PNG Chronicles

At Mapang Missionary House in Port Moresby, there was a lady and her son from Ukarumpa who were headed back to Holland, but they didn’t have visas. This seems a little odd, but you can’t leave PNG (maybe this is normal everywhere) without a current PNG visa, and PNG is notoriously slow about handling the visa paperwork, especially work visas as required by missionaries. Her flight was leaving at 3:30, she was supposed to check in at 1:30, and here it was 2:15 and no visa yet. Luke, the gentleman who picked us up at the airport, along with someone else, was at Immigration downtown trying to get the visas signed, and we had just received a call at Mapang that Luke was on his way over to pick Cindy and me up so we would get to the airport on time, but they didn’t know if he had the missing visas. They were going out to the airport with us anyway, to be there when the visas were signed. I’m sure many, including me, were in prayer for those visas, and God provided, as when Luke pulled up he said they had her signed visas down at the airport.

We all threw our bags in the van, and Luke said “Fasten your seatbelts.” A ride that is normally 20 minutes was cut to 10 as Luke pulled out all the stops. He pulled in to the International terminal, and Cindy and I waited as he escorted the lady and her teenage son in, and based on the several minutes (seemed like MANY minutes as we sweated in the van out front) Luke was in the terminal. Luke came back and ferried us to the domestic terminal, and got us thru the process. There were multiple guarded checkpoints going in, the first at the front door. You can’t enter the terminal without a ticket, although they weren’t checking white-skins and their escorts.) Next guarded point was going up to the counter, where we presented our electronic ticket. He pasted a couple of bar-code stickers onto our tickets, and I headed over toward the entry to the gates. I thought those stickers were boarding passes, but Luke said they weren’t, so I had to go back and ask the clerk for our passes. He printed them, and we then were able to go through the next checkpoint, the entry to the security check. We put our bags on the conveyor (laptop didn’t need to come out of the computer case, and since we didn’t have boots on we didn’t need to take our shoes off. We passed there, and had to show our passes to go into the single waiting area for all the gates. (No toilets in this waiting area, past security, by the way.) We bought a bottle of water at one of the two little counters selling food and drink, and waited the quite interesting hour for our flight to be called. There is one exit door from waiting, and then you walk to a covered walkway which has the numbered gates.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 4 PM, and as that time neared, we heard “Lae” called out by the person at the doorway.  We showed our boarding passes as we passed the door, and proceeded outside.  Our flight was waiting on the tarmac a hundred yards past the covered walkway. We boarded the F100 and were in row 20, next to last row in the back of the jet. The steward, after everyone was on board, kindly moved us forward so we weren’t sitting by the engine. A beautiful, cloudy, uneventful flight (served cookies – biscuits – and juice on the 45-minute flight) into the Markham River valley to the Lae airport.

I wasn’t expecting a large terminal, and that was a correct expectation. A surprise, however, was that we were at Nadzab. I thought Lae had an airport, and Nadzab was one that served the fertile Markham River valley “upstream” from Lae. Charlie later showed me the old downtown Lae airport, which has closed, so Nadzab is the main airport serving Lae. As we pulled up to the terminal, we saw the Brown family waiting at the fence for us. I waved; they said they saw a white hand waving so they knew it was us. Cindy charged back several rows where our carryon luggage was stored, and seemed to be in pretty much of a hurry to get off the plane, for some reason. As we disembarked and headed across the tarmac to the terminal, the Browns disappeared behind the terminal for their entrance.

The luggage pickup area was just inside the terminal, where we all waited for the luggage to be set out. No one was allowed in the area except the passengers, and there was a guarded buffer area between the area where folks meeting the flight were waiting and the luggage room. Cindy was pretty anxious, so I assured her that if she took my computer bag, I could get the two suitcases, and she rushed out to where the Browns were waiting. I saw an exchange between Cindy and the guards before she left the buffer zone, and then when she got to the exit, I heard squeals of “Nana!” Lots of smiles were seen, both from Browns and from the crowd around.

We headed out to the van with the Brown crew, and started on the hour drive in to Lae. This was a very exotic country we were in, but the main thing that impressed me on the drive from Nadzab to Lae was the constant stream of people walking along the road. Most people don’t have cars (I remember reading something about how thrilled some folks were when their village got a car as part of a land-use deal) so if they’re going somewhere, they walk or ride a PMV – Public Motor Vehicle. There are a lot of PMVs on the road – usually 15-20 passenger buses. But a PMV ride costs something, and most folks in PNG have next to nothing, so they walk, sometimes well over an hour each way daily, to get to work, or to shop, or just to visit. We complain about a 30-minute commute.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 3:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.