Paul's PNG Collection

Papua New Guinea 2008-10

The Intimate Life of a Rascol

I was leaning against a truck wilting slightly from the fierce heat of the mid-day. The truck driver was taking a break from his leisurely maintenance schedule in preparation for the run to Lae, some 100 kms down the coast.  

Although he was now in Madang, it emerged that his childhood was spent in Port Moresby. As with most men between the ages of twenty and thirty something it doesn't take long for the conversation to turn to past indiscretion.  

“Oh, in my early days I was a rascol.”  

“What sort of things did you do?”  

“We stole cars mainly”, he grinned hugely at the memory. 

“How did you get into that?”  

“My sister started going out with a Goilala boy. He knew all of the big criminals, and it was exciting to know them.”  

“It gave you a lot of status.”  

“Yes, we thought we were important and no-one could hurt us. It was our protection.”  

“But you ended up here – why did you stop being a rascol?”  

“One time three of us went out and started breaking into a car in the road. We didn't know that the man next door was a policeman. He came out and we ran away but he shot. My friend got a bullet right here.” He pointed to a spot between his eyes.  

“He was killed.”  

“Sure.”  

“So that's why you gave up?”  

“Oh you grow up and realise things. When I was at school, I was always top of the class, but I ended up dropping out. Now I wish I had more education.”  

In our own locality a local young man in his twenties ran across the road to greet us.  
 

“I see you walking around and I wanted to say hello.”  

Within minutes we knew that the local gang was called the 007s ,but was not dangerous. They were expert housebreakers. But the Goilalas in a neighbouring area would rob you of your shoes and kill you without thinking. Another group held up cars and so on.  

“They all know me.”  

I heard a similar story from David who came from a settlement in Gordons 5 mile.   

“They like me round here; they all know me.”  

The difference with David was that he was trying to form a group to start a small business. His members were disabled like him. He walked with a crutch and one leg was missing below the knee.  

When I had known him for a month or so he came into the office. He was keen to talk.  

“Where are you going?”  

“I have to go the court.”  

This was the start of a series of startling stories. David explained that he used to be a rascol. As usual this was accompanied by a huge grin. He had a gang of youths, but he was the leader.   

His first real incident was encountered close to one of the settlements on the outskirts of Port Moresby. He and his friends had hi-jacked a four-wheel drive. These are usually quickly hidden and dismantled for parts. On this occasion they had been spotted by a Police patrol car and a chase took place. Shots were fired.   

“They didn't get me I ran into the settlement.”  

David knew by this stage that he had an audience and ventured into the tale of his greatest triumph and the point of his downfall.  

First let me explain about the Brian Bell Plaza. Brian Bell is an old Australian businessman who has built up one of the most lucrative chain of Department stores across PNG. His goods are usually Australian quality, and he charges top price for a complete range of electrical, home and clothing items. Here in Port Moresby he has built a three-storey shopping plaza with escalators and shops opening onto a central open space. This is modern and smart shopping for PNG and is situated very close to our office.  

David had hatched a plan. It was fool proof. First a car was stolen and the driver parked near to the Plaza, but far enough away to ensure that no suspicion was aroused. The boys concealed their handguns in billums (locally made bags) and entered the plaza in their school uniforms. They approached the security guards and explained that they were doing a school project. They spent the next twenty minutes writing studiously in their books as they surveyed the scene and worked their way towards the main office area.  

At just the right moment he nodded to his crew, and they approached the dozing guard by the door. The guard was quietly made aware of the risk to his well-being through a note handed to him and continued to sit quietly as the boys entered the secure area. The staff were lined up and ordered to remove their clothes.   

“There was even a white woman there.”  

“Did you make her take off her clothes?” He giggled and nodded.  

“Then we made them lie on the floor and taped their hands and mouths.”  

They put jewellery and a lot of cash from the safe into their billums and left the frightened and embarrassed staff. David had instructed his boys not to rush on any account, and they slowly walked onto the escalator and out of the store.  

The car was waiting, and they quietly slid into their seats. Everything had worked perfectly. They would now drive quickly away from the area and be too far away to track when the hoist was discovered. The car pulled away and then stopped.   

Port Moresby has a steady flow of traffic along its highways and side roads, but rarely are there traffic jams, that is until the day of the robbery. They sat in a queue of traffic in front of the store. David told them to stay quiet and act normally. They waited a few minutes. By now the alarm had been raised and there was noise and confusion growing in front of them on the street in front of the store. Policemen arrived and started to look into the cars in the queue. David had to act. Each was given a direction to walk in and told not to run on any account. The car was pulled over and they walked calmly up the street and took their several paths. David had turned into the main shopping square just 50 metres to the right of the hold-up street. He walked through the buai chewing, shouting throng and out of the far side of the Square.   

The Police, meanwhile, had rushed to the scene at a leisurely pace and saw the boys splitting up. Groups of policemen also split up to cover David's possible routes of escape.  

As he reached the next road David heard a shout. A policeman was coming towards him with his revolver drawn. David pulled out his handgun and fired at the policeman. He fired many times until the eight bullets he had were finished. The policeman approached.  

“Get down on the road.”. David stood glaring at him. 

“Get down on the road .” No response. A shot rang out.  

David lay on the road as the policeman stood over him, gun still trained on the helpless fugitive. He picked up the billum, looked into it and shot second bullet into David's leg. A man and a woman tried to help him by making a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood. They were told to leave him and sent away.  

It was now the policeman's turn to walk calmly away with the billum full of cash and jewellery. He was not seen again.  

Our area is close to the Central Hospital and somehow David was taken in by wantoks as news spread like a brush fire around the buay market. When he came out again his life had been saved but his leg hadn't. David's visit to the court, he explained, was to seek compensation for the shooting and the needless loss of his leg.  

“They didn't ever find any stolen things on me, so they think the policeman shot me without any reason. And I also blame the hospital. They didn't have to cut my leg off.”  

Now David is a popular ex-rascol with a rough wooden crutch and a daily battle to survive.  

If this sounds a little like a Hollywood movie you will find plenty who will tell you that youth see films and want to imitate celluloid life. Poor quality graffiti is common along every corrugated fence and wall and another ‘real life' heist bested even David's daring adventure. Fake Policemen, a helicopter landing on a bank roof shot down by a real policeman, villains shot dead. David himself tells you that his life was like a film you see on the T.V.  

“But it is different when you are there.”  

“ When did you start being a rascol?”   

“Oh at about 14 or 15 years old. I was a street kid”. 

David tells a story of abandonment by parents at a young age, of a rootless lost childhood. Two days later Tsotsi, the moving South African film about an African rascol was on the T.V. and the character was also named David. The same motifs were woven into their lives.  

“I never really had anyone around.” He is almost embarrassed to talk of his parents, dismisses it lightly, but registers a sense of loss and the slightest hint of vulnerability.”  

“There are lots of kids on the streets around Gordons Market. You know Gordons Market” I nod.  

“I have been there a few times.”  

“That is where all of the stolen and smuggled things are sold. Some of the kids are only 8 or 10 years old and they smoke marijuana and get drunk with the older boys.”  

“Do they listen to you – can you help them?”  

“No, they just ask me “are your words going to fill my stomach?” They listen for a while and then run off to get more drugs.” He returns to his theme.  

“For years I never lived anywhere. Wherever I was I just slept there, on the street, in a doorway. “He mimed going to sleep with his head on his arms. Next morning you just get up and start again wherever you are.”  

With the streets as his home; with the pavements as his bed; with the young drunks as his family his destiny was fashioned in the untouchable, unreachable world of lost childhood. Like some monster of the deep, David was spawned in the murky depths of an ocean too strange and inaccessible for human comfort, rising to gorge on the frail flesh of succulent normality.  

The loss of David's leg was not the first time he had been wounded. He tells of the time he robbed a restaurant just few minutes' walk from my home and close to the Port Moresby International School where Julia's friends Annie and Wolfgang work and live.  

“We planned it for a while. There was me, the son of the Police Commander of Southern Region, and that one from Popendeta I told you about.” He had described how his best friend from Popendetta in Oro Province had recently been caught by Police near his home and had his legs and arms cut off by them before being castrated and thrown into the Ocean.  

“You know many of the kids who become rascols are not like me. They come from rich homes.”  

“Why do they do get involved?”  

“Some of them don't want to get things from their parents and they like the fun and the excitement.” It was noticeable that David consistently referred to his activities as “playing crime”. 

“Anyway, we were told by our contact inside the restaurant that the office air-con was broken. We got some blue overalls from an air-con firm and went to the office with a toolbox. There weren't any tools in it, just a gun. The Indian bossman let us in. I handed him a note. It said that this was a hold up and told him to open the safe. We made him and his secretary take off their clothes. Then we gagged them with his socks and tied up their hands and feet. We stuffed it in his mouth. It was easy and we had our stolen car outside. Then just as we were leaving, we heard a big bang. Our back tyre just exploded. We were lucky. We were close to The International School.”  

A white woman had just parked, as usual, to wait for her daughter to get into the car. She had the small kids in the back seat and was dreamily listening to music. Her reverie was soon interrupted by ‘breaking news' in the form of a heavy-jowled face at the side window. The face was accompanied by a gun and she and the children were bundled from the car. The boys jumped into the car and sped towards town, leaving a shocked and distraught mother and children on the side of the road.  

The boys quickly decided to leave town and drove back past the scene of their misdeeds. The car was spotted. A Police vehicle gave chase, and shots were fired from both cars. David, sitting in the back seat felt an intense pain in his back. The car swerved to the side of the road and …. At this point David turned round and raised his shirt. There was a large scar on the lower part of his back.  

“This is where the bullet hit me.” He turned to face us.  

“It came out here”. He pointed to an even bigger wound where the bullet had smashed its way out, somehow missing vital organs. 

“Weren't you bleeding a lot? What did the Police do?”  

“Yeah, blood was running down my shirt. The driver wanted to get out and run, but I wouldn't let him. I put a Magnum next to his head and told him to drive off fast. But he had the hand brake on and the car went round and round. They jumped out and ran.”  

“Were you still in the car?”  

“I was lying on the seat and somehow the police didn't see me. They chased off after the other two. It was like there was some magic on me. I got out of the car and went across the road to PNG Power. They still didn't see me, and people were looking up the road at the chase. I got into an PNG Power pick-up with a driver and a passenger. I told them I had been shot, and they took me to the hospital. We even went through a road block and police let us go. I was trying to hide the blood on my clothes.”  

David was in hospital for two weeks. A police guard was placed on the ward. After two weeks David made an excuse to go to the toilet and left the hospital undetected. The magic was still working. He went back to his 5 Mile settlement. It wasn't long before the police got a lead and started to search the settlement. They were asking if people had seen a wounded man coming back from the hospital. David, by now feeling invulnerable, went over and chatted to policemen sitting by their car. He described how he made a huge effort to walk without a limp. After some time, he saw a taxi and got in telling them loudly that he wanted to go to an area far across town. Once out of the area he left the taxi and was clear away. The police later asked the taxi driver if he had seen the wounded fugitive.  

“Yes, he was the one you were talking to when I picked him up.”  

David had many more stories; most involved the same themes.  

“How is it that you had such a tough childhood, but you still feel comfortable talking to someone like me?”  

“You must be able to talk to the bossman. Most of our crimes need someone to tell us when money is available. We start talking to someone at a bar and maybe they talk about their work then we offer them a deal if they help us to steal the money.”  

One of these jobs involved a big payroll being transferred in a cardboard box from Port Moresby to a remote area of logging.  

“The accountant told us when it would come. We waited at a restaurant. When the car pulled up the driver found a Magnum pointing at his head. We drove up the road and met a police car. They took us to the house of a wantok. She is a stewardess for Air New Guinea. We counted out the money – K20,000 for each of us K6,000 for the police and a couple of thousand for the woman.”  

“What do you do with the money?”  

“We can't put it in the bank, so we spend it. We give some around to friends and wantoks, drink a lot of beer, maybe take some girls around. It goes quickly.”  

“Have you ever killed anyone in the hold-ups?”  

“I have killed three people – one policeman, one security guard and another person.”  

He goes on to describe how one hold up went wrong, and he was chased up the side of a steep mountain by armed policemen. He tired and ran into the nearest house. He told a young woman and a man to come with him. They were terrified. He tried his magic again and walked back down the mountain with a billum full of money and a gun. They walked past the policeman, but he shouted at them to stop. David told them to keep walking, and the policeman fired a shot. As he came towards them David shot the policeman dead.  

“They were scared.” He said of the two unwilling companions. “She urinated”, he indicated the area of soiling. This was also a common detail repeated in his descriptions.  

“How did you feel about killing the policeman?”  

“What do mean?”  

“Did it feel bad doing that?”, He almost sneered, but half smiled instead. 

“When he is holding an M16 and coming to kill you can't worry about that.”  

David's killing of a security guard was even more chilling. The security guard was shot when he started shouting that the strangers – two boys and two girls - were rascols.  

“I stood over him and said, “you alright; or do want some more?” Then he made some breaths, and he died.” It didn't seem to be a matter for remorse.  

“So, when did you stop being a rascol? Was it when you lost your leg?”  

“Now I have decided to stop, but I stole three cars even when I had one leg.”  

“Were you not worried that you couldn't run away?”  

“No, a car is faster than a man on legs.”  

“So how do you survive today?”  

“I still know everyone. They come round and give me a bit of money when they get some from playing crime and now, we want to start some small businesses with our disables.”  

I asked him if he had ever been caught. He had been on remand several times but always managed to talk his way out of it in court. Prison was a tough place.  

“You can't back down. One boy cheated on me. I got him in a corner and smashed him in the mouth. There was no more trouble.”  

David is 23 years old and if you met him sober, you would find him to be a charming companion.  

LATER  

David seemed to be making an effort. He attended the sessions at the Disability Workshop to learn carpentry skills. Then he decided to try to go fruit picking in Australia and I helped him to get to an interview. However, over time his attendance at the workshop became more erratic and the last we saw of him was threatening staff and my housemate, Armstrong, in the office of the disability service organisation opposite mine, trying to get money. He seemed to have melted back onto the streets.  

Modern destruction, Rascols https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86in8frImaA      Youtube video made 2022 gives a flavour.  

Manu's Last Stand.  

Manu has a voice that comes from somewhere in the depths of a primeval swamp in the pit of his stomach. Words bubble up through the mud and emerge like smoke rings. They seem to have some sort of shape until you try to grasp them. His guttural offerings are accompanied by a fierce, humourless stare. This is a kenaka, a man from the bush, a fighting man with a fierce will.  

When I asked Manu how old he was he said thirty five, thought, shrugged and then said he did not know. He did know that he had been born in a remote area of highland Tari and had not been back for twenty seven years and never spoken to his wantoks since. Now he was marooned in Port Moresby. He lives illegally on the premises and, although threatened with the sack from his guard job, says he has nowhere to go because he has no wantoks in town. His guard pay offers little hope of saving the K700 (£140) he needs to get back home for his older years. So what little he earned went on beer and pokies.  

I developed a desire to help Manu get back to his home, with a slight unease about what he might find when he got there. But I know from battered experience that giving money is not the solution. I decided to find out how much it mattered to Manu.  

One evening in January I sat with the three guards and in my best pidgin asked them if they would like to start a small business. Of course they said they would. No, they couldn't work together because they would argue. So the small but significant money I had for them was to be split three ways. Each was given the challenge of deciding how they would spend the money.  

The next day I came to them again. The two Mikes settled for the safe option – buay (bettle nut) and smokes. Manu had thought big he was going to cook lamb flaps. I talked to him about the vision of saving money and perhaps even getting back home. He was immediately born again and, if he could write, would have signed the pledge. He would renounce the pleasures of the flesh. Beer and pokies were for sinners. I laughed and said he didn't have to give them up, just save something.   

“ Yu bigpela man nau. Yu richpela man tru.” Manu laughed and looked coyly at the ground with a shy pride. In the highlands the big man is the wealthiest man. The man who can support the most wives, provide the most pigs at weddings and funerals and thus has the most power in the village. So telling Manu he was a big man was a real compliment. Life could not be better.  

For the next week life was transformed. On the street an oil drum was turned upside down, holes drilled for air and wood used for heat. A roof was constructed over the drum. Manu turned into Vai Vai Avenue's Gordon Ramsay seven days a week. Bananas were added to the cuisine and the street kitchen began to turn into a meeting place. A gaggle of people could be seen chewing the fat, literally and figuratively. Manu was a happy man.  

But war clouds were gathering. Before Christmas the Governor of Port Moresby had declared his vision of a new, Port Moresby metropolis. It was to turn from a dirty dangerous collection of poverty ridden settlements into Singapore. Buay- stained pavements would become clean, fountains would be built, parks were to be constructed. Tourists would find POM irresistible. To do this he would stop the disgusting habit of chewing buay. His first efforts were not the biggest success. He was soon complaining in the press that people were ignoring his words and posters, bearing his image were covered in buai spit. Now he got serious. This was PNG, where the only language universally understood was force.   

Gradually, people began to notice that a new militia was operating in town – City Rangers. They came in small groups and snatched the wares of street sellers. The professional classes began to write in the papers how pleased they were that poor people were being deprived of their only source of income. Cleanliness was next to Godliness and transcended hunger. My complaints about human rights abuses were generally scorned. Did I want dirty streets full of crime? Manu wasn't concerned. His business was going well and he was on a quiet street. If they came he would fight them.  

A few days later Manu was not cooking. I asked him why he had stopped. He told me how the City Rangers had arrived unexpectedly and grabbed the meat and the wares of the other traders on the street. He was disconsolate. For two days he moped, then he was suddenly back in the kitchen. He was not going to be defeated.  

A week passed, stories of escalating force were emerging. There had been trouble when the Rangers shut down the informal buay market that developed in the centre of our area.  

************  

I looked out of the window one sunny morning. There was Manu in a pair of fashionable shades. He was barking softly at a young female house worker in the old Filipino man's house. She was replying in that bright, giggly manner of a flattered girl. I smiled at the thought of Manu romancing the young woman in his new shades.  

As I came out to go to work I stopped to chat. Manu was sitting inside the compound, still wearing his shades. I praised them, but then noticed he had a cut on his cheek.  

“Have you hurt yourself?”, he nodded and removed his shades.  

His eyes were puffed and bruised.   

“What happened?”  

He explained in pidgin that the Rangers had come yesterday. The traders began to fight. He had been hit with sticks and stones. It took a week for his injuries to heal.  

Next day a man told me that three rangers had been beaten close to death in Hohola when they had tried to close down the informal buay market there. I thought, with some satisfaction, that this terrible incident would make the governor withdraw his militia. All was quiet for several days. Buay sales resumed, Manu resumed.  

But the Governor was simply regrouping. He decided to escalate the war. Shock and Awe was the strategy. Instead of guerrilla forces of ten men there were now battalions of fifty. The rangers were now an unstoppable tribal army, with fluorescent waistcoats often wound around their painted heads. All carried stout sticks or bush knives. Traders were beaten, goods stolen, heads cracked. The streets became cleaner, the street life dampened. In two weeks, the Governor, a human rights lawyer, had won. We all looked forward to Hohola market full of tourists – or blood.  

Things got worse for Manu. His boss arrived and ordered the guards to stop selling outside of the compound. But Manu, the short, fierce man with an earring is a fighter; a Kanaka with a strong will to win.  

Today I stopped to talk to him at his cooked meat and banana stall. Now it is on the other side of the street. Manu has bought himself a cell phone and has new clothes. But, still, I am about to write a letter for him to send to the Governor. The Rangers have telephone number for the public to report buai sellers. They had come in a car and simply eaten his lamb flaps. The Minister has gone on television to denounce the human rights violations of the City administration and to support violated women. Manu is taking the fight to the Governor having discovered that the pen is less painful than the stick. Meanwhile the poor have even less income to feed the children and send them to school, but I suspect that they will be back.  

POST SCRIPT  

Manu's fight against the Empire has led to the gutter. I went with him to see the City official charged with the task of compensating aggrieved traders for violations of their rights. He had not turned up for work. His secretary said he had a huge file of claims to get through. Manu was told to come back next week. I tried to make other appointments to accompany Manu, but he was now drinking again and was never ready to go. Last month the bosses came round. His street banana trees were cut down – a hiding place for rascols. They came again and cut down his curb-side maize. Now he was in real trouble. They told him he could not sleep on the premises. He blamed Mike, another Tari guard and drunk again tried to cut him with a knife. Mike suffered some cuts to the arm and Manu was suspended for a month. He has never come back.  

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

Pressure Grows On Lillie 

Lillie is a big personality with a big stomach, a barrel shape and a small bottom. Although from Oro Province, lowland country at the base of the highlands, she, in common with many highlanders, has a face that looks like a jelly tipped from the mould before it has properly set. Features sag sloppily on the large head, but this does not stop her tying and pinning her wiry hair into girly styles often garnished with a tropical flower. When she is enthusiastic her speech comes in gales ending with peels of giggling operatic laughter. She is endlessly generous, controlling and energetic. She is a born organiser. In short Lillie is ‘Mama' not only to her grown up sons and young daughter, but to everyone in the office and the beggars who come to her for coins. Lillie is also the wife of Principal Secretary from the Department and the only paid officer of The National Board for Disabled People. 

What a week and a half Lillie had leading up to Christmas. On any psychologist's scale of stress Lillie would have rung the bell and probably broken it. It all started with a wife's jealousy for her husband…….. 

When at work she always refers to her husband as “The Secretary”. 

“When I got home, I talked to the Secretary about blah blah.” 

“I talked to the Secretary last night and he thinks I should do so and so.” 

This time she suspected that the Secretary had been two-timing her and life at home had not been comfortable. She was angry and left work to sort it out with him – at the Department. When she arrived the object of her fury was missing, but his car wasn't. In front of an uninvited audience of Department staff, confused guards, visitors and eager buai sellers, Lillie grabbed a stout object and set about her husband's car until it was completely air-conditioned. She then left the baffled audience, climbed into her car and returned to work. 

For the next few days Lillie was not her usual ebullient self. She was unhappy, fell prey to a virus and made thinly- veiled comments about her husband. The Secretary, an urbane and intelligent leader of the Department, went about his business as usual.  

Lillie had a day off to recover and returned. It was not long into the day when she had an unwelcome visitor in the form of Kora, an older one-legged man from Kerema. Kora was one of the recipients of Mama Lillie's largess. When he finished his morning begging on the streets he would come to Lillie for coins. She had given him second-hand clothes, larger-than-wisdom-dictated hands-out, and occasional kai-kai (food). Now you might think that Kora would be pleased with this treatment, but that is not the way it works. In Kora's uneducated and rather restricted view of life Lillie was the source of the river of Government funds for disabled people. He was disabled and ergo he should receive the funds.  

When Kora had arrived some weeks before Lillie had tried to tell him that she could not give him money any time he just turned up he got angry. She was cheating him of Government money that was his by right. Shouting took place, mediators were engaged and eventually Kora left unsatisfied. Now it was Christmas, and it was his double right as a one-legged man to get his share of the Government hand-out. He swung into Lillie's office, and she told him she had no money, but he could make himself a cup of tea. It was not long before shouting broke out drawing people into the corridor. Kora shouted, Lillie screamed at him to get out, a cup smashed onto the floor. Mediators emerged again and persuaded Kora to leave. He sat outside and planned guerrilla warfare. Every fifteen minutes he swung back in and hammered on the locked door with his crutch and shouted. Lillie shouted back and voices chorused from the offices along the corridor. Each time Lillie's screaming became more desperate and demented. At last, she chased him from the corridor with a broom. A few minutes later, the sound of breaking glass followed by wailing. 

“He's broken my window with his crutch.” 

Ross, my colleague, went out to find him at work on his windscreen. Guards were called but showed little interest after Lillie's refusal to contribute to their Christmas fund. 

After some minutes a ruffled man from the next building came in to report that a one-legged man had just broken a large plate glass window in his human-rights shop and was complaining that he was being cheated of his rightful money from the Government. I enquired why nobody had called the Police to remove him before he had bankrupted these organisations. Lillie sprang into action, and it was not long before Kora was crying in the cells full of remorse, the sound of Lillie's shrill admonition in his ears. 

So it was that the pressure was building on Lillie. Home was going out of control and her work haven was under siege. But at least she had been successful in one all-important thing. She had purchased a new work vehicle, courtesy of a grant from the Secretary. Even this had not been without its frustrations. She had wanted a double-cab Hilux but had been persuaded to settle for a slightly smaller sporty 4x4. It stood gleaming outside, and, after all, it was the same model as the one driven by the President of the Women's Council. 

But as one door opens another slams in your face. Lillie had decided that as part of her case for the vehicle she must claim that Armstrong, her Ugandan VSO volunteer would keep the vehicle at our house after working hours to avoid instant theft. Of course, as soon as the vehicle arrived Lillie commandeered it and drove it home and around as she pleased – a queen of the roads. Armstrong did not like being used and Brown Kapi, the Vice Chair, an Engan in a wheelchair, saw his chance in a bid for power. He called a meeting of the committee. Lillie postponed it to the next day, which was Xmas Eve. Next day Lillie again rang and cancelled the meeting. Brown was incensed. 

We were whiling away the last working hours before the Xmas break in our office when the peace was shattered by the unmistakable gale-force screaming of Lillie. Thoughts turned to Kora, we looked at each other and rose to see what was the cause of her latest burst of anger. The butt of her anger was Mrs Ruth Kapi, the Lucretia Borgia of the disability world and wife of the vice-chair. 

“You get of my office. You have no right here, you are nothing to do with disability, but you are always interfering – get out GET OUT.” The pitch and intensity were rising, and Lucretia was giving as good as she got. Lucretia, unable to get back to Lillie for a moment turned upon a blind man and a worker from my office against whom she also had a war in progress. She swore and called them assholes. They locked the door. 

Lillie called for reinforcements. Within five minutes they arrived in the form of two embarrassed, hulking sons. By now Lillie's fire was out of control. Armstrong was blamed, Brown was condemned, and Lucretia was attacked. With her sons behind her Lillie flew at Lucretia in the corridor, they struggled briefly, but fiercely, and the sons parted the two professional women.  

I sat Lillie down in my office, where by now Armstrong had taken refuge. She began to calm down and we worked out that she should leave the vehicle at the Department and go for her Xmas break to resolve the dispute when tempers had calmed. Just at that moment another battalion entered the field. The Secretary had arrived. Armstrong was called to Lilly's office for more talks. The sounds of battle once again arose from behind the closed door. Lillie emerged and slammed the door so hard that I looked at her hand to expecting to see a dismembered doorknob. Lillie was defeated and very angry. It was the end of a bad, bad, week. 

Lucretia Ruth Kapi, a tough highland Engan woman was tearful and said she was sorry to our two wounded people. Armstrong was left with the vehicle in a shocked state – his first experience of PNG attack. 

Today is Christmas Day. We have a sparkling sporty 4 x 4 in standing idle in front of our house but wonder at what cost. We will have a dull Xmas, but I suspect it will be preferable to Xmas in the Secretary's household.  

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