The Divine Word Student Culture and Me

By Leonard Fong Roka

Dress like an angel but still you cannot pour cold water on my views upon you and your kind of home in the distant unknown.

After unofficially walking out of the University of Papua New Guinea in 2004, I was grounded in the heartland of Bougainville—Kieta.  There I gaited—taciturn a Kieta heart—my way through temporary jobs with the National Research Institute, the PNG Electoral Commission and lastly, partaking in the creation of our local company, the Ioro Roadworks & Construction Company Limited based in the Panguna District.

Pleasant a trail, yeps!  But one thing that bothers me the most is the proverb: ‘when the going gets tougher, the toughest will survive’. Thus, I came here to study and contribute to the betterment of Bougainville. Take me in, where intellectualism is concerned.

Giving a speech at DWU open day, 2012

You know, many Bougainvilleans have passed out of Divine Word University; all they whisper is that, it is a place to think about. So, from Panguna, I stretched my sly right hand to knock: and, here I am. Here, I am after signing my application form, which, in the very last section I did signed an oath declaring that I will be subservient to the by-laws set to guide me up.

But, week-in-week-out students deny and say that not a clause was there in the application form, thus, we test the DWU system. Drinking in the dormitories, smoking in the bed rooms, carelessly using our ablutions, playing music and movies from morn to sunset and littering like extreme social retards. When the university catches us deep in our folly, we shed tears and look for excuses. But, one should ask, didn’t I sign the registration form to be servant by heart of this institution?

We have a student populace that have no care or respect of the roommate’s kind of culture and by-laws of the institute. 

What is the future Papua New Guinea to be like? I could say that the future is in a deep shit!

PNG is in trouble, because we are pretenders! We dress to captivate the lecturer in our seminars. We study to pass the examinations and not to be pursuers of change. We act money earners to our lovers alongside the crotons! We let go our mother tongue in the jet planes and become English windsocks speaking our new vernacular outside the grammatical sweetness of England.

Anywhere, I am penning off here with words from Charles Kettering: ‘the difference between intelligence and education is this: intelligence will make you a good living’. The Dalai Lama further adds: ‘open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values’.