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We stood on a Port Moresby dock and blinked at a collection of hot tin roofs, the white man’s gift to the tropics. Sweltering, steaming. The town was on the dry fringe of an island famous for moisture; the merciless sun seemed to dry up everything but sweat. A crew of Papuans came to our relief, thunderously pushing along small flat cars to carry our freight and baggage. They were big blacks with oiled skins and nothing on but lavalavas. Their bushes of hair were two or three feet in diameter; jolly smiles relieved the savage look. These were the first Papuans I had seen, and already I was learning a word of their language. Glancing respectfully toward me they repeated it, “Bogabada, Bogabada!” This, I thought, was some native honorific. I took the salute gracefully. “Just what does Bogabada mean?” I asked the Irish customs inspector. “Big belly,” he said.
Some of my 235 pounds I dropped in the strenuous months that were to follow. However, I knew that Bogabada would still stick by me.
My Papuans rolled the luggage up a corrugated iron street to the corrugated iron hotel. Ryan’s Hotel became my headquarters. The bedroom walls ran about seven feet high; above them to the ceiling was a great open space which let in breezes, bats and mosquitoes. If elephants could fly they would have made it, too. These ventilation holes breathed the very breath of scandal, for you could hear every whisper, and wonder who were paired off now. Like most tropical hotels it was the home of dissatisfied customers; they drank excessively, they said, to drown the taste of Ryan’s food.
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Almost at once I assumed the role of lobbyist for human health. Financial details had been arranged. Papua, Australia and the Foundation were to share expenses equally. When I saw Governor Murray I found him polite but vague, with a smile that let me know that our work had been thrust upon him, and that every hookworm we might find would be an added insult to his administration, something that would lead to trouble with the overlords in Melbourne.
He quoted discouraging figures, and said that census-taking in Papua couldn’t be much more than an estimate. When you put the population figure at 300,000 you always had to say “more or less.” There were so many places that white men seldom or never saw. How could you be accurate about a Territory that covered 87,786 square miles on the mainland alone, and 90,540 when you counted in the outlying islands? You had to tackle mountains that were practically unclimbable, streams that were unnavigable and tribes that even explorers couldn’t dig out. He stroked a graying mustache over a withering mouth.... Yes, his own medical service was quite adequate, he thought. (Fading eyes strayed a little, peering to see which way Parliament was going to jump.) Yes, Lambert, this Rockefeller idea might do some good here.... When could we dine?
I have had time to reverse my first opinion of Governor Murray, who lived to be over eighty and died with a fine administrative record. He didn’t happen to like us, that was all. So I had to go to the very competent Chief Medical Officer, who understood the situation exactly and gave us the most generous help. The planters backed us all the way.
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I decided to begin with short surveys of plantations lying around Port Moresby. Heiser and Waite had told me I needn’t fool with the villages; all the parasites were on the plantations. I hadn’t been out a week before I realized they had reached this conclusion only because they hadn’t gone beyond Papua’s freakish little dry belt, where the Ankylostoma cannot thrive. I found the villages in the moist area alive with hookworm.