A Baby, A Name, and Jiwaka
My PNG family and I once we arrived in Jiwaka Fog rolled around us in the thin light of dawn. We waited, engine idling, on the side of the road just past the large billboard welcoming us to Jiwaka province. We had arrived. Across two provincial lines, lots of bumpy road and tanked up with roadside three-in-one coffee we had trekked to come and visit my Papua New Guinean brother Michael's family for a very special occasion. Michael's younger brother and his wife had a new baby and this weekend they were going to have a baby naming ceremony, a celebration that's observed in only a few provinces in Papua New Guinea (PNG). I had never been to a baby naming ceremony, so I was excited to see what this ceremony would be like and to see what this new province, and its unique culture, would be like. The sun stretched and began to push away the rumpled coverlet of fog, revealing a beautiful landscape of steep mountains, fields packed with tight, neat te