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Saturday, 5 October 2013

A Panguna kid falling in love with business


Leonard Fong Roka

For Paul Monoung (pictured with his canteen below) he was not there before 1990 to witness his Panguna District so cursed with squatter settlements by non-Bougainvilleans of PNG that sailed to his island to exploit its wealth of opportunities and suppress the indigenous people of Panguna.
Born in 1998 with the peace process after the PNG army had satisfied themselves from shelling his island with Australia supplied mortar bombs and gunships from coast to coast, he did not see the pre-crisis reality that caused the rebellion that eventually killed some 20 000 of his people; one of whom is his blood uncle, killed by the PNG government in Torokina’s Papona village.

Drive in a vehicle from the village of Maingku where the Panguna District starts from on the port-mine-access road into Panguna mine site and down Tumpusiong Valley to Jaba where Panguna District meets Nagovis of South Bougainville and one could work out why young Paul Monoung is significant to Panguna.

Along this section of the Arawa to South Bougainville highway you won’t go hungry or thirsty for retail outlets are lined from the Maingku area (Pakia) into Panguna mine site and down into the Tumpusiong Valley by the road side.

The road side business activities within the Panguna District is raising; there are retail stores, tyre services, fuel stations, vehicle workshops, liquor outlets, traditional food and goods stores, cooked food bars when you eat and markets for fresh garden produce that south Bougainvillean travellers help themselves with.

And this change in the Panguna people is being driven by the money culture backed by the alluvial gold mining in the district.

Our Monoung did complete elementary school in 2010 and should be in Grade 5 now but he is forever on and off from school. He spends most of his time panning gold in his Tumpusiong Valley. He is one of the many kids known in the Tumpusiong Valley as the ‘koro batauinanunaving’ which means ‘gold chaser’.

These kids inherited this tag because of their attitude whereby whenever a gold miner taps more gold in a particular spot along the BCL polluted Kavarong river banks; they are seen to migrate there with their home-made equipment. They will stick around the spot till the gold infested block runs dry and they move on.

In the 2012 Monoung made some K5000 and decided to compete with three other kids of his age who also had canteens nearby who were also members of his gold chasing gang.

He ordered his elder sister’s husband to hand-lumber his timber; purchased a few old roofing iron sheets at K600 from his father’s kitchen hut, and with his brother-in-law they began building his semi-permanent house for his canteen.

He is now shelling all goods except refrigerated goods since he has no private mini-hydro of his own but he plans to buy a generator in Arawa which will be dismantled and place in the water system to be built soon to operate a freeze he plans to buy soon.

‘Nephew, that store you photographed me when you helped me to weave the bamboo wall is doing fine,’ he told me over the phone. ‘Stationeries are doing well because of the students at Kavarongnau School. I just purchased a big stereo system to lure customers here and it is happening. My money is growing and I will build myself a permanent house soon after constructing the hydro electricity.’

He said he loves his business but his mother and sisters angers him a lot by doing a lot of credits in his canteen.

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