Looking into the village of remote New Britain is like looking back in time. Many villages feed their relatively small numbers almost exclusively with food grown in the village. The dwellings are constructed with lumber hand-milled by the locals with machetes and waterproofed with large leaves and plastic sheeting donated by the nearby oil palm company. Life is simple – a typical day involves waking up with the sun, spending the morning tending your garden and spending the afternoon with your family. When the sun goes down, you retire to your home and go to bed.
Many settlements are reachable only by arduous walks that take you across bridgeless river crossings and up and over steep, slippery ridges. The terrain is often so strenuous that finding a flat piece of train more than 50 meters long seems practically impossible. The extreme difficulty of passage means that travel through the region is done only infrequently. Recently though, as is expected, westerners have begun to slowly find their way into these small villages. Sometimes they are missionaries trying to “save souls” and sometimes they are explorers looking for caves or rivers. No matter what the goal of the outsiders, their impact is huge.
When people, who have been essentially isolated forever from the influence of global modernization see westerners laden with high tech clothing, gear and food, their expectations change. When once they only needed food, shelter and family to survive, now they believe that they need what the westerners have. Because there is no monetary economy in these remote areas, the people hike out of their villages to the nearest road, take a bus to the nearest town, get a job and start earning money to buy the things that they now believe essential.
The problem though, is that while they like having the money, they don’t like living in the towns. They don’t like working on the oil palm plantations where they can’t have their own garden because they live in a company housing development. Instead of living off of what they produce, they now have to buy everything they need. Unsatisfied, they dream of a perfect solution.
The solution that they believe is the answer to their problems unfortunately involves the destruction of their land. Because tribes and not the government own most of the land in New Britain, motivation for the government to develop infrastructure in remote areas is low. If roads are to be built, there are only two options – build it yourself or sell the right to remove timber from your land to a Malaysian logging company. As soon as a tribe tells the logging company that they can take timber from their land, the company will build a road to the area so that the timber can be easily extracted. Now, the people of the village can still live in their homes while making an income AND have a road, complete with hitch-hikeable vehicles that will take them to town and (unfortunately this is true) allow them to blow all of the money on the local brew, South Pacific lager. And what is even more unfortunate is that a lack of education among the people of these remote villages allows the logging companies to pay about one kena a tree and make about 300 kena profit off of it. (1 kena = approx 3 USD).
It’s a tough situation, but a situation that the people of Tuke are in right now. Some of the young men of the village have begun making the one days (for them) walk to the road and then hitchhiking the two hours ride to the town of Navo to take jobs for Hargy Oil Palm. And just recently the tribe agreed to sell the logging rights to a large chunk of their land for an alarming 80,000 kena. And after the loggers are done, the plan is to call in the gold miners to further extract wealth from the land.
So if you were to be a fly on the wall in Tuke for the next 10 years, you would be able to watch it transform from a remote mountain village to a logged and mined village with a road directly to it.
