Week 1 Part 2: Fish, Food and New Friends

     There’s a distinct advantage to living in Papua New Guinea (PNG) – there’s an incredible amount of variety in the types of foods you can eat here! We discovered this quickly as our host sister Christophilda (or Philda as she’s referred to by friends/family) started teaching us what local foods were available and how to cook them. We also had the advantage of living on the coast in Wargiden (our village) and were able to have fresh fish almost daily of all types of varieties and sizes. We had everything from small reef fish to barracuda and all of it was delicious. We learned to fry, dry and gris (said like “grease” meaning cook in fresh coconut milk) fish in a multitude of ways and in combination with a variety of gaden kaikai (garden foods). 

     Yum! I have never tasted better fish and I got seriously hooked on foods cooked in coconut milk. I learned to sigarap (shred and milk) coconuts, make coconut oil and use coconut in a host of PNG recipes. By the time I left Wargiden I was able to cook much of the foods there and my host sisters told me I was a PNG meri stret (a true PNG woman). I also learned to cook yams, pitpit (related to sugar cane), kaukau (a sweet potato), tapiak (which is a root vegetable) and sago (there’s about a zillion ways to make this and I’ve dedicated a whole blog post later to this, so stay tuned). Coming here I’d heard there wasn’t much variety in the food but I found that I was always being offered something new and my host family and friends always were bringing something new for us to test out from gris mau banana (sweet bananas cooked in coconut) to sago jelly with fish and two minute noodles.

Better than the food though, was the new friendships. The neat thing about living in the village is the community. Now I know that’s a buzz word that gets thrown around a lot in the USA and has very little true meaning, but here in PNG it means that everyone is interconnected and doing life together. April and I would often sit on our veranda in the afternoon to rest during the heat of the day, and we would be visited by some of the village girls that became our “little sisters” or mumak  in the local language, or some of the little children or by our neighbors and “relatives.” They would come and stori (chat) with us, sing with us, teach us to make net bags (bilums) or rice baskets, play card games or just be with us. It was such a privilege to get to know and spend time with the wonderful people of Wargiden.

Next up, a blog on the wonderful world of Sago palms and the 101 ways to cook it. J