This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act.
Somebody always remembers it … in an evil way.
― James A. Michener, Hawaii
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One evening when I was in Port Moresby, I had dinner with some people who had grown up in Papua New Guinea. My conversation with one man in particular stays with me to this day. He had grown up on the east coast of the island. When he was a child there were no roads to his village. All travel was done by sea; all contact with others came via the sea.
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Then a road was built and with it came new influences and cultural changes. I asked him what the biggest change was. He said, “With the road came the missionaries. With the missionaries came the requirement to wear clothes and act in ways that had not been part of our culture in the past. The day the road came, everything changed. We learned shame.”
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Photo by Barbara
A brother and sister I met in Lae, PNG.
Scan of 35mm slide.