I spent more and more weekends with Delphine and the news of our relationship spilled over to Bougainville and her relatives ordered her to cut it off. To me this was the ticket away from her.

Then, one October day in 2013, Delphine sent me a text message. ‘My monthly periods have ceased for two weeks now’ from the north coast of Madang where she was doing her practice teaching.

This was no surprise to me. It was one of many ‘I am pregnant’ texts I had received from my former women since 2004. In 2013 two women from Bougainville sent me ‘I am pregnant’ and ‘my monthly period is over’ texts and both would later joke about it. A week or so before Delphine’s text I had received another from someone else, which we laughed over later.

So I was not much bothered. But at the back of my mind a bell rang. ‘You are a father’. I felt uncomfortable. I began regularly texting Delphine ‘how is your period?’ and ‘how is the baby?’

From the start I saw confidence in Delphine that I was the father of the child she was carrying. But my promiscuous heart was lost and confused and hunted for escape routes, including a new girl – a school student – I had met in Madang.

Emotionally burdened, I left Madang in October 2013 for holidays and reached home at Arawa with the news of my pregnant Buin girlfriend Delphine already in the ears of many people.

One of my two Bougainville-based girlfriends left me after hearing I was a father. But the school student had not heard my news so I kept communicating with her by phone.

Delphine arrived at my home in Arawa in December and I was in full acceptance that the child was mine. But her relatives ordered her back to Buin with a price of K20,000 that she should pay them for their care and support in her education in order to marry me. I was knocked off guard.

I was sad and regularly in tears thinking about my unborn baby and the K20,000 I did not have and the stream of negative words thrown at my unborn daughter by Delphine’s relatives.

To me Delphine was not my wife without the K20,000 as they had stated and a bride price of a further K10,000 revealed to me by Delphine.

When Delphine left Arawa, I lost my phone and with it the contact details of potential new girlfriends who did not know I was a father. My holiday was darkened and I returned to university in Madang in February 2014.

“I am a father, why can’t the Buin people respect me and my child and leave us alone.” I was infuriated but what could I do? I had not the money to shut their mouths.

My fellow students knew I was a father and respected me. My Madang girl and the last home based girlfriends deserted me, thus I lived my life occupied with writing and spending my days in the university library.

I also decided to halt my promiscuity and cut down my boozing. I was a father and I needed to change for my child and the young nieces and nephews of my brother and three sisters who needed a better home to nurture into positive citizens of Bougainville.

In June 2014 my daughter was born and my mother, who was at the birth, told me ‘she is your photocopy’. I was happy and began begging Delphine to send me her pictures so I could display them in Facebook and so on.

Delphine did not have the means to do so and remained silent. But for me, unsettled by the K20,000 and the high probability of losing Delphine, kept bombarding her. I demanded the little girl’s pictures.

In this period our nightmares mushroomed as the K20,000 ticket to marry Delphine haunted me. Her belief that I was seeing other girls began to distance me from her and our baby.

Meanwhile, Delphine, now finished college, was busy teaching her first year in Buin and telling me she would never trust me for I was a sex maniac, a liar and a cheat.

(To be continued)