St. Xavier's - Adventure High School

Most people have never heard of Papua New Guinea, and those that think they have, are sure it is in Africa or South America somewhere. This incredibly beautiful and unique country is the second largest Island in the world, Greenland being the first, and its people are just as diverse and fascinating as its flora and fauna.

One-quarter of all the language groups in the world come from Papua New Guinea and her sister state to the west, Iran Jaya. Most of these languages have never been documented or translated, and are spoken by only a few thousand people on Earth. As a result, the country has now developed two common ”lingua francas”, and people speak Motu in the Southern Papua half of the country, while Melanesian Pidgin is spoken throughout New Guinea and the highlands in the North.

In 1975, I was a C.U.S.O. (Canadian University Service Overseas) volunteer assigned to St. Xavier’s High School on Kairiru Island, which lies about 30 kilometers off the North coast, near the town of Wewak, East Sepik Province. St. Xavier’s was a boy’s Catholic boarding school, run by the Marist Brothers, a wonderful group of men. They were strictly a teaching order, and accepted me warmly, even though I wasn’t Catholic. I was to teach boys ranging from eleven to twenty years old, which had come from approximately twenty-seven different enemy tribes along the Sepik River.

Being a flat-lander from the prairie provinces of Canada, I was absolutely captivated by everything I saw, heard, smelled, and tasted. Kairiru was a tropical paradise that people from my part of the world only dream about. Fresh water streams, coral reefs, and even volcanic hot springs created an atmosphere that I could scarcely believe half the time. Coconut palms waved along sandy beaches, and coral reefs everywhere abounded with fish that have not yet been studied or classified. The jungle hummed with insects and birds that were never quiet, and the flowers bloomed incessantly, leaving their heady perfume hanging in the humidity.

Arriving at the island by airplane the first time, I shall never forget how I was struck by the thought that Kairiru looked just like an island in a story I had read as a child. When I was in school, there was a story called “Mafatu and the Shark”, that I had read over and over. There were pictures of Mafatu and his island, and now those images flooded my mind. I had come to Mafatu’s island, and believe me, my story turned out to be just as fun and interesting as his.

The first few months living on the island were a blur of new and exciting activities that I had never even heard of before, let alone tried!

My home-room class was forty-four boys in grade seven, only six of which had ever spoken to a white man before, and believe me, when I got there, I was WHITE! Some of my students had never even seen a white man before, other than the parish priest who may have come to their village.

Needless-to-say, I had my hands full learning Pidgin, working in the gardens, fixing outboard motors, chainsaws, maintaining our water system, and working in the daily clinic for the villagers and students. I happen to be a bit of a “Jack-of-all trades, which is how I got the job in the first place. I have always been ready to try something new, and love to learn something I didn’t know before. I can’t help it.

The first serious job I had to contend with was the condition of my students. Some of them had come from very isolated villages far up on the Sepik River. The Sepik is very much like the Amazon in many ways, except it isn’t as long. It has a huge swampy flood plain, which effectively cut off the people from each other, and drove them into a never-ending tribal war that was still going on to some extent when I arrived. The massive raids and head hunting that had occurred in the past were over, but some tribes were still engaged in bloody conflict far up in the bush. For them, nothing had changed.

Many of my boys from these far-flung villages were plagued by pestilences that have made man suffer since the first human looked at the moon and wondered what it was. Almost all had lice in great numbers, with the added bonus of multitudes of fleas that were incredible jumpers. About half of them also had bad cases of Scabies, which are particularly nasty in the humid tropics, where the scratching causes oozing sores wherever the infection spreads.

They were so busy scratching and tending their sores that they couldn’t sleep properly at night. On top of all that, Malaria of all three types is endemic throughout the whole area, and barely a day went by when two or three boys from each class weren’t down with fever.

I had grown up in a small town in Saskatchewan back in the fifties, so I knew what lice looked like, but I had never seen human fleas, or Scabies, and I was determined to eradicate them. I was on a mission, and I decided that if I never did another thing while I was in New Guinea, I was going to rid those boys of their vermin, no matter what.

Of course, the best way to get rid of lice is to shave off the hair, but these were all teen-age boys, in the flower of their youth, and they were not happy with the idea of shaving their heads like little rascal boys in the village. I had to find something else that would do the job.

Our resident technical expert, Brother William Borell, told me that a mixture of soap and Kerosene would kill all the adult lice, and then reapplication over two successive weeks would kill all the nits that hatched in the mean-time. I decided to try it.

I dissolved about thirty bars of Sunlight soap in some water, until there was nothing but a slimy smooth soup of soap, and then added an equal portion of Kerosene. After vigorous stirring, it was deemed ready and we all headed for the stream next to the school.

Being a new arrival to New Guinea, and still unsure of all the Pidgin words necessary to tell them what to do, I decided the best way was to demonstrate, and have them follow me. I stripped down, and jumped in the water, beckoning them in too.

I must admit, that getting naked in front of your students is not an easy thing to do, but on the other hand, you couldn’t ask for a better way to break the ice between two cultures. Standing there in the buff together, we all had a good laugh at our differences and similarities, and then got down to the job at hand.

Brother William had told me to have them lather up for fifteen minutes, and then rinse it out thoroughly, so we all cheerfully scooped it onto our heads and sat around to wait.

I don’t know if any of you have ever tried this treatment, but if you have, you will probably have anticipated what happened next. Kerosene is enough of an irritant on the hands if you use it clean off grease and dirt, but on the scalp it is like a million needles poking you. Add enough soap to make it into shampoo, and you’ve got a recipe for some serious suffering.

After five minutes I was ready to wash mine out, since I had no lice, but I thought I had better be a good example and keep it on the whole time they did. Five minutes turned to ten, and now some of them were starting to hop around in obvious discomfort. Those with more fortitude hung on stoically, but by then end of the fifteen minutes they were all itching to rinse, and we dove in thankfully. I thought my head was on fire, really. I don’t know how they did it so willingly, other than some stupid sense of masculinity that New Guineans are full of.

A week later we did it again, and once more after that, but I must admit that I never tried the third application. I never saw another louse on a student the whole time I was there.

The fleas were easier to deal with than I thought they would be. We just burned all their clothes from the village, and gave them new ones! Getting them out of the bed frames and dormitories was a bigger job, but not too complicated. We just took their beds apart, board by board, and singed them all thoroughly in a fire outside the dorm. No more fleas!

Scabies are caused by a tiny mite that burrows into the dermis of the skin in moist areas, and then proceeds to tunnel its way around the area, causing intense itching especially at night. Nothing we had on hand would touch them, so I headed for the Pharmacist in Wewak.

For half a month’s salary, he gave me a gallon can of Benzoic Acid compound that killed them in droves, believe me. Only a few applications of the greasy stuff would virtually eliminate them, and soon my boys were working away happily, unhindered by their need to constantly scratch. My efforts had rewarded me with a class that would finally really talk to me, and colleagues that respected me for my willingness to get down and dirty. I was in.

After a few months, living in the brother’s house had become tiresome, with them all rising early for prayers and such. I have always been a night-hawk, with more energy after the sun went down than before, and I was keen to get my own house away from everyone. A small flattened promontory above the school airstrip seemed the perfect place, and with some arranging and permissions given around the place, I planned to become a home-owner!

There is no such thing as Crown land in Papua New Guinea, as every tree and leaf is owned by someone, and it took a lot a lot of negotiations and exchanges to secure the rights to each tree I needed for my house. Never has a contractor spent more time with the construction of a home than I did picking every tree and branch that had to be used for mine. By the time I was done, I felt I knew each one, and could envision where they had all come from as I looked at them. I have lived many places since, but this has been the only one that was truly mine. It was primitive, rustic, and without any conveniences, but I loved it.

I had the assistance of forty-four boys in its construction, but that might seem better from your perspective than mine. There were boys from nineteen different camps in my class, and their ideas on how to build a house in the traditional way varied distinctly.

Each one had their own ideas on which type of tree to use for posts and which one to use for beams, as well as whether to use coconut fronds of Sago palms for the Morotta shingles on the roof. It was a learning experience for us all, as we struggled to come up with some sort of a compromise, and I must say the result made us all proud.

It was traditional house in most ways, tied together with bush Canda (cane) as they all were, but it had a few modern innovations in its design that made it stand out a bit. Instead of being wide open on the inside, it was divided into two rooms by a wall of plaited sago branch bark that gave it a very decorative look, and the boys had done an exceptional job painting the Morotta to make it colorful and bright. I couldn’t have been happier if it had been a mansion on Wall Street!

The best part about living in a thatched roof house in the tropics is the rain. When it rains, the sound of its falling thunders on the corrugated iron roofs was enough to wake the dead, and I just couldn’t sleep through it. The rain on a thatched roof however, is something quite different. It patters and drips while the rain builds up, and then settles down to a soft roar when it really comes down. I could sleep like a baby when it rained, and so did the boys.

Cool, dull mornings in the rainy season, when it never got above twenty-seven degrees Celsius, were hard to get the boys up and going, as they all had been raised in the village, where rainy days meant no work. Sundays, in particular were delicious, as no one had to get up until eight o’clock for missa (mass) at nine.

Kairiru had been the scene of many bloody struggles during World War II, when the Japanese invaded New Guinea with the intention of being able to attack Australia from there. There were still many relics of the war lying about, and at the Eastern end of the island, there were anti-aircraft installations and a submarine base that reminded us of the conflict.

There had been about fifteen hundred Japanese soldiers posted to the island during the war, and most of them had met a bitter end after the war. They had been sent to Muschu without food or water, and almost all had died.

If you would like to read about some about some of our discoveries on Kairiru of War artifacts, check out my story entitled, “Spelunking for Japanese Bones on Kairiru Island”, or “Muschu Island – Paradise or Japanese Hell”.

During my second year at St. Xavier’s, it was decided that we seriously needed a new library to house all the books we had accumulated. The old library was completely inadequate, now that the school accommodated nearly four hundred and fifty boys. After Independence on September of 1975, there had been a surge of new students into schools everywhere in the country.

I believe, and so does C.U.S.O., that education was the best way to help the people develop at their own pace. In fact, the motto of C.U.S.O. is, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Everyone was excited about building the new library, and with that many teenage boys around, labor was our best asset. Once we had settled on a plan that met our needs, we began work on the project. The most beautiful thing about working at St. Xavier’s was the incredible cooperation between everyone, and the absence of red tape. When we wanted something done, we did it, and if we didn’t have the materials, we farmed out our labor until we had the cash to go ahead.

Throughout my time on Kairiru, we built several teachers houses, the library, plus a fifty meter swimming pool, made entirely by hand.

The library was special project that almost everybody on the island lent a hand in somehow, and much attention was drawn to it right from the beginning with the discovery we made while clearing the land for the foundation.

As I said, Kairiru had been a Japanese base during the War, and had been bombed heavily. Many people don’t realize that a large number of bombs that are dropped don’t actually detonate when they hit the ground. Some are intentionally delayed to cause even more damage after-the-fact, but many just fail to go off period.

Having chosen our location to be the highest point on the campus, we began the initial leveling of the land and clearing away the bush. It was to be built just beside the airstrip that ran up from the beach to the base of Mount Malangis which dominated the island. It would have a fine view of the landscape, with Muschu Island in front of us to the South, and the mountains of the mainland of New Guinea in the background.

As we dug into the hillside a bit to obtain sufficient space for the construction, we were almost immediately stopped by the exposure of a large iron plate lodged in the ground. Attempts to remove it proved fruitless, so our headmaster, Brother Patrick Howley, instructed the boys to dig away the soil from around it to see how deeply it was buried. It only took a few minutes to uncover enough of the object to determine what it was.

Without doubt it was an unexploded American bomb, and it was a big one.

Fortunately, Brother Pat, was an experienced and trained explosive expert, having lived in New Guinea for many years and was well qualified to know how to handle such heavy ordinance. He immediately set up a large perimeter around the bomb so that no one would go near it, and contacted the Papua New Guinean Armed forces detachment in Wewak to inform them of our discovery. They felt that they probably had no one better qualified than he to deal with the situation, as he had done so in the past, so we decided to handle it ourselves, in typical Kairiru fashion.

The next day, Brother Pat and a hand-picked crew of teachers and senior students began the delicate job of completely uncovering the bomb and removing it from the site. I and two other teachers were assigned the task of carefully tying ropes around the fins and body, so that they could be attached to large Bamboo poles that we suspended above it. By mid afternoon we had everything securely tied, and all the soil cleared away so we could see the whole evil thing.

It was a five hundred pound bomb, which showed only a bit of damage to one of its fins from its high-altitude plummet. The South face of Kairiru was quite swampy, and the bomb must have just plowed into the mud and been covered by bush after the war. People had been walking over and around that site for thirty years, as the school trade-store was only a few meters away. It was a miracle that it had never gone off years earlier when the bush had been cleared from around the school and burned almost right on that same spot.

With forty boys all lifting carefully in coordination, we gently carried it slowly down to the beach. It was Brother Pat’s intention to detonate the bomb in the mouth of our small harbor to deepen it a bit, so we could land our boat during low tides.

The “Tau-K” was a thirty-five foot aluminum landing craft that could come right up onto the beach to unload, but couldn’t always get through the reefs when loaded and the tide was out. We all thought this would be a great way to put the bomb’s destructive power to good use, and villagers from all over the island came to watch as we prepared to blast.

Approaching the final destination, the boys began their traditional hooting, that in tribal warfare is a frightening sound. Young men preparing to fight always have this chant, and it can make the hair on your neck stand up, even when you know there won’t be a fight. They triumphantly lowered the bomb to the beach to await further instructions.

We waited until the tide had gone out to its lowest point, and then we very carefully maneuvered the bomb into position at the bottom of the harbor mouth. Hoping to absorb as much of the impact as possible in the water, we again waited for the tide, which wasn’t to be at its highest until the next morning just after sunrise.

There was no need to ring the bell to wake everyone that morning, as the school was up and buzzing long before seven. By then I had my camera ready, lined up with the hundreds of other come to watch. Brother Pat had attached a stick of Gelignite to the side of the bomb and was now wiring the detonator. With a countdown chanted by the whole crowd, he set it off.

I had previously been around when dynamite was used to blow up beaver dams back in Saskatchewan, but I was totally unprepared for the concussion which struck me, knocking me flat. I, and all the others gathered for the spectacle were literally “blown away”, and we were standing at least two hundred meters from the blast, far up the beach. I was stunned for a moment, but by the time the debris started to fall, it was definitely time to run. I took two seconds to snap one picture, and then ran further up the airstrip to get away from the water, rock, mud, and fish that were raining down on us.

The wind was blowing briskly from the west, so most of the water that fell down missed us, but the chunks of coral were another matter. One piece actually crashed through the South side of the Church, the nearest building to the beach. No one was hurt, but everyone was certainly surprised at the size of the explosion, even Brother Pat. He had been involved with the detonation of a two hundred fifty pound bomb in Wewak a few years earlier, and it had been nowhere near as large a blast. We were fortunate he had insisted that we allow the tide to rise as high as possible. The deeper water provided some protection against the force of the bomb, and it had also directed it more downward. The resulting hole at the mouth of the harbor was nearly ten meters deep now, more than enough for the boat to enter no matter what the tides were like.

As soon as the last pieces had fallen there arose a great roar of a cheer from all the boys, and immediately they began a massive sprint down to the harbor. Island people had learned early in the war that the big bombs could actually be a windfall if they never struck inhabited areas. Any that landed in the water produced geysers of water, and great quantities of fish and other animals stunned by the blast near them.

Fish from as far as one hundred meters away were now rising to the surface belly-up, and the boys scrambled to get as many as they could before they recovered. Within a few minutes they were proudly pushing four wheel barrows full of all kinds of fish up the kitchen for a big feast that night.

Of course, Brother William Borell had to examine them all, and plucked a few out the group for further study. He was constantly collecting samples of plants and animals to send off to Melbourne for identification. In all, he eventually “discovered” more than twenty species of fish, numerous insects and plants, as well as one snake not known to exist in New Guinea.

He has published many of his works and was awarded an Honorary Masters Degree from the University of Melbourne in 1992, a few years before his death. If you are interested in tropical plants and animals, you might want to look up his work. He was an incredibly intelligent man, who had lived through imprisonment by the Japanese during the war in Singapore. He spoke five languages, and what he didn’t know about really wasn’t worth discussing much. I’ll think of him for the rest of my life.

As I mentioned, our side of Kairiru was swampy, and Malaria was always a serious problem. Many nights I have sat up with a fevered boy raving with delirium, and three boys died during my stay at the school. Cerebral Malaria is a terrible death that strikes without warning, and even the biggest, strongest boys were not immune.

One boy in particular was the head prefect of his senior class, and was very handsome and muscular. His name was Joseph Yarahui, and he had spent a lot of time with me in the machine shop fixing out board motors and chainsaws.

One evening he and a group of others were playing rugby in front of my house, and he had called to me to come and join them. As a Canadian, I had never played Aussie rules, but they were having such a good time wrestling each other down, I had to give it a try.

Joseph was so strong that it usually took two or three others to bring him down, but if he could get in the clear he was gone. Running like a demon in bare feet he would charge through their lines and score almost every time he got the ball. I was totally impressed.

The sun sets early in the tropics, and by seven o’clock it is too dark for sports, and the boys had night study to attend to, so off they went until nine. After night study, Joseph came to me in my Science Lab office, complaining of a fever. That in itself was very common, so I gave him the first four tablets of Chloroquin, two Aspirin, and told him I would come to his dormitory as soon as I was finished making my rounds of the other dorms.

By the time I got to him at ten o’clock, he was huddled on his bed, covered with everything he could find for warmth, shuddering with the chills of a bad bout of fever. I could tell from the whites of his eyes that he was in serious trouble. They were yellowy and bloodshot, and he was already becoming delirious. I decided that I needed the experience of an older hand, so I sent one of the boys up to get Brother Bryan Leak, our Deputy Head-master. He was a wonderful man, who had spent more than ten years in New Guinea, and not much could surprise him.

He confirmed my suspicions, and decided to administer an intramuscular shot of Choloroquin immediately. We were able to get him to take a couple more aspirin with some water, but he soon lost consciousness to the fever and began thrashing and yelling.

By midnight he was much worse, and we were at our wits end what to do for him. Brother Pat was summoned from the monastery, and Father Peter came as well. As soon as I saw Brother Pat’s face I knew that things were very bad. He had been through this before, and he knew the signs.

His fever kept rising, and we carried him into the showers to try to cool him off, but it was all to no avail. Towards four o’clock in the morning he began foaming at the mouth and screaming and calling in his ”Tok Ples”, or local tongue. He was mad with fever and tried to bite us, and fought with all his might to be free of his pain, but he could not.

Just before sunrise he passed into a coma and shortly afterward his heart stopped. We all wept unashamedly, and I still cry when I think of him. Every boy in the dorm was present, and we sat with him until dawn and prayed that he would finally be at peace now.

Despite all the trials and tribulations of the last thirty years, that night has been etched in my mind as the worst, and was the only time I have actually been holding someone who died. When adults die it is a shock, but when a child dies, it pains the heart even more. All that lost potential and ability can never be regained. I have determined that he won’t be forgotten, so I tell you about him.

Out of necessity we held the funeral the next day, even though his people were from far up river, and could not get there in time to attend. We sent radio messages in to Wirui mission, and they forwarded them on to the parish priest serving his village. It was a terribly sad day, and classes were canceled all week, as we tried to cope with our loss.

He was a very special young man, and everyone who wanted to say a few words spoke at the service.

His class-mates were most affected, and we had to do something to cheer them up and get their spirit moving again. We decided that an overnight camp out on Muschu Island for the senior boys would be appropriate, so I ferried them all over to the beach on Muschu, and we had our own kind of wake.

It was a calm, clear, moonlight night, and the boys stayed up all night singing Island songs and recalling wonderful memories of their four years with Joseph. He had been two months short of graduating from high school, and everyone had a humorous story or incident to relate. We had many a good laugh, especially about stories of his exploits with the ladies.

He was very handsome, as I said, and the village girls around Kairiru had admired and pestered him a bit. Some of the tales of his night-time rendezvous’ with the local girls brought roars of laughter that could likely be heard on Kairiru, which was only a kilometer away.

By the time the last story was told, the stars had all faded and the sun was peaking up over the eastern ocean horizon. We were all bleary-eyed and tired, but washed free of our grief and ready to move on.

I had several pictures of Joseph, so we put one in a big frame and mounted it in the library, which we dedicated to him. I often wonder if the “Joseph Yarahui” library still stands, or if it has fallen into disrepair and rot, as things in the tropics do so quickly.

These are only a few of my many adventures, both happy and sad, that occurred on Kairiru. If you wish to hear more of my life in New Guinea, please check out my other stories under the username: Doctor Bob, or Uncabobbert

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