Mawarero Woman, Rai Coast. Picture courtesy of Kessy Sawang or owner of www.pngwomen.com's friends (Jeremy and Team) at Finisterre Vision.
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, 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.
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 morn, 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 brothers, 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…
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.
The woman in the village is
lucky to have a cake of yellow soap. Her employment is constant, sun up to sun
down, she has no leave and there is no payment.
37 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…
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