South Sea Gold: Chapter Twenty Two

The trip to Owego went smoothly. Kim showed her teaching certificate to the Milne Bay Province education office in Alotau and explained that she was doing a study on introducing elementary education in rural villages. The education officer saw no problem, on a short term basis, and gave her a brief note of informal approval.

Not wishing to call unnecessary attention to their arrival, the four of them, Tom, Matt, Kim and Morrie, chose to fly to an airstrip at one of the larger islands. They then hired a motorboat for the remaining one-hour trip to Owego's second village, which, they learned, simply went by the name West Owego.

Beverli, the guest house proprietor, was delighted to see new customers so soon after Sophia's promise to recommend her place. "Why didn't you bring her back with you?" she asked Matt in Tok Pisin, as Tom translated. Sophia had to work, Tom explained, but might come later. Tom made a courtesy call to the village headman, Keri, to say that his wife was a school teacher, studying ways to introduce schools into villages, and hoped they might talk with some of the local families. Keri asked if this was the school that had been promised by the Alotau office.

"No," Tom said, "A real school will come soon, but my wife might be persuaded to teach some of the village children during the short time she is here, if the village elders wish."

Keri nodded. "I think many of them would like that. May I talk with my friend Yari, too? He is hetman of the bay village."

"Yes, certainly." Tom didn't think it necessary to say that he already knew Yari Banta. "Meanwhile, I am recovering from a recent injury and am here to gain strength. But if I can be of any help in simple work around the village, please ask. Our guest, Matt, whom you may have already met, is from Hong Kong. He speaks English and Chinese, but not Tok Pisin."

"I speak some English, but not well. We will get along. Welcome to our village."

Beverli proved to be a fountain of local information. Originally from West Papua she and her Bengali husband, a trader, had lived in the Indonesian part of New Guinea, until he had died four years ago. She used her small inheritance to move to Milne Bay and set up the guest house she had always dreamed of. Her twenty-year-old son and an older married daughter both lived in West Owego; the daughter had a little girl a couple of years older than Morrie. Kim soon had several acquaintances in the village, some of whom had young children.

Late the next day, Tom and Matt walked over to the main village on the bay, looking for Yari Banta. They found him at his home, preparing for his night shift at the mine. He remembered them both, and also remembered that the boss from Port Moresby didn't want Tom around the mine because of his connection with the Port Moresby newspaper. "You are both welcome in my village," Yari said, "but I get in trouble if you go to the mine, Mr. Akani."

"What about me?" Matt asked. "Is it all right if I visit my engineer friend from Hong Kong?" Tom translated.

"Big boss said nothing about that. I guess it would be all right," Yari said.

"Can you tell me anything about the slurry pipe line?" asked Tom.

"Last landslide crush it again, where it passes close to the hill. Stronger new pipe will come on airplane in about two days. They pass less slurry a day now, but on more days. Pipe still leaks. Big boss says don't shut it off."

Kim had her temporary school set up to start four days after their arrival. Six children from West Owego and four from Bay Village would come for an hour or two each weekday morning. Kim learned that few villagers kept close track of time. Some other families thought that school might be a good idea, but decided to wait and see what it was like, and how much it would interfere with children's duties at home. The children adopted Morrie as their mascot, entering into their games, and content to draw pictures while the older children learned to read.

Tom and Matt talked with the village men, became more acquainted with fishing and subsistence farming, taking notes for further background stories. On the third day a cargo plane arrived, and they walked to the airstrip to see if the new pipe had come. They found four men loading three dozen four-metre sections of new pipe onto the mine's flat-bed lorry along with several crates. The Chinese resident engineer was signing a manifest. Matt asked,"Getting extra, in case of more breaks?"

"Better than that," the engineer said. "We're rerouting the pipeline into the field on the other side of the road to go around the landslide spot."

"My girl friend said a woman engineer would have planned it that way to start with."

The engineer laughed. "Once in a while, the women are right. But the mine boss thinks it was my idea, and and I'm going to let him go on believing it."

Matt walked up to see the damaged pipe and reported back to Tom and Kim, "There's still a large area of mud and leakage there by the side of the road. They're going to go under the road upstream, and again downstream from the trouble area, and there seems to be enough slope there so the flow should be good. The pipe will be about ten meters away from any more landslides."

"Any more kids making mud pies there?" asked Tom.

"Not while I was there. But it's nice mud for it."

"Except for traces of cyanide."

"Right."

"What do kids eat down here?" Tom asked Kim that night. "The rice Beverli feeds us comes from bags, not from local fields. Everybody has fish, of course. Sometimes pork on special occasions."

"Most of the families grow manioc for starch, here in the lowlands. It takes a while to prepare it; you have too boil it or soak it a long while to get the poison out. What I've seen in the gardens here are a kind of banana, a few coconut trees. She says yams don't do as well here as they do in the mountains, and there aren't many sago palms. The staple food in most families here in Owego is manioc. The bitter kind is usually easiest to grow in their soil, so that's what the kids usually get. They have green vegetables in their gardens, but maybe not as much as they should."

"But there's enough food?"

"If the parents are good farmers, yes. Maybe not always well balanced, especially when a parent is sick or disabled." Kim thought for a few minutes. "Kids here seem to be well fed, but somehow they aren't as full of energy as many kids back home."

Kim's concern grew stronger two days later, when one of her pupils from Bay Village failed to come to class. One of her companions told Kim, "Palli got very sick last night. Sharp pains in her legs and belly, so she stayed in bed today."

"I'm sorry to hear she is sick. Does she have fever?" Kim asked.

"I don't know," said her friend. "She falls down when she tries to walk."

Kim left Morrie with Tom when class was over, and walked back to Bay Village with her pupils. They took her to Palli's house, where Palli's grandmother was massaging the little girl's legs. Palli smiled when she saw her teacher. Her speech slurred a little, but she seemed alert. Kim felt her arm; not hot, but she was trembling. "Are you cold, Palli?"

"No." She seemed to have a spasm then, and cried out. "My legs hurt me."

Kim watched her for several minutes. "What's wrong with her?" asked Grandmother.

"I don't know. Some infection perhaps . . ." Kim really had no idea.

"Is it a curse, do you think?" asked Grandmother.

"No, I don't think so," said Kim.. . . "Has the Clinic nurse looked at her? That might be a wise thing to do. Can her father carry her there?"

"Her father died in the mine," her grandmother said, "but I will ask her uncle."

Kim was very troubled as she walked back to West Owego. "I've never seen anything like that before," she told Tom and Matt. She was wide awake, not hot, but trembling. The family said she fell several times when she tried to walk."

"Do they immunize against polio down here in the provinces?" Tom wondered.

"I don't know, but I'm glad Morrie has had all his shots." She spent much of the afternoon looking through her Home Guide to Children's Health, but could find nothing remotely like what she had seen that morning.

Next morning, she asked her pupils about Palli.

They were all excited. "Lisa has the same thing! She hurts and she falls down!" The children from both villages could talk of nothing else. Kim did what she could to have them focus on reading, but she finally closed the class early. She told Tom and Matt, "I think you ought to look into this. Are we going to have an epidemic?"

They walked over to the village on the bay, and visited both families. Tom recognized Palli's grandmother. "You are the lady that visited us at the helicopter the day after your son died in the mine, aren't you?"

"Yes." Her Tok Pisin was halting but understandable. "What is happening to my family? My son has died. Is my little girl going to die too?"

"What did the nurse at the clinic say last night?" Kim asked.

"He said it was a virus infection. He gave her some panadol for the leg pain, but it hasn't helped."

Tom looked at Matt. "I'm baffled."

He was even more shaken after stopping at Yari Banta's house. The head man had another child to report: a ten-year-old boy, who had taken sick that afternoon.

They went with Yari to visit him. Like the other two children, he had leg pain and was unable to walk. Tom knew very little about medicine, but he tried moving one of the boy's legs. The leg was stiff, but not paralyzed. The boy himself could move it a little, but certainly not in a normal way.

"How did this start?" Tom asked.

"He and his brother had been working in the family's garden this morning. When it was time to go eat their morning meal, he and his older brother raced each other back to the house. This boy won, but after he had sat down to eat, he couldn't get up again, and said his legs hurt," said the father.

"What did he have to eat?"

"Only what he has every morning, a bowl of manioc and a bit of fish, same as the rest of the family."

The clinic nurse had little to add when they checked with him. "With three children sick at the same time, it's surely a virus," he said. "They should start to improve in a couple of more days, with some rest and plenty of water to drink. Not to worry, yet."

Kim was thankful next day that no more illness appeared among her school children. She even had a new pupil from Bay Village. On the other hand, the three sick ones were not improving. Palli thought her leg pain was a little better, but she still couldn't walk by herself.

That afternoon, Yari Banta called a meeting of the families in his village. No one had any new illness to report nor any change in the status of those who were ill. Village opinion on the cause of the illness was divided: some agreed with the clinic nurse. The farmers blamed the pipeline; four people believed the miners had brought a curse by wounding the spirit of the mountain with their drills. Arguments were growing acrimonious and Yari finally called a halt.

"Angry words are not helping our sick children. The mine clinic's nurse does not have medicine that is helping. This trouble is something uncommon. The district health sub-center will not have people who can deal with this. They should go to the hospital in Alotau."