Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Is it hard to see that this country needs to have its own National Language Institute to train Papua New Guineans as linguists and literacy workers to serve as custodians of our Indigenous languages and as a special task force responsible for shouldering the national burden of eradicating literacy? We no longer can afford to lose many more of our languages. We are struggling with the slow pace in eradicating literacy. Language and literacy are the two sides of the same coin that we have not invested enough resources to develop. The National Language Institute can serve other purposes as well. It can serve as the central point in facilitating research, development, symposiums, translations, and publication of such data that pertains to the status of language, the linguistic properties of our languages, and the evidence of the intellectual or epistemological foundations of our languages and cultures. The Institute can also serve as the center of cross fertilization of languages and invo...

This week I am inspired to write about the origin of domesticated plants in New Guinea after learning of the significant discovery by archaeologists Prof. Glen Summerhays of the University of Otago and UPNG’s Dr. Mathew Leavesley, at Kosipe archaeological site. Congratulations to both of them as well as to Herman Mandui from the National Museum and Art Gallery for a spectacular job. The UPNG students who worked with them deserve praise for making the discovery of the century. The discovery is significant enough to warrant an extended story about the activities of our ancestors. It is our ancestors’ story as much as it is ours. There is more we need to discover about ourselves. I have always been a keen enthusiast for the peopling of the Island of New Guinea and the domestication of plants. The island of New Guinea is truly a world of its own basked in the mysteries of this world. Domesticated plants in New Guinea were introduced from the Southeast Asian train. The traditional food cr...

 Yauwiga displays his medals of honor. Courtesy of  Bikmaus Journal published by IPNGS  The only famous Papua New Guinean fuzzy wuzzy angel with a blue eye happens to be Paul Yauwiga Wankunale from Kusaun village in the Kubalia area of the East Sepik Province. I grew up marveled at this tall, well built, giant of a man from my area; legendary in his lifetime for his bravery in the Second World War, fighting alongside the Allied forces on Guadalcanal, Buka, Rabaul, Madang, Morobe, and the Sepik. Warrant Officer Yauwiga was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Bravery Award, and other such medals for his valiant war efforts. One such campaign is described in Lorna Fleetwood’s book, A Short History of Wewak: “On 27th March 1945 Yauwiga was with an Australian Infantry Brigade (A.I.B) party at Aravia. It was learned that an enemy party of about eighty Japanese was approaching their camp. While the A.I.B escaped with their codes and essential equipment Yauwiga took up a defen...

The inmates and the CIS officers at the Buimo prison outside of Lae welcomed me as an old friend in my visit to their space last week. I was there to facilitate a workshop on proposal writing and basic report writing. The workshop is a joint project involving the Bible Society of PNG, the Correction Institution Services and the National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat of the Department of Education. A year ago I facilitated a writer’s workshop. Out of the writer’s workshop the first anthology of prison writings is ready to be published. The book is a rare work as it brings together the writings of prisoners and warders who attended the course. In this year’s workshop I worked with them to come up with a tentative title for the book. The book is the first of its kind in the country. Seeing the participants from the last workshop again was reassuring in a lot of ways. Since the first workshop a lot has happened at the Buimo penitentiary. There was a mass break-out, the former comman...