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Simon Eroro, an Australian journalist, really wanted to talk a group of rebels in Papua New Guinea. He crossed many miles of wild, dangerous territory to find them, only to be told that he must be circumcised to meet with them. And they do circumcision the old fashioned way.
No, not a scalpel. Not even a knife. Slivers of bamboo.
In recognition of the extreme efforts that he went to to get the story, Eroro won a local journalism award:
In his subsequent reporting for the Post-Courier newspaper, Mr Eroro exposed the cross-border movements of Free West Papua militants from Indonesia into Papua New Guinea. The judges of News Ltd’s Scoop of the Year prize said the reports had led to a major police operation to tighten the borders.
“The impact of Simon’s scoop was enormous; the police commissioner launched a major operation to tighten the borders and close down the [Free West Papua] refugee camps,” the judges said.
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Flickr user CIFOR
Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:
Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups’ languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.
The BBC’s natural history unit sent an expedition to Mount Bosavi, a volcano in Papua New Guinea. Scientists on the team identified 40 new species of wildlife which have called the crater home since its last eruption 200,000 years ago. These include the 3-pound Bosavi Woolly Rat which can grow up to 32 inches long! They also found colorful new birds, beetles, spiders, marsupials, and frogs, such as the Litoria sauroni pictured.
The habitat in the area is currently regarded as pristine, but less than 20 miles to the south of Mount Bosavi extensive logging operations are happening.
The mountain acts like an island in the vast sea of jungle, trapping different species on it.
(image credit: BBC)
Here’s one gruesome way of avoiding a tribal warfare adopted by two villages in Papua New Guinea: kill every male babies born!
By virtually wiping out the ‘male stock’, tribal women hope they can avoid deadly bow-and-arrow wars between the villages in the future.
‘Babies grow into men and men turn into warriors,’ said Rona Luke, a village wife who is attending a special ‘peace and reconciliation’ meeting in the mountain village of Goroka.
‘It’s because of the terrible fights that have brought death and destruction to our villages for the past 20 years that all the womenfolk have agreed to have all new-born male babies killed,’ said Mrs Luke.
‘The women have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them.’
