The Komo Market

So, today, I decided to go to the local market. It’s where most of the commerce happens amongst the local tribes in this environment. We pass it every day and it's strangeness calls to me. I can’t be here and not try and see it.

We see it from the dirt road that we take on our twenty or so mile drive back and forth from the quarry. Hundreds and hundreds of people sitting on the ground, some under old umbrellas, smoke from fires for..I have no idea what. There seems to be people from many classes there. Pretty, colorful clothes, to rags that are barely staying in place, to an older man in a beat up leather cowboy hat, spandex shorts, cowboy boots and a colorful shirt that I’m pretty sure started it’s life as a lady's blouse. I come to find out that his name is David and he is the land owner here. The EXPATs call them Chiefs, but I’m not sure if that is a correct title, a belittlement, or a commonly accepted slang term. But anyway, I’m not using it until I know for sure.

My driver is Gibson. He’s a local national, an LN. He looks hard as nails. He sometimes comes to work with his face painted, wears a necklace of boars teeth that have some of the meat still on them, and has lots and lots of scars. In other words the kind of guy that I want to go exploring with. It’s like walking the ghetto with the guy that kicked Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown’s ass.

We take our ambulance over, Gibson and I, and through a process of weaving and honking and waving make our way down a few hundred yards of dirt track in the meager span of twenty minutes or so. The day is hot, and it’s really dusty. It’s not rained for four days, the longest drought that we’ve experienced in my ten months in PNG.

From a distance, coming to the market seemed like an awesome idea. Up close I find that everyone here has paid their life's dues in blood and sweat and are hard as rock. Many have obvious scars that appear to have been made with bush knives. One such older man has the classic facial droop sometimes seen in a catastrophic stroke except that the droop starts from a massive, perfectly straight scar that runs from the top of his upper lip to where the top of his ear used to be. Above the scar his face is happy and animated, below is a mass of floppy flesh that looks like a detailed but lifeless mask that wasn’t glued properly and is falling away.

Their heat and pain tempered bodies seem out of place with their soft spirits, opposites interwoven, as with so many things in this country. They share yells of “A’llow!” (Hello!) and exhibit Nike grade calloused feet from a lifetime of walking up and down dirt roads and jungle trails in their bare feet. You can feel the love and kindness in those that we pass, but are forced to remember that this is the most violent province in PNG and that several people have been killed just in the short time that I’ve been on this site. Just the last two weeks. There are approximately 300,000 tribes people in the province. Yeah…I’m amazed, and a little bit scared.

I love mixing with the locals. We were warned off of it during out security briefing prior to coming into the country. “Don’t make eye contact or they’ll see you as aggressive and attack you.” “Don’t shake hands because if you grip too tightly they will feel assaulted and attack you.” Pretty much the same briefing that you might give someone that is insistent on walking nude through the bear cage at the zoo. And in closing, “Are you sure that you’re going to make enough money to take this kind of risk??” Well, no. Now that you’ve put it that way, I’m not sure at all. But I was sure that I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to visit and try and do medicine in one of the most primitive places on earth. I’ve been here sixteen months now and have looked into a lot of eyes, shaken a lot of hands, huged many men and women, yet have never been attacked because of it.

Everywhere we go in the local area I see dart boards propped up on big sticks with lines of men and women throwing darts like crazy. I ask Gibson what it’s all about and he tells me in broken English that you get to throw three darts for K2 (two Kina, at this time about a dollar U.S.) If you get a dart inside any of the skinny lines, I can’t remember, the multipliers or something? Then you win a Coke. Coke and God seem to be on a nearly equal footing here. A case of Coke goes for about K50, or $25US, which is a couple of days pay, or maybe a bit more, for a local worker. I spend K6 and don’t win a Coke but with laughter and much gesturing it’s explained that I “almost” did, so I should keep trying! Carnies are alive and well in PNG.

We walk around and I buy my driver a pack of smokes, K20, we buy some ‘grain bread’ which turns out to be super delicious fresh baked bread that tastes exactly like the fresh baked bread that I know from home, K1. We pass a long line of men and women with their lips and teeth and ground around them stained bright red with Betel Nut spit. Kind of the local beer to the best of my understanding.

I tell Gibson, “I feel like a zebra here.” He says, “You are the first white man that has come here. (Here being the market, not the area in general) No white people from the project come here.” I’d just assumed that they did. I ask, “Is it safe for me here?” He says, “Don’t know. Not from this area.” Awesome. I later discover that for security reasons we aren't allowed at the market, information that was somehow not passed on to me during indoctrination.

Everything is going pretty well. We’re maybe a hundred yards from the ambulance when someone hits me in the back with a big rock. I can feel a big knot develop right away, and have that moment that everyone knows where you first register the shock, and then hold still to see if you can feel blood running from the area. There is blood that I can feel, but I don’t move a muscle. Not because I’m macho but because I don’t know what to do. Almost instantly the crowd around me begins to get really agitated. They are pushing in really close, there are machetes in every second or third hand and they are now being waved in the air in a really angry way. I am terrified. Only the second time I’ve been truly scared since I’ve been in this country. I've been here a while, I've heard these stories and seen the dead bodies. I know how this is going to end, as attacking a white man here is a grave offense. They wouldn't have started it if they didn't intend to finish it. This is going to end very ugly.

I have two thoughts right away. The first, and I swear that this is true. “Fuck, Babs is going to be SO pissed…I promised her that this wouldn’t happen.” The second, from dinking around in the martial arts when I was a kid is that a single person can have an advantage in a large crowd as long as he keeps his feet and keeps moving so that people can’t set up to hit him. No one wants to chop up their buddies. So I duck my head and reach into my pocket for my pocket knife. It's a silly little thing by local standards and I have no idea what I intended to do with it. What I do intend to do is to just keep plowing through people that, hopefully, other people won’t want to accidentally hit with their bush knives and make my way to my ambulance that is reinforced for just such a situation. I figure that Gibson can take care of himself and I start to move.

As I try and move Gibson grabs my arm, holding me in place. For some reason I can’t bring myself to fight him though my adrenalin is demanding that I fight everyone, so I just keep pulling away from him, but he’s holding tight saying, “No, wait! Wait! It’s ok!” I say, “Gibson, get the fuck off of me! Get the fuck off!” He says, “They not yelling you! They not angry you! They saying, ‘he’s one white man alone and he came here, that makes him a good and brave man!’” “They are saying that you are a good man! They looking for person from rock. Not angry you. They say you good and brave man! No one hurt you here.” My very next thought, and I swear that this is also true…”You just told me that you’re not from here! How the hell do you know what their intentions are?!?”

As he's explaining though, I can see that the crushing that was so terrifying and threatening moments before does seem like maybe it’s meant to keep me from getting hit any more. No one is looking like they want to chop me up. My whole body is vibrating with nerves. I’ve not been so scared 10 times in my adult life. The medic in me is thinking, “Oh man, you’re going to crash hard after this rush wears off. You should look out for that.”

Things start to calm down…people start to give me a little bit of room to breath. They are reaching out and touching me, touching my clothes, my back, my hair, holding my hand in a way that feels intimate, and I know from my experience here that it is, though not sexual. People seem to be taking turns rubbing big circles on the sore spot on my back, which at first doesn't feel like any kind of favor, but seemes to make it better after a few minutes. It’s pretty obvious that they know that I just about soiled my pants and they seem really happy to just touch until my heart rate drops somewhere back near normal. And it’s working. It feels really good to be touched by so many hands in such a kind way. I can feel my spirit soaking up their calm energy. In a few minutes I’m back to the happy place in my head. Grateful to have had such an experience but so very thankful that it’s over and that I’m not seriously injured or dead.

I wish that I had a way to explain what a moment like that is like. And old white guy, in a crush of maybe, two hundred little black as night people, nearly as primitive as any in the world, sharing their energy, their kindness, trying to make a stranger better and apologize for the rudeness of being offended in the first place…

What a terrifyingly perfect moment.