33 Years…So Far So Bad

Looking back through misty eyes, it’s kind of a painful nightmare. It all goes back to the family I was born into. But, it’s not worth crying over spilled milk.

Lost opportunities! A wide valley of lost fortunes I staggered through and that’s Bougainville. Yet it’s my home, the land I must be put to rest when my time comes.

Birthday Poster

My father was an auto-mechanic, but he did not teach me the basics of the trade so that I would appreciate him. But he got me entirely into the water of Catholic fanaticism; unbalanced life, and here I am not a holistic kid.

 Anywhere, the Bougainville conflict took papa away and preserved me. I was there doing this and that in my teens in the refugee camps of Kupe mountains in Kieta.

With papa in his resting grave at Piruana some kilometers south of the Kupe Mountains, there was a paradigm shift in my life. I began to mingle more with my peers and learn the arts of manhood. I learn the art of building houses and gardening. These are skills that as a Kieta man I need.

Poor mama, who, without any past investment with papa, fought the war of sustaining us, her 5 Bougainville conflict created orphans. She did it!

I completed Grade 12 and entered the University of Papua New Guinea in 2003 but left in 2004 due to financial constraints.

Out of the education, I got bogged up with numerous part-time jobs and had the taste of what employment and life was in a real world.

Pay packages landing on my palms, more often, two envelopes at the same time had me an icon of sexism and alcoholics in my home valley of Panguna.

I did earned fame for sex, boozing and pornography.

These reckless years, 2004 to 2010, got me learning more things I had missed out on apart from boozing and sex. Example, I got behind the vehicle wheels and bulldozers whilst with our company, Ioro Road works & Construction Company Limited. Building myself houses and planting cocoa farms and happily, I learned to be a man.

Then, I enjoyed it. But today I regret that because it is a kind of a curse that is pestering me and I walk sick with shame back home. Hardly free to social in public spots coz every angle I want to look to, there is an ex-girl eyeing me.

2011, is the year, I decided to re-plot my life. It’s in the making and adapting slowly.

I am in a war to rebuild my reputation amongst my own people. I don’t want them to see me as the promiscuous and boozing Leonard Fong Roka of Kavarongnau.

My hamlet is a home to two Bougainville’s rebel leaders, the late Joseph Kabui and elder brother, Martin Miriori. In our family, I had fame on sex and beer whilst others had popularity in religious and political roles they played.

To me, 33 years had being wasted.

Master Boozer

33 years had being wasted without any tangible gains for a Panguna man.

In 1997, I openly announced as a Grade 7 presentation that I want to be a politician in the future, but I regret that because of doing something good amongst my people I began a social disgust of sex and liquor.

The same year, I began writing poetry with a dream of becoming an author. In fact, reading was my late papa’s art but sadly, he never thought me the art. He thought me to be a priest.

Anywhere, I feel I am in love with literature and that would be my lifetime job, I believe; and Bougainville politics coming second place in my dreams.

Will be blogging to the end of life.

But I believe, Leonard Fong Roka will be good name into the future with his people of Tumpusiong Valley.