My father was from Unea (commonly referred to as Bali)
Island in the Witu Island group of the West New Britain province of PNG. As an
auto-mechanic apprentice in the Panguna Mining School and working at the
Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) Light Vehicles Workshop, he had many
Bougainvillean friends.
Dad met my mother (a blood nice of two brothers and
Bougainvillean leaders, Martin Miriori and late Joseph Kabui), an Arawa High
School student, in the late 1970s. They got married and I was born in 1979 at
the Arawa General Hospital. Here is when, a young man, Leonard Fong, from
Hoskins in West New Britain again decided I should inherit his name.
In the early 1980s, my nuclear family left our home hamlet,
Kavarongnau, in the Panguna District’s Tumpusiong Valley and re-settled in the
mountainous Kupe area inland from Arawa where Bougainville’s first gold mining
operation existed in the early 1930s. My family reclaimed a piece of land my
grandmother had previously purchased from her in-laws, the family members of my
grandfather.
In the mid-1980s my father resigned from BCL as he aligned
himself into religious living. He began practicing catechism at Kupe as I went
to attend my first formal education at Piruana Village Tokples School
(pre-school), a school located between Arawa and the Kupe Mountains in 1986.
But while in school a illness that nearly had me paralyzed and
death, attacked, my grandmother and others declared that it was a attack from
our spiritual masters for having missed a initiation I was required for, so I
was taken to leave with an old woman and relative of mind at Parakake on the
Port-Mine (Loloho-Panguna) access road.
Whilst I was here, for the whole length of 1986, father went
to do his catechist training at Mabiri Ministry School some 20 kilometers north
of Arawa. Then he began working as a catechist in the then developing Arawa
Parish with the late American, Fr. Gerard Palettea (Arawa urban, in late 1986
was officially declared a parish).
After completing my traditional healing process I began my
schooling at Peter Lahis Community School, in Arawa, in 1987.
Practicing his church work dad also was a member of a
community group known as Matau Nerinaving
that was pressuring the North Solomons Provincial Government to remove the New
Guinean squatter settlers. This was group created by the people inland from
Arawa whom most of their land was being taken over by the urbanization and
worst, by the slums.
On weekends I attended their meetings with my father.
In 1988, I was doing Grade 2, when PNG police brutality
sprouted on my island and people. In 1989, with the crisis intensifying dad
left Arawa to be close to the rest of the family in the Kupe Mountains, I and
my brother were transferred to Kaperia Community School where we dwelled with
our relative, the late Joseph Kabui then premier of North Solomons.
Around late July 1989, the Kupe villagers were evacuated
into the Kaino village, I and my brother began attending school from Kaino till
1990 when the Australia-backed PNG block on my island was enforced and services
were called off.
I witnessed the whole Bougainville conflict upon which I
lost my father in 1993, after he was shot by the Bougainville Revolutionary
Army (BRA). Despite being a crisis, it had both positive and the negative
impacts on us.
My father and his religious life did deny me the expose to
my people and culture. But his death opens me to learning our way of life and
to be a man. I mingled with my people and learn skills like building houses.
In 1994, after hearing that the PNGDF were to established
schools in Arawa where a care center was building up, my mother led us out at
mid-night in order to evade BRA elements to Arawa. We arrived safe and a month
later the PNGDF attempted to recapture the Panguna mine.
In 1995, with the late Theodore Miriung leading a peace
building effort on Bougainville, I resumed school at what was formerly the Bovo
International Primary School but under code number of my old school, the
Kaperia Community School till 1996.
By this time, my religious mother also remarried another
religious man from Panguna.
From 1997 to 2000, I was at Arawa High School, where in
Grade 7 a William Mania from Eastern Highlands was ordering us to write poems
everyday; and where also, a Kiwi author and ornithologist Don Hadden was my
English teacher for 3 consecutive years.
In 2001 and 2002 I was at Hutjena Secondary School where the
freedom I was caught into got me drinking and womanizing. In 2003 I attended
the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) with a dream to study literature.
Here also, I had my first piece of poem published by the University News of UPNG.
This hike was interrupted by my unofficial departure from
the university in 2004 due to financial crisis.
Taking up part times jobs I was home for almost 7 years then
came back to Divine Word University (DWU). This period also took my family back
into the Tumpusiong Valley.
Since me and my four siblings were in school following each
other, a year apart, we left Kupe and were turning Arawa as a home. Our hamlet
and gardens in Kupe were subjected to looting and destruction by thieves out
there. Thus when I returned to Arawa, I purchase second hand roofing irons;
hired a chainsaw man and built a semi-permanent 4-room house and a desolated hamlet
in the Tumpusiong Valley away from Kavarongnau. My Arawa bogged family began
heading into Tumpusiong adding more houses to my creation.
In the process I also led the family by planting a 3 000
cocoa trees plantation in our land in the Bana District in South Bougainville.
Leaving this to the other family members I created another plot in another area
within Tumpusiong where I also erected my second house in the Tumpusiong Valley.
I was to expand this site from the 5 00 cocoa trees but my coming to DWU
interrupted the work.
My curiosity of coming to DWU was not generated by my will
to study but I was keen to make it here after I came across a book that carried
a ‘published by the DWU Press’.
Having written a collection of 18 short stories and over 100
hundred poems (whist at home I was exchanging letters with author Dr. Steven
Winduo who advised me to write more than 100 poems but later lost contact with
him) during my 7 years grounding at home I thought that if I go there as a
student maybe they could help.
But that just did not work out the way I thought it would
but my 2011 Communication Skills lecturer, Mrs. Aiva Ore in her lecturers
mentioned blogging as an avenue of self-publishing and that captured my
attention.
After her lecture, I went straight to Google search, and
born was a blog that I used my own name, Leonard Fong Roka. In the course of
the same fortnight, looking for support information to get into my blog, I
discovered the Crocodile Prize that eventually led me into Keith Jackson &
Friends: PNG ATTITUDE.
Writing for PNG Attitude since 2011, as made me feel like a
writer a lot; there is also being a lot of improvement in my writing but more
is yet to be done. It has being a venue where I decant my thoughts, stories and
dreams out to a wider audience.
But school work is the greatest impediment for me to
dominate PNG Attitude with my writings and improve my writing skills; or even
write or work towards a novel or any other type of book. Currently, bogged down
with an autobiography of my crisis experience and a anthropological work
recording my family history which have a rough version of it in the anthology,
Crocodile Prize 2012 that Crawford House gave me a positive feedback for after
reading it.
But I have confidence in myself that before I die I will
still caress a book with ‘by Leonard Fong Roka’ on the front cover and leave
behind a pile of writings or legacy—in PNG Attitude words—being a ‘lonely
Bougainvillean voice’ for Bougainvilleans
to love and hate.
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