Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

  I travelled home to Wewak just before the nominations for the National General Elections began.     I went home to be with my father who was very old, frail, and sick.    I had no choice but to visit my father because he was admitted to the Boram General Hospital for medical attention.    To me relief he recovered before I arrived in town.    I took one of those early flights out on Sunday morning. I arrived in Wewak on a calm Sunday morning. A tranquil and easy feeling welcomed me after many years away.   But all these were shattered as I passed through Nuigo settlement to get to my home.    Nuigo road was the very road that I walked on to get to school in Mongniol Primary School, to Wewak town, to Dagua Market, to Meni Beach or to church at Wirui in my childhood years.    In those days we literarily walked in the night to the movies at Garamut Theatre or at the Wirui Sound Shell. Our mothers waited for us to return home after 11pm in the night or sometimes past midnight.    My gene

Muschu and Kairiru Island from Boutique Hotel, Wewak Hill An excerpt below is a teaser of the forthcoming personal memoir.... We were excited, sad, and also afraid of the journey. There were a lot of people on Wom Beach that day. The crowd was there to see the journey we were to take across the sea to the island known as Kairiru. Most of the year seven boys on the school barge had never been on a boat, let alone have any experience of the sea. The atmosphere was one of anxiety, despair, and trepidation. We just imagined where we were going to on this first boat trip. Our parents probably held their own fears at bay about releasing us off to a strange place. We held on to anything on the boat that can keep us steady and safe.   The moment I stepped onto the school barge I knew the journey to the world beyond familiar shores had begun. I was excited more than worried, as might have been the case with many of the new faces I was on the boat with. I was fortunate that I had th

Last week, in my lecture for the course Literature and Politics, I read the poem “Different Histories” to the 50 plus students. It was an important poem I had written when I was an undergraduate student, just learning to write and the thoughts that went into the poem have become more real to as I explained the return to the place of my birth in the month of January, 2019. Uncle Thomas Pomala, Michael Fischer, Thorsten Trimmpop, and Daniel Hui @ Songo in Forest, Ulighembi 2019 I made an unplanned visit to the forest place in the Prince Alexander Mountain range where my umbilical cord lies buried. On a fine day, the 8 th of January 2019 I drove up to Ulighembi Village in a hired 5 doors Toyota Landcruiser.   Accompanying me were three friends who flew all the way from the USA and Singapore. Thorsten Trimpop, the award winning filmmaker based in Chicago, the anthropologist, Michael Fischer based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui, arrived i