Baptism of 'Pidgin Fire'

Most of you know I have been making very regular trips to PNG lately. Our mine in PNG is located on Lihir Island which is in the New Ireland Province. Last trip was (most likely) my last trip before baby time so in it seemed like a perfect time to finally sit the Site Induction. In the five previous trips I hadn't gotten around to it.

The majority of the days induction was spoken in Tok Pisin - aka Pidgin, the national language of PNG. Those of you familiar with Pidgin will know it's does use a large number of words from the English language, however despite the similarities, it is still another language and was a bit of a struggle to understand.

I now know that Buai is beatlenut and that Mari is woman as they spent quite a bit of time on the topics of drugs & alcohol and sexual harassment. If I listened carefully to the intonation and watched the body language of the presenters I got the general gist.

Lucky I did because at the end of each presentation we had to undertake a basic assessment. Also lucky for me that the PowerPoint slides were in English so even if I couldn't understand what was being said, I could read it.

It poured rain for most of the time we were there and I had to avoid 'Curry Night' at the club this time because I didn't think the Vindaloo was going to agree with me on the 14-hour trip home the next day. We almost didn't make it home as it was raining so hard the night before our departure that the plane didn't leave Port Moresby. Thankfully it flew in first thing in the morning, which unfortunately meant a 3am start for the incoming passengers, but worked out well for us!

As glad as I am not to have to travel that far again before baby time, I am going to miss my visits to Lihir. Working on mine sites has such a different atmosphere to working in a corporate environment. 'Mining Holly' really is going to miss the steel caps and hard hat!

Tenkyu-Tru my Lihir Island colleagues