AN INTRODUCTION
Aside from supporting the Art Events and Educational Programs, Freeport also encourages direct interaction between visitors and the Kamoros.
When they have VIPs or guests who come to visit the mine up at Tembagapura, or host aid agencies working on social development programs, visits to the Kamoro village are often included in their busy schedules. Time permitting these encounters can be either a pre-dinner dance performance and art sale at the Rimba Hotel, or a half day tour out to one of the villages where the guests get to see sago processing, the preparation of traditional foods and a chance to buy some art directly from the villagers and chat with them in relaxed atmosphere.
Spending more time with the Kamoro involves at least two nights and a boat trip down to the sea where we have a nice wooden guesthouse. Most of the people who have been on these trips are mainly teachers from the international schools at Kuala Kencana and Tembagapura. Other adverturers are Freeporters or contractors working up top like Kim Godbold and her husband. Check out her heartfelt soliloquy in "Your Kamoro Corner".
Aside from supporting the Art Events and Educational Programs, Freeport also encourages direct interaction between visitors and the Kamoros.
When they have VIPs or guests who come to visit the mine up at Tembagapura, or host aid agencies working on social development programs, visits to the Kamoro village are often included in their busy schedules. Time permitting these encounters can be either a pre-dinner dance performance and art sale at the Rimba Hotel, or a half day tour out to one of the villages where the guests get to see sago processing, the preparation of traditional foods and a chance to buy some art directly from the villagers and chat with them in relaxed atmosphere.
Spending more time with the Kamoro involves at least two nights and a boat trip down to the sea where we have a nice wooden guesthouse. Most of the people who have been on these trips are mainly teachers from the international schools at Kuala Kencana and Tembagapura. Other adverturers are Freeporters or contractors working up top like Kim Godbold and her husband. Check out her heartfelt soliloquy in "Your Kamoro Corner".
MAY,2011
One of the longer trips to Timika Pantai (where we have our guest house) was made by Kal’s second son Andres when he came out for a holiday. With a week to spend, Andres and the villagers went fishing and even crocodile hunting one night. Crocodiles in that area are pretty much hunted out but they managed to get a small one.
No part of the croc was wasted - it made a fine meal, and the skin and head was then sent to the Timika market to be sold for making wallets or belts,
and the head, a fine souvenir for someone's home
and the head, a fine souvenir for someone's home
Just one of the many fish Andres "picked up" out of the Arafura Sea.
FEBRUARY, 2011
It wasn’t quite Valentine’s Day but you would be excused for thinking that there was still love in the air. February 20th was the fateful day when Mr. Russell King and his group, guests of Freeport, met with the Sanggar Waita from Kamora Jaya Village. Was it the music, the swaying of the hips, the swishing of the grass skirts, the primal cry in the singing? Whatever the x-factor, the two groups hit it off and there was no stopping them from elbow jostling. Nothing melts a Kamoro heart like a “buleh” shaking his booty with them. A real topper, for that was the first time that the Sanggar was performing too.
Ethnic Runaway shooting in Timika Pantai Village
By TransTv Team
Indonesian Reality TV comes to Timika Pantai (but not for the first time). Dea Ananda and Samuel Zylgwyn are the two Indonessian TV/movie stars featured in Ethnic Runaway.
For two weeks they lived, ate, slept and worked like the Kamoro. There was no star treatment for these two who gamely followed every instruction from their Kamoro hosts. Two years ago, the village had been chosen for a Spanish Reality TV program that featured a family of four, so our Kamoro were just as expert as their guests when it came to filming this one.
Kim Godbold and Friends
Kim’s written a beautiful account of her experience and we thank her for letting us share it. You’ll find it in Your Kamoro Corner. Now this is a tres lyrical group. I suppose that happens when you get a bunch of Phds together and feed them with some good fresh fish. So not to be bested by his student, here Is a veritable verse by Max Quanchi’:
Visiting the Kamoro: Timika Pantai
At night when you stand in the easternmost hamlet of Timika Pantai, a Kamoro
village in the tidal swamplands of the south coast of West Papua, you can look
north to the peaks of the cordillera and see the lights of the massive Freeport-
McRonron mine, workshops and residential town of Tembagapura. In Timika Pantai,
the technological and engineering marvel that is Freeport has little impact
other than as a link with the company’s social and community development
programs which promote Kamoro art and a wider understanding of Kamoro
lifestyles and cultures.
To be immersed in the Kamoro pattern of daily life requires a three hour boat ride from Timika, the district capital of 30000 motorbikes and 70000, mostly Indonesian people. The boat trip meanders through mangrove forests, estuaries and narrow channels and is a brilliant introduction to the hunter and gatherer tribal lifestyle that Kamoro still follow. The Kamoro Cultural package organised by Dr. Kal Muller, a Freeport consultant on social and community development, starts in Timika town with a one-hour road trip through Indonesian transmigration suburbs and resettlement areas, roadside stores, army barracks, Catholic Churches, a single rice padi, banana and cassava farms and finally the beraggled shipping port near the river mouth.
Arriving in Timika Pantai is reminiscent of what early European explorers experienced – gliding up a silent, seemingly uninhabited estuary and pulling in to the sandy bank where a few Kamoro wait silently to help unload. The easternmost Timika Pantai hamlet sits along a sand ridge barely above the high tide mark and consists of 15 traditional local materials houses and kitchens, usually with an adjacent open walled platform for sitting and talking. There are 18000 Kamoro, living in 40 villages scattered around the mangrove swamplands, marked on the survey maps as “Inundated by Tides”.
On the afternoon our group of four arrived in Timika Pantai the hamlet was conducting the 40th and final day of mourning for a deceased member of the village. Drumming, a slow shuffle dance by a few men, chanting and occasional speeches and much laughter was a male-only affair, with a small group of women dancing outside the gathering only for a few minutes at the beginning. Back at our lodgings, a freshly caught one metre fish was paraded before becoming our meal for the next two days – grilled, baked, in curries and smoked.
The Saturday program was brilliant – a demonstration of sago making by a group of women (we ate the sago that night), a boat trip to purchase carvings from a Kamoro village on the other side of the estuary, a short trip down the coast to abandoned Japanese coastal guns (defending a former fighter air strip constructed by the Japanese in 1943), the breaking open of a mangrove log to collect edible worms, and the highlight - a short trip up-river to be surrounded mid-stream by sixteen Kamoro canoes and a hundred singing and shouting Kamoro men dressed in traditional costume. The paddlers then advanced on the hamlet and danced on the shore, again accompanied by a few women on the fringes. The day finished with a huge display of Kamoro carvings in the hamlet – our visiting group bought twenty-five carvings, panels, paddles, fish nets and drums!!! At the end of the day the sky turned red with the sunset, then darkness fell, and you could see the lights of Freeport mine on the distant peaks.
The highlights, organised brilliantly by Kal and his assistant Jefri, are many, but for me it was the late afternoon swims in the estuary. A soft light and the quiet of the mangroves, sea and sky seemed to emphasize the harmony that Kamoro people have established with their environment. The splashing children in the shallows, diving off the anchored canoes and heading home before darkness fell, reminded us visitors that the many hundreds of kilometres of mangroves and estuaries are not empty – but home to several living cultures, of which the Kamoro and Asmat are the most famous. The long, slow boat trip home to Timika town was equally exciting with rain showers, hornbills, hanging birds nest, a short stop at an illegal still for fermented sugar palm, a quickly submerging crocodile in one of the quieter, less-travelled channels and finally steel bridges, satellite discs and telephone poles to remind us we were back in the real, or, at least another world. The world’s second biggest mine is a hundred kilometres and 4000 metres up in the cordillera, and Timika town was only created in the 1970s, yet side by side live the Kamoro, a community that thanks to Kal’s package tour options, we can also appreciate and now can claim to know.
—MAX QUANCHI
TIMIKA, FEBRUARY, 2011
Max and Kim admiring their 1m long soon-to-be dinner fish –
“our meal for the next two days – grilled, baked, in curried and smoked.”
>
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER, 2010TIMIKA, FEBRUARY, 2011
Max and Kim admiring their 1m long soon-to-be dinner fish –
“our meal for the next two days – grilled, baked, in curried and smoked.”
>
The social calendar for the Kamoro for October and November 2010 was full with one visit after another in addition to three other events for that period.
Kamoro watch Dennis eating tambelo
PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO LOAD THE VIDEO
PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO LOAD THE VIDEO
October 19th, saw 9 members from the Young Amcham (American Chamber of Commerce) descend upon Mware village for a day trip. Braving the punishing heat, the group ran around snapping photos, watching sago processing, trying out traditional delicacies and ended the trip practicing serious retail therapy at our Timika gallery.
In an evening program at the Rimba Hotel, the Kamoro put up a sago processing demonstration followed by a very rousing Cassowary Dance. Their voices and drumming resounded in the main lobby of the hotel as 35 dancers, 5 drummers accompanied by a bull-roarer and one “spotted” cassowary made a spectacular display.
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