I sat down with my security Yunego and his family yesterday when a sister of his wife and her two kids came by; a boy and a girl. The girl, named Linet, was too cute for her own good. I mean you decide yourself.
When she then showed me she wasn’t afraid of giving her brother and Terry (son of Yunego) a proper thrashing when being provoked, she stole my heart.
Now I have no desire to become a father. Children like this have a high affection rating, but they always fall in the â”I-love-kids-but-I-could-not-eat-a-whole-one”-category. Nice to be around kids, but in the evening you have to be able to give them back to the proper owners.
But to come to why I was writing this article. While adopting a child for Dutcch couples became harder again, adoption in PNG is very easy. You just tell the parents you want to look after their child and it’s done. Of course it is customary to only do this within an existing wantok system, but white people fall outside of this system.
So when I mockingly said that I was going to take her to the Netherlands because she was so cute everybody thought that I was serious.
Irony and sarcasm do not exist in PNG like the western society knows this. I keep on falling into this trap, but because it was such a part of my upbringing I just don’t learn.
Within a minute her future was planned. She would go with me to the Netherlands, I’d put her through school, she would find a white guy, get married and then I would take them to PNG again. Being in PNG they would look after me when I’d grow old. On the side her wantoks would of course reap the benefits of having a daughter that had enjoyed a foreign education. That she would marry a white guy would also be giving her and her family a very high status.
She was pushed towards me to see if she herself too liked the prospect of this. I presume she was happy to go with me because she was smiling and holding my hand. Most kids in the Highlands are terrified to even be close to me.
I got myself in a sticky situation again. How to talk myself out of it? Talking about not being married yet wouldn’t do (I would be given a woman on the spot as well) or not having the money to support her wouldn’t do either (what are you talking about? You’re white; you have money to spare). In PNG it is always good to talk about external, higher authority that is the cause of why something won’t work. That is usually instantly accepted. So when I mentioned that it would be impossible to take her to the Netherlands because my government would say no to a child that was not mine (see aforementioned link), things were sorted out pretty quickly. Hopefully Yunego is not going to mention to the mother that I might be staying in PNG…