PNG Echo

y REBECCA RUNDUALI
It was raining on that morning, 16 years ago,
when my mother died from Tuberculosis (TB)
in the Port Moresby General Hospital TB ward.
My father had long deserted us, I didn’t know
what to do. I was only 15 years old then. The
doctor helped me fill out the papers and gave me the
death certificate. They put her lifeless body into the
morgue - I had no money to pay for a car to bring her
body home to pay our last respects.
I walked in the rain from Three Mile to our home
in Konedobu. When I arrived, my younger siblings
were sitting outside our little tin house collecting
water from the raindrops with pots. Their faces
looked tired and hungry. They ran to me hoping I
was bringing food.
With a heavy heart, I hugged them to me and
told them that Mama had died. I told them not to
cry as we needed to work together and find money
to bury her.
My twin sisters were nine years old then and our
baby brother was seven: they were small for their
age. I told the three of them to stay by the house as
I had to go look for our father. He was a policeman
at the Port Moresby Police Station. I set out to walk
from Konedobu to downtown Port Moresby for the
second time.
When I turned up at the Police Station, his new wife
was there, she swore at me and told me to leave but
some of the officers brought me in to the precinct to
see my Dad, anyway.
I told my father that Mama had died expecting that
he’d help us but he told me to leave his office, that it
was none of his business and that she was not his wife
nor were we his children.
I wanted to scream, to argue, but I couldn’t
because I knew if I did, I would cry and I wasn’t
going to cry in front of him and his new wife who
had followed me in. I had far too much pride for
that. I walked back home alone that afternoon, just
as it was getting dark.
AFTER WE BURIED MAMA
It took the four of us two months to raise the
money (by selling fish and empty tins and bottles
that we collected) to buy a coffin and another
month to raise money to pay for the land at Kilakila
to bury our mother.
The settlement we lived in was kind to us,
one of our neighbors transported us in his truck
and another women gave us a nice ‘Meri blouse’
for our mother to wear. We buried her on a
Saturday morning.
Her family did not bother to come; they had disowned
her many years before when she married my father.
A month later, my father turned up with his new
wife and took our baby brother away. I fought him,
but he beat me and left with little Johnny, I never saw
him again.
It was just the three of us left. We carried on what our
mother used to do and sold doughnuts and fried fish in
downtown Port Moresby to survive.
While I sold the fried fish and doughnuts, the twins
would collect the empty bottles and tins discarded by
the city residents.
Life was good; at least we had a roof over our heads
and food to eat at the end of the day.
I promised them that, the next year, I’d put them in
school and they were so excited. We used the profit
from our food sales to buy our food to eat and saved
the money from the sales of empty cans and bottles for
their schooling.
TB STRIKES AGAIN
After a year, one of my sisters started getting sick,
she lost a lot of weight so we took her to the clinic
and were told that she had TB – the disease our
mother had died from. Later that month, my other
sister also went down with TB.
I couldn’t let the twins die, they were all I had: they
were my family. The nurse said they had to eat good
food and take their six months’ supply of medicine in
order to get better.
I did the best I could, but within two months, they
had both died.
They died a day apart, first Barbie then Nancy. Though
I begged Nancy to not leave me, she said she was so tired
and that her twin and her Mama were waiting for her, so
I told her to close her eyes and go to them.
I left them in the morgue and walked home.
The next day I woke up covered in my own sweat
and I knew I too had TB. I slept all day, praying for
death to take me - it had already taken my mama and
my two beautiful sisters - it had left me with nothing.
I lay on the floor of our tin house the whole week,
too weak and sick to move.
Before that week was out, a man from the
settlement, during a drunken binge, broke into
our little tin house and raped me, I was too weak
to fight, too weak to scream for help, and just laid
there as he raped me, beat me up and pulled me out
into the darkness.
He thought I was dead. He’d pushed me into
the drain that ran at the back of the settlement.
Eventually, I was discovered by a ‘white’ couple who
called an ambulance to take me to the hospital.
It took me three weeks to recover during which
time I was too sick to do anything. My father was
a police officer but I could not go to him - he had
already rejected me twice.
I couldn’t pay the admission fee or the ward fee but
the nurse was kind enough and let me go without any
payment.
I went back home, determined to bury my little
sisters, so I, once again, started selling fried fish and
collecting empty tins and bottles to sell.
It took me almost eight months to save enough
(adding it to the money the twins had saved for
school) but when I went back to the morgue, it was
too late - they were not there.
I was told that the unclaimed bodies had all been
buried in an unmarked grave at Nine Mile Cemetery
two months previously. I cried for what was an
eternity, my mind screamed, I couldn’t accept that
their little bodies, were dumped into one big hole
with so many others. The pain was unbearable.
I returned to my tin house at the edge of the
settlement, and continued, as before, selling fish and
collecting empty bottles and tins to sell.
LIFE THESE DAYS
I’ve been selling fried fish ever since and I continue
to search for my little brother because he is my only
family. I heard a couple of years ago that my father
had retired and moved back to his former home in
Morobe. And one day, when I have saved enough,
maybe I’ll go to Morobe and look for my little
brother - but perhaps this is just wishful thinking.
I still pray for him, every night before I go to sleep.
I hope he’s okay, I hope he went to school, and I
hope he’s working, I also sometimes pray that he
would come back and search for me.
Anyway, these days, I have many friends, other
women who have similar stories to me - some sell
food and goods on the roadside to survive as do I,
while others sell their bodies – but not me - I know
my mother and sisters are watching down from
Heaven and might be ashamed of me if I did that. •
The character in the story is now 31 years old and still lives in the tin house she used to share with her mother
and three siblings. She tells me that she started a rumor around the settlement that she was infected with
HIV & Aids so no one bothers her, not even the drunkards.
PNG ECHO 25