Four Islands In Ten Years (part 1)

June 17th, 2007

It just dawned on me that Terrie and I started our foray into island living ten years ago, which really doesn’t seem like that much time when you consider we are heading to our fourth island very soon. I had intended to include some basic geographical information about all of the locations we have called home for the past ten years in one post, but because of the space that the photos take up this anecdote will be broken into three or four parts starting with Papua New Guinea, then American Samoa, the BVI, and finally Culebra.

Papua New Guinea
Initially, island life for us started when, after thirty years of snow, cold, and wintry darkness in New England, we told the Peace Corps recruiter that she could (literally) send us anywhere it does not snow. So, in February of 1997 we got on a plane in Boston, touched down briefly in San Francisco for a three day orientation and then shipped off to Papua New Guinea for two years and three months of “the toughest job you’ll ever love.”

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an amazingly diverse country both in terms of natural resources and culture. Geographically speaking PNG is about the size of California and it is located north of Australia where it makes up one half of the second largest island (the other half is Irian Jaya) in the world after Greenland. With an estimated population of 5.8million, over 800 distinct and officially recorded languages, and documented cannibalism as recently as 20 years ago, PNG is easily one of the most unique destinations on earth.

If you would like more in depth cultural details, political data, or travel information regarding New Guinea I would recommend you have a look at Lonely Planet’s Papua New Guinea Destination Guide or the Post Courier newspaper as a starting point. At some point in the future I will write a more comprehensive missive specifically concerning our Peace Corps experience and the work that we undertook in the Lakekamu Basin as rural community development volunteers.