College Lecturer Joins Remote Community in Papua New Guinea.
Added to website: 24 July 2007
Andrew Farmer, biology lecturer from Leek College, has spent the first month as Project Manager of the Waria Valley Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods Project in Papua New Guinea.
The way of life is very different in the valley compared to the life we are used to in the Moorlands. There is no electricity and so waking hours closely follow the path of the sun, with evenings extended by using paraffin lamps. Most of the villagers chew betel nut, which gives them a red grin and there is little access to alcohol in the valley. The only running water is found in streams and rivers, which are used for drinking, cooking, washing and showering with a bucket. Instead of cars people walk between the villages or use canoes carved out of trees, or rafts made of banana trunks, as there are no roads. The nearest road is over a hundred miles away. The riverbanks are alive with children swimming and adults washing or fishing while wooden canoes laden with fresh vegetables cross back and forth.
The village community who belong to the Zia tribe have been very welcoming and provide us with local foods grown in forest gardens. They include sweet potatoes, bananas and various greens and ferns, which make up the staple diet. We have also spent time working in the hot sun planting crops such as rice, taro, onions and beans to be harvested in the coming months.
The village has the aroma of wood smoke, as all cooking is done on fires. People can be seen walking around with glowing sticks to light theirs at home. They let out shrieks of laughter as you greet them in the local language and are always keen to shake hands, often several times a day, and ask about what we have been doing.
One of the purposes of the project, which is funded through the Darwin Initiative, is to collect baseline biodiversity data. This involves working in dense forest avoiding scratches from rattans and the bite of the deadly mosquito.
‘We are using standard techniques to survey the varied wildlife and conducting vegetation surveys to work out tree densities,’ said Jeff Dawson, the project scientist from Bramhope near Leeds at a recent school presentation in Lae. The tree surveys may be used to determine which trees can be harvested in a sustainable way to provide materials for houses and canoes.
Small bats, such as the tube-nosed fruit are surveyed using mist nets, which are checked every half an hour at night. Fruit bats can be very useful to the trees as they disperse the seeds of the fruits to encourage reforestation and are important indicators of the health of the forest. Out of the thousand species of bat in the world Papua New Guinea has over ninety. All the bats, frogs, lizards and small mammals captured are identified, measured and released unharmed. The birds are observed through binoculars at dawn and dusk. ‘Bucket’ traps often reveal the most interesting finds such as snakes and frogs, so we are looking forward to setting them up next month after buying dozens of buckets and lengths of cloth in town. There are many species of reptiles and amphibians that are undescribed in the area so every survey may uncover something unusual. The forest and its edges are particularly rich in frog species, which in other countries are endangered due to pollution and diseases such as chytrid disease, which the project is testing for. Amphibians have porous skin and so are very sensitive to chemical pollution, which thankfully has not reached most rural habitats in New Guinea.
The project will be running for several years and will be assisted by volunteers sent through Coral Cay Conservation, a non-profit organisation committed to protecting endangered tropical forests and coral reefs. The volunteers will help to collect data on the flora and fauna and assist in setting up sustainable livelihood projects such as small-scale chicken farming and bamboo furniture making.
The information collected will be used to help the local people to make decisions to use their resources effectively and sustainably. The forest is their livelihood and their tribal home. Within the community there are strong tribal links and everybody looks after their extended family. All the members of the Zia tribe are split into four different clans and many sub clans, which have ownership rights over different areas of forest. This complicated structure has to some extent reduced exploitation by international logging and mining companies. They are keen to preserve their heritage and want to find other ways to cope with increasing population instead of destroying what they have.
Papua New Guinea has the largest proportion of remaining primary forest in the world. It contains unique wildlife such as the birds of paradise, which give the name to the Yewa clan in the local language. There are no monkeys but there are kangaroos that live in the trees. They occupy the niche that is left open by the lack of primates. The forests are home to the cassowary, a large emu-like bird with giant claws, which may also be seen in Blackbrook wildlife park, along with another Papuan endemic, the blue-crowned pigeon.
As a team, which includes forestry graduate Oscar Pileng from New Britain as local science officer, we did a three day round trip by foot and river, joined by half the population of the local hamlet, to deliver a presentation to the nearest open school on the coast. The village school, which just celebrated the opening of a new library building has had no teachers and so has been closed for months.
‘I enjoy talking to the children, it’s something I look forward to,’ said Oscar. He will have plenty of opportunity to work in schools, as the programme also includes an educational element with specially prepared materials. We have a plan to run some sessions to temporarily open the school on some mornings during the rainy season when it gets too wet to work in the forest. When the school reopens there will be regular educational sessions from the team, which will include volunteers who have arrived from Britain and other countries.
Sport is very important in the area and is almost exclusively volleyball, played rigorously according to the rules with even the most informal games attracting a referee. On Sunday afternoons the WVCP team including local support staff and their extended families play against other teams and sometimes win.
In the evenings you hear the sounds of hundreds of tree frogs, insects and the singing worm, with the flapping of the wings of huge fruit bats moving from tree to tree. It is a time to talk and relax after long busy, humid days, before crawling beneath a mosquito net and being serenaded to sleep.
In the morning the sun creeps through the gaps in the walls of the wooden huts and you hear the occasional voice of a child or the scraping of coconuts to make oil. A pair of hornbills fly over making a sound like a very slow helicopter as the aroma of the forest gives way to wood smoke and a new day begins.
Andrew Farmer is a lecturer at Leek College, instructor at Upper Limits climbing wall and a member of Buxton Mountain Rescue Team.
For more information on the project visit click here.
