When we left Calgary in January 2013, we certainly didn’t expect to find ourselves on the other side of the world 3 ½ years later. Now, coming up on our 1 year anniversary in PNG, I am still astounded at the completely unexpected journey we’ve been on over the past few years. Some parts have been amazing, but there have been a lot more challenges than we would have expected. For me, living in PNG is a dream come true in many ways: I have an amazing job – as good as it gets for a lawyer who loves a challenge and being stretched to the max on a daily basis; we’re finally getting to live in a tropical climate (my dream – unfortunately not Dennis’); and Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, are all within a 5-8 hour flight away (now I just have to find the time to actually use up some of the 8 weeks of holidays I get each year to make it to all of those places!). It’s far harder on Dennis, but even for me, the longer we are away, the more I miss home and the more I appreciate it.
I don’t think that you can really appreciate Canada until you’ve spent some time away. Who knows whether it will last once we return, but I now have so much appreciation for a lot of “small” things in life that I no longer consider small at all.
1. Clean water. Here we can’t use water from the tap to fill the kettle or fill a pot to boil some vegetables - we have to use water from a bottled water cooler. Drinking bottled water in Canada now seems like a ridiculous thing.
2. Clean streets. One of the toughest things to handle here is how dirty everything is. They don’t clean the exteriors of buildings, and you can’t take windows out of the frames for security reasons, so during the dry windy season, which just started, we can barely see out of our windows at home or at the office. And there is garbage, garbage everywhere. There’s no way around it, plastic needs to be banned.
3. Proper medical care (which is free!) and our social safety net. The state of health and the degree of poverty in this nation can make you cry. TB is still a huge issue, the HIV infection rate is one of the highest in the world. And the vast majority of the population can’t actually afford any medical care at all. Being face to face each day with extreme poverty and its consequences is humbling.
Of course, while my liberal Catholic guilt stops me from turning into a complete expat monster (and boy there are a lot of them running around in PNG), and I am definitely grateful for how much better my life is than the average person in PNG and for all the financial benefits that coming here will bring us (early retirement here I come!), I still get to feel sorry for myself now and then, and if you lived here, you’d would have days like that too.
I’m keeping a top ten list of the everyday things that I miss not having. They may not seem like big things, but just imagine not having them or not being able to do them for a year (and OMG we still have another 2 years to go!)
1. Diet Pepsi –don’t ask me why this is number 1 – it just is.
2. Walking by myself.
3. Driving my own car.
4. Internet faster than 1mbps (yes you read that right – and we only get that speed on a good day).
5. Tide laundry detergent and bounce dryer sheets. ( I am SO tired of crappy laundry detergent.)
6. My own furniture (and not the stuff that comes with an apartment whether you like it or not – especially a proper pillow top mattress.)
7. Nice bars and restaurants, and good live bands.
8. Ordinary electrical outlets (not the ones where you have to switch on and off each socket individually).
9. Banks where the lineups are not 50 people long (I am not kidding).
10. DOGS. (This is my real number 1 and likely my number 2-9 as well. I miss Jake and Coco every single day and I cannot wait until we get back to Canada and adopt 2 or 3 dogs.)
Thanks to everyone who has been following along. It means a lot to Dennis and to me to know that people are still keeping up with our adventures (as well as our often boring life as expats). We miss you all.
Lori
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