ANTONIA: A Day in the Life
CONTENTS
Introducing Antonia
Before dawn
First light
Morning
Late morning
Early afternoon
Late afternoon and evening
The next morning
AUDIO:
Click the audio links under each title for Dr. Tyman's narration
CONTENTS
Introducing Antonia
Before dawn
First light
Morning
Late morning
Early afternoon
Late afternoon and evening
The next morning
AUDIO:
Click the audio links under each title for Dr. Tyman's narration
Introducing Antonia
1_intro
Antonia Mungun lives with her family in the village of Torembi, on the banks of a small stream in the north-west corner of Papua New Guinea.Their house is a long, one-roomed structure made from local materials — of wood with a palm leaf roof.
It was lengthened at one stage when a new kitchen section was added. The main fireplace is in the new section and there’s a second cooking area at the other end of the building, with a pantry in between.
The house has a door at each end and, like the other houses in the village, was built above ground, on posts, to avoid the damp. The area underneath is used by pigs and chickens.
The houses here have no chimneys. The smoke finds its way out through the roof or the spaces above the walls which allow air to circulate.
When I first met Antonia, she was 36 years of age and had lived in the village all her life.
Antonia’s husband Damien built the house. He sometimes hunts wild pigs and, in the dry season, helps Antonia clear a patch in the forest for a garden. But most of the day-to-day work is Antonia’s responsibility.
Antonia has borne 12 children, but five died as infants — either from malaria or from stomach upsets.
Francis is 9 years old and has just finished Grade 3. Emma is 12, has completed Grade 4 and is expected to help her mother around the house.
The three younger children, Donna, Marion and Colin, spend most of the day playing at home.
Colin is the youngest in the family, while Terrence, at 17, is the eldest child. He and his brother George, who is 16, both completed primary school, but their parents could not afford to send them to the provincial capital for a secondary education.
There is little for them to do now and they spend most of their time with friends.
Before dawn
2_pre-dawn
Damien and the two older boys sleep on wooden platforms covered by cardboard, with a mosquito net over each of them.Antonia sleeps on the floor, at the end of a line of five children, all together under one mosquito net.
They cover the floor with pieces of plastic and sacking, to shut out draughts and insects. During the day, the bedding is rolled up and put to one side.
Like the other women in the village, Antonia gets up shortly before 6.00 a.m. when the cockerels come down from their roost.
While it’s still dark, she first goes down to the river for a wash.
Changing quickly, she rinses out her skirt and hangs it up to dry.
She then scoops a bucket of water from the river and heads back up the bank to the house.
Next, she splits firewood, which she and Emma had gathered in the forest the day before.
While the rest of the family is still fast asleep, Antonia lays the fire. The hearth is made of clay several centimetres thick, to keep the fire from burning through the floor of the house.
To light fires today, she uses matches. In the past, she kept a few embers smouldering all night long — into which she blew new life each day.
Finally, she gets out the pottery frying pan. She’ll use this over the next hour and a quarter to cook the 17 sago pancakes needed to feed her family at breakfast.
First light
3_1st_light
The sun is now up, though not very high. As it gets light inside the house, the children wake and are sent off to the river to wash.From underneath the house, the chickens emerge clucking noisily and the pigs grunt and whine, pleading for food.
While the children are away and the frypan is heating, Antonia tidies up around the house. She hooks the mosquito net up out of the way and sweeps the floor with a brush made of leaves. Then it’s back to the fireplace to start on the pancakes.
In place of the flour used in making most pancakes in Australia, Antonia uses powdered sago, gathered from local forests. Small pieces are sliced from a large block, crumbled up and kneaded in much the same way that bread is prepared for baking.
The kneaded sago is flattened out in the frying pan to form a pancake, sprinkled with water, using half a coconut shell, and turned over after a couple of minutes cooking.
Once cooked, it is transferred to a platter and folded over for easier storage. The pancakes which Antonia makes for her husband Damien are dipped in water to soften them.
Like many others, Damien has chewed betel nut mixed with lime for many years and, as a result, his teeth have decayed and he finds eating difficult.
Over the next hour or so, Antonia cooked 17 pancakes — churning one out every two or three minutes - three for Damien, three each for George and Terrence and so on. In the case of Damien and the two older boys, their food was wrapped in plastic to keep it fresh and hung up until the owner of each bag was hungry and ready to eat.
Colin, the youngest, had woken up with the other children, but Antonia had promptly put him into a large bilum hanging from the ceiling.
From her position by the fireplace, she was able to reach out and rock him from time to time. Emma also helped get him to sleep again.
Eventually, though, hunger got the better of Colin. He was only 18 months old. Antonia was nursing him and fed him often during the day, usually while busy working on other things.
Antonia had been up for one and a half hours and now it was her turn to eat — as soon as the dishes had been washed, that is!
For a treat, the children were each given a small piece of smoked pork, as well as the usual pancake, and Damien had his three soggy pancakes as well as some pitpit — a type of wild sugar cane.
Finally, when everyone else had been catered for, Antonia sat down to eat.
Morning
4_morning
Just 15 minutes after sitting down to eat her breakfast, Antonia is outside again, ready to collect raw sago, the family’s basic foodstuff, from a nearby swamp.
It lay half an hour’s walk from the village and Antonia stopped at a bush house along the way to pick up the necessary tools. Whilst some of the village women collected sago in groups, Antonia preferred to work alone.
She had been in the swamp the day before and picked out the tree she wanted - roughly 9 years old and 15 metres high.
She first cleared away the brush at the base so she could swing her axe freely, then she got stuck into the tree. It was half a metre in diameter, but Antonia took only 10 minutes to cut it down.
This one sago palm would provide the Mungun family with enough sago to last them a week.
Antonia tidied up along the trunk, first with a machete, then an axe... cutting away the needle-sharp spines which protect new growth.
She then ringed the bark of the tree and removed it in sections, revealing the coarse fibres beneath.
Antonia used the bark she’d removed to wedge beneath the trunk and provide her with a platform to sit on later, just above the level of the water in the swamp.
Since sago scraping is women’s work here, Damien did not usually accompany his wife — but he came on this particular day helping to carry my camera and recording equipment. He also gave Antonia lots of advice on how to hold her scraper.
Antonia used a sago scraper made of bamboo to break up the fibres inside the trunk then a machete to chop them up into yet smaller fragments. She sang all the while, to maintain a steady rhythm, even though she was panting for breath much of the time from the effort involved on such a hot, sticky day.
After Antonia had been scraping for an hour, the large leaf she’d been using as a container was piled high with fibres full of sago powder.
It was now time to carry these away for washing.
Late morning
5_late_am
Antonia had built a sago washing platform the day before and now added the finishing touches to the set of three sediment traps.
She began by dumping a load of fibres into the gently sloping trough, then she added water using a wooden ladle, and squeezed this soggy mass against a strainer made from coconut matting.
The powdered sago is washed through the strainer and the fibres which remain are, after several washings, thrown to one side.
Beneath the trough, the water flows through a series of silt traps made from leaves, slowing down all the time and it drains away at the lower end, leaving most of the sago in one or other of the collecting basins.
Every now and then, Antonia would remove each of the upper trays and dump their individual deposits of sago into the deeper basin beneath.
Leaving this to settle, Antonia returned to the trunk of the sago palm she’d cut down and started all over again — scraping, chopping with the machete, scraping, chopping, and washing. That morning she went through the same sequence four times - from scraping to washing.
One third of the trunk was reduced to a hollow shell, and she stood inside it for a while to tidy it up.
It was now 1.30 p.m. and Antonia had worked for five and a half hours without a break. She hadn’t even stopped for a drink, yet the temperature was 34 degrees Celsius and the humidity almost 90%.
I was only observing and recording her work and I had finished off both my water bottles long ago!
Early afternoon
6_early_pm
Antonia now had as much sago as she could carry - enough to last her family 2 to 3 days. She formed a carry basket by lining her string bag with leaves.
The water was drained from the sediment traps to reveal the sago, which was then scooped into the leaf-lined bilum.
Antonia now hoisted this onto her back and set off home at a brisk pace. Heavy with water as she set out, the bag must have weighed about twenty kilograms.
In two or three days, Antonia will return to the sago swamp. With a husband, seven children and five pigs to feed, she uses a lot of sago — especially when friends or relatives with no food of their own call round for meals.
When Antonia got home at around 2.00 p.m, the children, needless to say, were hungry, and it was time to cook again.
First, though, she had to dash into the forest for a fresh load of firewood. Then she got the fire going and started on the pancakes.
This time she had Emma to help her. Though only 12 years old, Emma ranked as the second woman in the family and was responsible for a number of household chores.
Emma was left alone to cook pancakes, while her mother went to look for greens.
The river was in flood at the time and, with so much debris piled up against the bridge it was in danger of being swept away... but it held somehow, and Antonia was soon on her way home with a bilum on her back loaded with greens.
She had collected wild greens from the forest, not plants from her garden. The leaves had to be stripped from the stems first with the smaller children helping a bit, then the greens were cooked in the milk from coconuts which Antonia herself had picked.
The younger children ate their soup as soon as it was ready, while the bowls for their father and older brothers were put to one side, awaiting their return from the men’s house nearby where they were visiting with friends.
It was now 3.15 p.m and the weather was hot and sticky. The young ones, with full stomachs, dozed off, while Francis played with some other boys in the river.
George enjoyed a game of cards with his cousin, while Damien and Terrence slept in the men’s house. Antonia also had 10 minutes to relax before starting on the next phase of her day’s work.
Late afternoon and evening
7_late_pm
After a very short break, it was time for Antonia to go outside again, to sort tobacco leaves drying in the sun.
These were later brought inside for curing over the fire.
There was time then for a few minutes fishing. The catch consisted of just two small fish, but they would at least add flavour to tomorrow’s soup.
By now it was late afternoon and time to take the laundry in before the evening thunderstorm.
It was also the hour for which the chickens had waited patiently, having looked after themselves all day, scratching around under the house.
They made short work of the dried coconut Antonia had prepared for them.
Then it was the turn of the pigs, who were screeching for food, having spent their day foraging in the forest in the shade. Their sago pancakes had been soaked in water so they could gobble them up quickly, as only pigs can!
Fortunately, at least for some, a pig had been killed in the village that day, so Antonia now had more work to do, cooking her family’s share.
Antonia then had a few moments alone with her children, by the fire.
Baby Colin had one last feed, but it was soon time to let down the mosquito net and roll out the plastic and cardboard sheets which served as a bed.
The children were arranged on the floor in order — first Donna, then Emma, Francis, Marian and Colin — leaving space for Antonia at the end.
Antonia lay down with Colin for a few minutes till he dozed off, then she got up and went next door to help her neighbours prepare for a wedding feast.
They boiled some of the meat and smoked the rest so it would keep for a few days.
The next morning
Next morning, Antonia got up early to help dress the bride and she walked behind her in the procession.
Later that day, she set off with other women to take her two youngest children to the baby clinic at the local mission.
She waited several hours before seeing the nurse, but, having had two other sons die young, it was good to know this one was still healthy.
She later walked over to the airstrip to farewell a friend leaving for Wewak.
Antonia typically scrapes sago on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Wednesday’s load is not eaten by the family, but cut into blocks which are exchanged for fish at the market on Thursdays.
On Mondays and Saturdays, she works in her husband’s garden — as well as on Thursdays after the market, as soon as she’s disposed of her sago.
She usually sells a few vegetables after church on Sunday, at the market near the mission, and when that’s over she can again be found hard at work in the garden.
Antonia’s life today is very like the life led by many past generations of women from Torembi.
When a woman here is widowed, she is often in no hurry to remarry. For a woman, marriage always involves a greater workload and increased responsibility. If a widow is able to continue using the gardens of her dead husband’s family, she can readily support herself and her children.
A widowed man is usually anxious to remarry as soon as possible, because women here are responsible for most food production and men depend on their skills and labour.