raining or about to rain, or just finishing raining and if you go out the Poisonman will get you anyway, so people mostly sit around a smoldering cooking fire (smoke keeps the bugs down and Poisonman away) and tell stories. The men who I had hired as guides/carriers/field assistants would story, but also ask me all sorts of questions about the world, my work, my family, etc. One evening they asked the hardest question anyone has ever asked me to answer.
In order to understand why I had so much trouble answering this question, you have to know three things.
First, I was communicating in a language I had heard for the first time less than a month earlier. Tok Pisin is almost entirely based on English, and is quick to learn for a native English speaker, but the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are all different and it has no words for objects or ideas not necessary for trading among villages.
Second, Tok Pisin is not the native language in Herowana either. New Guinea has about a third of the world's linguistic diversity and Tok Pisin was adopted as a trade language, but people in Herowana don't use it in their daily lives.
Third, Herowanans have had very limited experience of western technology. They had their first contact with white men in the mid twentieth century. They still use tools fashioned from sticks, vines and stones. They have never seen a car, a TV, a computer or any sort of landscape except tropical rain forest. Most of their early contact with white men had been with missionaries, who taught little but the bible stories.
The question came one evening when we had visitors at the bush camp. Two of the men had younger relatives visiting, bringing news from the village, checking out the strange foreigner. We were huddled in the smoke and out of the rain in our little cook shelter. Benches made of sticks and vines, a rack of similar construction directly over the fire to dry out the firewood, walls of rain, a tarp for a roof. Luxury accommodations. It was tight with six of us, but everyone insisted I take the driest spot. One of the kids squatted in the mud until he got comfortable enough to sit on the same bench with me. I saw that Hotwara was holding a crumpled newspaper. "Where", I wondered, "did Hotwara get a newspaper, and why does he look like he wants me to bring it up?" I took the bait and asked, "Hotwara, wanim dispela neuspepa yu holdim?"
Grinning, he told me that two American tourists had come thorough the village and left it behind, and everyone wanted to know what the photo on the cover was. Curious, I turned on my headlamp and held out my hand for the paper. A rocky red desert. In the lower left corner, it showed a little bit of a mechanical arm and some wiring. The background was a rosy pink sky. It was a story about the Opportunity Mars Rover finding some geological signal of long past water.
I couldn't help but laugh, just a little bit, about the impossibility of explaining this. I quickly realized I was being rude and shut up, but all five of them were staring at me. They wanted an answer. I had no idea how to begin. After a couple of minutes, the guys started to make impatient noises. Finally, Sakias, the kid, asked, "Wanim dispela stori? Wanim dispela ples? Wanim kin samting?" pointing in turn to the words, the landscape and the machine visible in its own photo.
I decided I was just going to explain it all to them as best I could. I told them that first I had to tell them about the place.
I started in on cosmology. Their school has a globe donated by the government of Australia, and they had heard that the world is round. I reminded them of this using the roundest thing I had with me, a not very round tea pot. I ripped a page out of my notebook and drew a small circle, calling that Earth. I described how orbits work, how the Moon is always falling past the Earth, speeding around and around but always missing. They discussed amongst themselves for a while then told me to go on.
I drew the solar system, relating each object to things they knew in the sky. Mars, I told them, pointing at the next orbit out from earth on my page, is the little red dot that moves in relation to all the other stars, tracing its orbit on the invisible sky with my finger. Another ball moving around the sun, but further away and therefore colder. So cold it would kill you right away. Also very dry and covered in dust with rusty iron in it. The iron makes everything red, like a busnaif (machete) that didn't get the mud wiped off it. More discussion, some of it quite animated, then they told me their name for Mars, which I promptly forgot to write down.
Getting this far took me about two evenings, and the boys stayed on. I'm not sure if they wanted to hear the rest of the story or just liked the peanut-butter and crackers I gave them.
The next day after dinner we started again. The red place with the pink sky in the picture was Mars and the thing in the lower left corner was a machine sent there to take pictures and find out what Mars was like. I showed them my digital camera and said this machine had one too. I showed them my GPS unit and tried to describe a computer. They have seen two way radios, and I told them that the machine was a computer with a digital camera and a two way radio. I went back to my solar system diagram and told them that the kind of little plane that brought me to Herowana cannot get very high off the ground. The jetliners that occasionally fly overhead were also planes, but they work differently and can fly much higher, where their is less air. Scientists had made rockets, machines that could fly so high there was no air at all, and could keep going up. Another evening or two had passed
The scientists who sent the rockets had dropped the machine in the picture down to the surface of mars on a parachute (parachute took a surprising amount of time to get across, more than computer or solar system). I took a picture of Sakias and then zoomed in on it on the camera's LCD to show how the whole picture was made of little colored squares. That computer on the surface had a digital camera. It took a picture, and described each little square in the picture on the radio to a scientist's computer on earth, which drew each little square in the picture based on the description, remaking the picture exactly as it was. The scientist gave a copy of the picture to the newspaperman, who put it on the front of this paper.
I can't say if they believed a word of it. They thanked me for a very good story, laughed, and started the story of how they built the bridge across the river Fio. Truly an amazing feat of engineering and ingenuity, using vines and sticks and human muscle. The kids were proud to see me so impressed. Grins were revealed as black cavities on white teeth on black faces in the smoke and firelight. Sakias, his fist orbiting the teapot, announced that he would build a bridge of his own some day.