Yerem - the village that nobody wanted
18 August 2012
PHIL FITZPATRICK
IN THE LATE 1960s the aid post orderly at Olimola, on the border of Enga and East Sepik, had a nice little scam going.
With the collusion of the local luluai and tultul, he arranged for certain men in the surrounding hamlets to be illegally arrested for various misdemeanours related to village hygiene, failing to build latrines, leaving rubbish around, that sort of thing. With the men out of the way the wily orderly then set about seducing their wives.
When the members of the Kenea hamlet objected to this treatment they were beaten up by the luluai and tultul and some of their houses were burnt down. After one such beating a man died from his injuries.
The Kenea had only come into contact with the administration in 1961 and, because of their lack of sophistication, assumed that this sort of treatment was normal. With increasing threats from the orderly and his cohorts to bring the wrath of the kiap down on their heads, they decided to do what their ancestors had always done when threatened by a stronger group. They packed their belongings and fled.
They walked north down the Maramuni River. When they got to the foothills and the river mouth, they turned south along the Yuat River and found a suitable site for a new village. They built new houses, established gardens and set up rest houses for the kiap and his police. Then they waited.
It took a while for Assistant District Officer Jon Bartlett, patrolling out of Angoram, to find them. In the meantime they made contact with the river people at Asangamut. The Asangamuts greeted the Kenea in a friendly fashion and helped them build canoes and showed them how to use them. Some of the Asangamuts even walked the six hours south and moved to the new village.
The Kenea are closely related to the Enga and are typical highlanders with a social system based on patrilineal clans. The men stand up and make speeches at village meetings.
The Asangamuts are lowland people with a complex matrilineal social system. The men whisper to each other and decisions are made out of sight.
Despite these cultural differences the two groups settled happily together in the village which became known as Yerem.
When Jon Bartlett found Yerem, he wrote to his counterparts in the Western Highlands, which included Enga in those days, and advised them he had located an errant bunch of their people and what did they want to do about it. He suggested that it might be prudent to administer them from East Sepik.
The District Commissioner in Mount Hagen didn’t bother to reply and, as things are wont to happen, Jon moved on to another posting and the little settlement at Yerem was forgotten.
At first this didn’t really bother the people in the village but as the years went by they began to suspect that they were missing out on something. They had adapted to their new environment, even planting rubber and cocoa trees in the hopes of a cash income.
In the 1990s they carved an airstrip out of their garden land along the Yuat River so that the government and the missionaries could visit them. The government never came but the Baptists from Baiyer River and then the Seventh Day Adventists from Mount Hagen did.
In a short while Yerem had two churches, an aid post and a preparatory school and things were looking good. The missionaries even gave them a lawnmower to cut the grass on the airstrip.
When the lawnmower broke down, no one knew how to fix it and it was hard cutting the grass with bush knives so they let it grow long. After a while the Mission Aviation Fellowship aeroplane travelling between Wewak and Mount Hagen stopped dropping by to deliver goods and collect passengers. Then the school teacher left, followed shortly by the medic.
During the recent elections, just as before, no one came to collect the votes of the people at Yerem. A few men went down to Asangamut and discovered that they were not on the electoral roll.
When we dropped by a couple of weeks ago to do some social mapping they still had no idea who had won government. There are about 100 people at Yerem and I suspect they didn’t really care.
A happier bunch of people I hadn’t seen in a long time.
Where is that you say? A place called Yerem? Sorry, never heard of it!
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