You couldn’t write about PNG without a mention of Passenger Motor Vehicles (PMV’s).
When we first arrived, they weren’t very plentiful, but as the need for travel increased so did the necessity for them. The citizens of the country had little income and most of them couldn’t afford to purchase vehicles for themselves. But some groups were formed and contributed what they had to start a business of transporting people and goods to destinations far and near. As in the beginnings of all developing nations, their ideas were good, but their knowledge of how to run a business, managing their assets, driving and maintaining their vehicles wasn’t at the level needed to make it a success. It was normal to see a transport truck left along the side of the road due to a lack of learning to downshift or use the brakes properly which resulted in many accidents, resulting in deaths and loss of their investments. Sometimes it was as simple as not checking the oil or not doing basic maintenance on their vehicles. They understood they needed fuel and oil, but didn’t yet understand they had to change the oil, change filters, lubricate the joints, etc. But gradually their maintenance skill matched their longing to make a profit.
As the PMV industry grew, laws were developed to ensure the passengers would be safe as they travelled. PMV’s had to be registered and insured before they could obtain the treasured blue license plate which distinguished PMV’s from other vehicles. Fares were set and generally followed through the years so a person would know how much it would cost to travel to different destinations. There were also mandatory inspections each year. In addition, there were police road blocks to stop the PMV’s and inspect them by using a checklist. The police would check to see if the drivers were sober and had a valid driver’s license, insurance, registration and inspection certificates. The police would make sure that the vehicles weren’t overloaded with passengers and sometimes the police would ask the passengers how much fare they had been charged.
Even with all of those precautions, there were many vehicles that were unsafe and driven illegally. The police would charge ‘on the spot’ fines that charged the drivers hefty amounts of cash payments. During times of tribal fighting, the police would have everyone exit the vehicle and check for guns and ammunition. They would also check for other contraband such as alcohol, marijuana, and plants and animals which may be carrying diseases from one province to another.
Horror stories revolved around holdups by road bandits, plundering of the passengers’ private possessions, raping of women, and the killing of traditional enemies discovered among the passengers. Yet how could low-income people travel any other way? When people stepped onto a PMV, they were taking great risks, but most of the time, they would arrive unharmed.
As a family we used PMV’s untold times to get around. The people of PNG are generally very friendly and have great hospitality which wasn’t hampered by getting on a PMV. I’ll tell you a story about a true incident we experienced when our granddaughter Grace came to visit us. She wanted to have grassroot experiences. She wasn’t interested in the tourist spots, but wanted to see daily living the way it really was.
The coastal port of Lae was not that far away in miles, but because of the bad road conditions at that time, it was estimated that it would take us up to eight hours to reach there. We went to Goroka town to find a bus headed for Lae. Here’s a little advice if you ever plan on traveling by PMV. Do a walk around the vehicle observing the following: are the tires bald, is the vehicle clean and roadworthy, is the driver sober and alert, and how many people have already boarded the vehicle. If only a few have boarded it could take a long time waiting for it to fill up which is important because it wouldn’t leave until it was full. On many occasions, I have been on buses for a long time because they went in circles around town searching for passengers to complete their quota.
We finally boarded a bus and Grace was excited to see sights along the way. But it was inside the bus that she slowly observed the best part of riding a PMV. The people were friendly, shaking her hand, asking her name and where she was from. There was only one road by which you could reach the coast, but it was never a fast trip. With twenty-four seats and the driver, there would be times when people needed to stop for a toilet break, to get a drink or something to eat, take a stretch, change a tire, or for other reasons. A beautiful thing about the people is that it is generally regarded as bad manners to eat in front of someone else without sharing with them. So, when the bus stopped at little roadside markets, the people would purchase food of their choice to eat on the bus. People in seats near Grace, would offer her peanuts, bananas, chewing gum, and other food. The warmth of friendly relationships grew as the miles went by.
One young man sitting on my left asked me all about Grace. I told him she had always wanted to visit us in PNG, so she had saved her money for three years to make this trip. His heart was warmed by that and he said he wanted to give her a gift. He proceeded to pull out a hand-woven string bag which his sister had made for him and give it to Grace telling her how happy he was to have her visit his nation. The warmth increased. It’s an incredible thing to experience and we were so happy that Grace had that ‘grass root’ experience. As the miles passed by, there was a bond developed so it was difficult emotionally for one to leave all those fellow travelers when the destination was reached. That wasn’t always the case on other PMV’s that I had been in.
Once my co-worker Ron and I were on a standard-sized pickup truck. A few miles down the road, it had its first flat tire. No worries, there was a spare which he put on, and we were on our way until there was a second flat tire. Now there wasn’t a spare tire to replace it and nowhere to have his tires repaired. So, there we sat. As the driver exited the cab of the truck, we observed that the steering wheel moved from side to side as he went. Ron and I made a quick decision to get our money back and find another PMV.
At another time, Ron and I were heading to the coastal city of Lae to pick up a new vehicle for our team. We were riding in the cab of a transport truck with a national driver. We were over halfway there when on a straight stretch of the road we saw what appeared to be a white woman in the middle of the road waving both arms furiously, wanting the truck to stop. The driver hit the brakes and the huge truck stopped just short of hitting her, leaving a cloud of dust swirling around her. She had a plastic bag over her head to help keep her dust free. In a frantic voice she begged us to take her to Lae. We asked the driver if he could squeeze her in since four in the front would be breaking the law. He agreed, and we helped her to get up into the cab. She explained to us that she had been the only woman and only white person on a small tour bus. It had broken down, and all she could think of was that nightfall was approaching and she could be raped or eaten by the men in the bus with her. She had sworn to herself that she would stop the next vehicle even if it cost her her life. She was to have reached her hotel in Lae hours ago, and it wouldn’t be an understatement to say she was frazzled. For the next couple of hours, she went on to tell us she was a widow from Orlando, Florida. She loved to travel, and she ran through a list of places she had visited in her journeys. As she told us about familiar events, she started to calm down by the time we reached her destination. However, when she reached the reception desk, she came alive as she recounted her story to the receptionist, adding that she wanted to be reimbursed for that portion of her journey. What a great woman! She never forgot us and she corresponded with us and sent some financial support through the years. We were able to visit her and meet her daughter living in the area. When the ‘world traveler’ died, her daughter sent us a generous memorial gift and continued her mother’s legacy of writing and supporting us until her death. In her will, she also left a legacy to our organization which would bless other missionaries for many years. How we thanked the Lord for using people such as these to help us reach the Elimbari people group.
In our early months on the field, one of my jobs was to oversee the national workers and help supply them with things they needed for various tasks. I was told to use the old blue Land Rover, which had no brakes, to haul the goods. One day we were sent down to a river, to load up some river stones. As the tray of the truck was nearly full, I had a challenging time getting up the hill with the heavy load. As I was just pulling away from the bank, I noticed a small boy was jumping back and forth from the truck to the pile of stones left on the bank. I wanted to stop and tell him to stop doing that so I switched off the engine which would work like the brakes to stop the truck. Unfortunately, as I did that, he slipped and fell getting pinned between the tailgate of the truck and the bank. I knew he could die so I quickly moved the truck forward and he crawled out unharmed. Whew! That was a close one!
Another time, I was driving the truck down to the swinging bridge a short distance away, and several people jumped on the back for a free ride. I didn’t mind helping, but I made sure the truck was in low ratio and tried to shift it into first gear, as it started rolling down the hill. I was fruitless in my efforts and all I heard was the grinding of gears as they refused to go into first gear, or any other gear. I need to let you know that the way of stopping the truck was to turn the key off, and the compression of the engine would stop the truck. Well as we headed down the steep hill, picking up speed as we went, I saw the wise people on the back jumping off in all directions, leaving me wondering what I could do to stop the truck. I saw a sapling near the road, so I thought it might stop me, but it didn’t. On one side of the one-lane gravel road was a drop off and on the other side was a red-clay bank that was hanging slightly over the road. I eased over near that bank, hoping that I could drive the truck near enough to allow the bank to impact the roof of the truck and bring me to a halt. It worked! Some people wondered why I seemed to be prematurely gray, but incidents like this one probably contributed to it!!
The senior missionary there was praising the Lord that the truck and I were safe. Trying to help me bond with the people, he asked me to take some men to go to a river to hunt for eels. They wanted him to take them but he was busy so I offered to drive them. They didn’t have any luck at catching the eels so we headed back to the mission station on the one-lane road. As I pulled out, from the corner of my eye I saw a Mack truck coming towards me with a full load of large pine trees. He had hit his brakes, but I saw the tires were not gripping the sandy soil. To avoid a head-on collision, I attempted to pull off the road into a section of the woods with small trees. I got about half the way out of danger, when there was a crashing sound as the Mack hit the back door of the truck. No one was hurt, but the door needed to be repaired. Sadly, the same door had been replaced by the insurance company not long before this incident. The mission station had no phone or radio with which we could notify the police, so the owner of the truck said, “Don’t worry, you can report it on Monday morning when you go to town.” When I arrived in town, there was a note from the police officer in the mailbox saying that I should have reported the accident to the police station immediately. At that time, most of the officers were from Australia and this particular man seemed to enjoy rebuking me for not reporting the incident within 24 hours according to the law. I had just turned twenty-three and was in a foreign country, so I quaked under the officer’s stern way of addressing me. I think he enjoyed watching me squirm. I ended returning to the police station a few months later to pay a fine for parking over a meter from the curb. What! How could they charge a person for that? Especially since they had no curbs in that little town.
Twenty-five years later, I was hit again by another Mack truck on a paved road. I saw the impact coming, slammed on my brakes and headed as near as I could to a deep culvert. Bang! A crushing impact was heard. It set all ten of us in my vehicle on edge. The truck didn’t even stop, and it left me furious. After checking my nine fellow passengers, including men, women, children and one blind man, I found that they were all safe and unharmed. So, I turned my attention to stopping any other vehicle that may come by to assist me to chase down the guilty driver.
To my surprise, the truck driver had stopped about four hundred yards away, and the next vehicle to stop was a police truck. The policeman quickly assessed the situation and made sure he was safe. He then returned the way he had come and brought the Mack-truck driver back to the scene of the impact to hear his side of the story. One of my passengers was our village son, Tabau, and as the policeman was questioning the driver, I would speak to Tabau in Elimbari language. I would say, “Anyone can tell the driver is drunk by his slurred speech.” Then the policeman would say to the driver, “I know you’ve been drinking by your slurred speech.” Then I would say to Tabau, “All he needs to do is smell the driver’s breath to know he is drunk.” And the police would say, “Lean over to me and let me smell your breath.” The driver obeyed, and again the policeman declared him drunk. Then the policeman said an irregular, surprising thing. He told the driver to turn his truck around and drive it to the police station in Goroka, and he would book him there. All I could think was, “I hope he doesn’t hit anyone else.”
To our surprise, the policeman told me that his mother was from Elimbari. He had understood everything I had said to Tabau, and he had acted on it. All I could think of was, “I’m glad I didn’t say anything bad or offensive about the policeman.”
I am glad to report that at the end of the next twenty-five years, I hadn’t had another encounter with another Mack truck.
Kathy, my wife, remembered when our baby Margie was still very young and nursing, we needed a return ride to Sinasina from Goroka. The first leg of that trip was to Asaro where we had to switch vehicles. We were surprised that we had to wait such a long time next to the road. We had no chairs to sit on, and we were all getting hungry and thirsty. One person gave the children a little something to eat before a truck which had space for us finally came by and picked us up. We arrived late that afternoon, hungry, thirsty and sunburned, but we were thankful we had finally arrived.
One of my ministries was to help new missionaries to find places to allocate and consult with them about how to start building relationships with the villagers, and start learning the language and culture. This entailed visiting them in their locations and doing both written and oral evaluations of their progress. The husband and wife were both being evaluated so Kathy came with me to help encourage the wife. We brought a single brother from Elimbari named Anton to help with looking after the missionaries’ children, food preparation, cooking, and washing pots and pans.
The location to which we were going was in the same province in which we worked so we were familiar with the location. But there were problems with landslides along the way and at one place we had to get off of the PMV and hike the rest of the way on foot. Although I went on many surveys around the country, I never considered myself a good hiker. Kathy also struggled hiking on uneven ground and Kuman was full of deep valleys and tall mountains so we had to be very careful. At one place, we were walking down a very steep slope which seemed like it was never going to end. A couple of times we stopped to let our knees rest, but perhaps we should have stopped more because at one place Kathy tumbled forward and fearing for her life, she grabbed some reeds to keep her from falling to her death, yelling “Save me, save me.” She was losing her grip and was in a panic by that time. But I told her to let go of the reeds because she was only about one foot from a ledge below. We were both thankful that it was a safe place and it had given her a little more time to catch her breath, renew her strength and courage and be able to continue.
We finally arrived safely at the couple’s home and settled in for a few days. They had two children at the time and we had a great time with them. Their dad would go out at the same time each afternoon to crank up the generator so they would have lights. I noticed he let it warm up first for a few minutes so the next night, I told the kids, “Lift up your hands. Get them up there. Many hands make light work.” Then the room would fill with light.
Doing their evaluations was a strenuous time for them and for us, but we were thankful to help their progress. The trip back home was also strenuous with all the ‘ups and downs’, hiking back to the road where we could catch a PMV, going to the town of Kundiawa, getting on another PMV and going the final leg of our trip.
While I was attending some school committee meetings at our field headquarters, the school board wanted to talk to Lydia and give her a test to see if she was prepared for her Senior year (Grade 12). Kathy didn’t drive on the roads in PNG so she asked Tabau to help her and Lydia get to the town of Goroka. They walked less than a mile to a small local market, where they got on the back of a PMV pickup truck and made it down to Goroka. They walked over to the mission guest house there, and someone there took them out to our field headquarters. Kathy had given Tabau the fares to return to the village.
Some PMV rides were like long-distance endurance runs. Some PMV’s were flatbed trucks with no type of benches or seating. Some were covered with tarps and some were exposed to the elements. But the most difficult thing for me was not having room to stretch your legs when your bottom got sore from bumping on the wooden floor. The passengers were in a position I liked to call ‘seated with knees and elbows entwined.’ Once there was a fellow missionary from the country of Thailand visiting with us in Elimbari. When it was time for him to go back to Goroka, we went by a flatbed PMV. There was a woman next to me who was a clan sister and she was talking and joking with me. At times when the truck jolted, we bumped body parts. I thought my visitor could easily think that I was a bit fresh with the opposite sex, but I think he must have experienced his share of ‘knee and elbow’ traveling.
On the flatbed trucks some of the men thought sitting on the spare tire was the ideal seat. At least you weren’t entwined with the other passengers, but a spare tire can get mighty hard if you sit on it for very long.
It is interesting thinking back about all the things that might be carried on a PMV. One could find all kinds of fresh food items as well as canned goods from the stores, and all kinds of animals—dogs, chickens, pigs, and calves. Building materials were a common thing to travel with. Occasionally, there would be a coffin on board. In the earlier times, people were so afraid of those who departed that they wouldn’t even ride on a truck with a coffin. They wouldn’t even ride on a truck which had transported a corpse because of being frightened of lingering malevolent spirits, and for that reason the owners of the vehicles would charge a charter price to haul bodies.
One lady from our community wanted to travel by a PMV bus to Lae. She went to Goroka town and went to the bus stop where PMV’s picked up passengers going to Lae and tried to board a bus. Several young men were trying to get on the bus as well. They pushed other people out of the way and some even climbed aboard through the windows. The lady decided to leave that bus and try another one. It was a good decision because on her way to Lae she saw that the bus which she had decided to get off had been involved in a head-on collision with another twenty-four seater bus and forty-four people had died in the crash. She was thankful she had not been on it.
Once, I went up to the Madang Province to do a Bible course with some pastors. It was well attended and those attending intently. They wouldn’t let us leave the day it concluded nor the next day because they wanted to send us off with a local feast. Most of them left the village in the morning to find delicacies for the special meal. When it was all cooked and they handed me my plate of food, it had some new taste-treats for me such as the embryo of a large ground bird, turtle and alligator eggs, and different kinds of fish along with some side dishes. During and after the meal, speeches were made and some gave testimonies of how much the course had taught them. We left by motorboat late that afternoon and went ashore to a village created to be a business hub. People coming from town would bring store goods to trade or sell to people there. The group I traveled with were largely sending bags of betel nut to be sold in the provincial town of Madang. It was a cash crop that grew well in their area and it was their main source of income.
Someone picked out a truck on which we would travel so the people with the bags of betel nut moved it from the canoes into the truck. I believe there were about forty bags loaded onto the truck and about thirty passengers sat on top of it, including my three teachers and me. This place was near the mouth of the Ramu river where in flowed into the sea so it was nearly at sea level. From there the trucks had to travel up a steep single-laned road over the mountain range. As we were nearing the top, the truck driver shifted gears and missed hitting low gear, and for a split second it stopped before hurling backwards down the steep road it had just come up on. All the passengers started yelling and were in panic. I knew how easy it would be to die that day so the only thing I could do was to brace myself for the impact of where the truck would stop. There were massive hardwood trees in the forest on both sides of the road, large stones, some pools of water, etc. Only the Lord knew where we would end up and who would live and who would not. The shouts from the cab kept saying, “Stay on the truck. Stay on the truck. Don’t try to jump off!” The truck had a canopy over the back so I grabbed tightly to the support pipes. I was sitting right behind the cab and I knew if we hit something really solid, I would be shot out the back of the truck almost instantly.
The thoughts of all the passengers were centered on whether we would live or die. One man, fearing death, decided to jump from the truck. It looked like he cleared the vehicle as it went through a stand of smaller trees and came to a halt. Everyone was stunned, but no one on the back was harmed. As people got down from the bed of the truck, they noticed the man who had tried to jump clear of the truck was not up moving around. On closer examination, when they tried to pick him up, his femur bone was broken and he was shouting in pain. They laid him down again, quickly found wood to make him a splint and bound up his leg. The driver knew he would be liable for any injuries or death. He told us to leave the bags of betel nut behind, climb the steep road and get on a different truck which would take us to town. Four men picked up the man with the broken leg and walked up the road like Billy goats, laying him up front near the cab. The driver promised all the people that he would send their bags of betel nut by another truck, and we pulled away from a close call. The young man with the broken leg was in terrible pain and kept saying, “I’m hot give me water.” We all gave our drinking water to his family and they gave him some to drink. Then he said, “I’m so hot! Please pour some cold water on me.” He did that for about the next two hours and then he fell silent, never to speak again. His wife and in-laws started wailing for him and begging for him to come back to them. His body and family were dropped off at a health center for the body to be autopsied in the morning. It was well after dark by then, and while we were there, the truck with the betel nut caught up to our truck and transferred the bags into our truck. We arrived in Madang before daybreak and tried to get some sleep on the PMV truck while some of the people were trying to sell their bags of betel nut.
Some of our fellow passengers were saying that the young man must have hidden some terrible sin from his past and that’s why he died. Some said he could see and feel the flames of hell, and that was why he screamed to be cooled down. In his last moments, he had his hand around my ankle and kept screaming that he was in pain. There was nothing I could do for him. I prayed for him and his family, and when he passed, it was a stark reminder to me that all of us will have an appointment with death.
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