Splintered Feet and Overloaded Bilums - What is the development agenda for rural PNG women and girls?

by GARY JUFFA - (www.pngwoman.com) 

WITH aching back and sweat soaked brow, the Papua New Guinean village woman is a hard worker. Carrying an oppressive weight in her string bags (bilums), laden on her lean back, sometimes a pile on another, not unusually a sleeping infant perched atop, her cracked feet grip the gritty dirt road and doggedly she moves on.

Mawarero Woman, Rai Coast. Picture courtesy of Jeremy and Team at Finisterre Vision. www.pngwoman.com

Her back bent over she trudges over mountains, across flooded streams, treacherous winding mountain tracks, bare footed to and from her home, her garden, to the market to some event, determined and dutifully.

Her duty is to her family, her children, her husband, often times they do not see her plight, she is the unseen force behind their very existence.

In the early morning, as the first birds sing, she is up and about, stoking the fire, preparing breakfast for her children and her husband, gathering her vegetables to sell at the station or district market. Another long and hard day awaits her. She has accepted her lot in life. Her family has readily demanded it. Her society sanctions it.

Sometime ago she has had an opportunity to dream. Perhaps a brief interaction in a church run school, where she learnt basic reading and writing and numbers, remote vestiges of dreams, forgotten, a small bright light that slowly flickers as it dies, snuffed by grim reality and the somber and stifling acceptance of arranged marriages and adulthood. Often she has had to make space for her brother's, school fees being scarce, admonished as it were by her very gender, to the garden and rearing children and her dreams of perhaps being a nurse or teacher, as far away as the flight of a lonely hawk, flying above the dull gray sky on that dreary walk, as she, laden with the burden of existence, life having departed along with her dreams, keeps on keeping on…

A woman carrying her granddaughter in the bilum in Sydney, Australia.
Image: Arosame Wawe‎ / 2017. 

And she is expected to accept, whatever is meted out to her, rarely a word of appreciation, though often brutal reprisal is swift, for delays in tending to some chore or responsibility, whether she had mitigating circumstance, illness, tiredness, or not…. punished for disappointments, unfulfilled expectations and failures beyond her comprehension…her cut lips and battered face, broken limbs, dislodged teeth and blinded eye reminders of the unjust society she exists in…

Hope for a better life for her children are transmitted in her loving hands and the warmth that she miraculously exudes towards them, despite the grim circumstances of her situation, catering to their every whim, their laughter she revels in, their tears she wipes and their pain she tends away.

Many fortunate women take for granted the moments they have to spend time attending to their personal hygiene. Moments spent in front of a mirror, applying scented lotions, carefully arranging their hair and taking a moment to take in their presentation. They wear clean fresh clothes, use modern appliances and engage in some form of meaningful employment.

A girl carrying her Madang style bilum. Image: Monalisa J. Umbu / April, 2017.

The woman in the village is lucky to have a cake of yellow soap. Her employment is constant, sun up to sundown, she has no leave and there is no payment.

40 years after independence, while seemingly this young nation saw hope in the so called democratic freedom granted to it, the Papua New Guinea village woman, still trudges to and from, with her bilums full, her back bent, her hands full, her feet bare, her punishment real and her dreams just that – “dreams”…

Yes, it seems independence has come to our young nation… but that is hardly so for our womenfolk in many parts of Papua New Guinea…

Little children know that special items are kept in their mother's bilum.
In the photograph, the little child was checking for some coins (money) while her mother was watching. Image Credit: Meri Madang / Facebook / 2017.