outback to jungle

Musings on experiences of volunteering in Papua New Guinea with some gratuitous domestic social and public comment

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

correcting the ambiguities

I just read the last published blog and realised the ambiguity in "Western Countries have to stop believing their salvation is in government". The "their" I meant was the people of the West who have forsaken community for extreme individualism. I was trying to juxtapose two situations - the West and PNG: PNG problem is with reliance on donors; Western problem is loss of community. PNG has strong community at the local level but not a common good at the national level. PNG has intensive capitalism as survivalism with very little national government direction. There is almost no government input to basic education, roads, hospitals, social security in PNG but this is an accepted function of Government in Australia and the West generally. So per capita, PNG could claim to be more capitalist - no perhaps more profiteerist- than people of the West.
I saw the con man again today - hadn't seen him for several months - at the Melanesian. We went to look at the Australian Universities and AusAid expo and he was lurking outside. People are so thirsty for education - I hope we can get our projects implemented.
On a grammar note in the last blog, "sun rising" should be "sun's rising".

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