This forum established after an incident of witch hunts and tracing attempts was observed to occur against students who spoke out on a topic others wanted silenced, on another forum. Our site is dedicated to those students.
>

VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, [5], 6, 7 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 18:43:56 02/13/00 Sun
Author: Anonymous
Subject: Re: The language problem isn't that big a barrier
In reply to: 's message, "The language problem isn't that big a barrier" on 18:02:44 02/13/00 Sun

I hope I am not the American who is irrating you. If he is who I think you mean, he irrates the living hell out of me as well.

I tend to agree with you that within PNG the people do seem to commucate well enough for their current purposes. In my travels I generally found that I was the real dummy. Being English speaking the villagers could generally figure out pretty fast what I was trying to say, but they had a difficult time getting their thoughts through my thick head. I attribute this to the fact that they meet so many different dialects everyday in their lives that they learn to read body lanuage or something. Whatever it is they are good at it.

The main focus that I think I am going after here (I am not aways sure, you guys do put up some damn good arguments that make me rethink my views sometimes) has to do with the representation in the National Government. In order to become a good Prime Minister working with international relations one must, of course, be educated and must speak a language that is common to the bulk of the people. This is not really the case in PNG right now and cuts out the chances for a large proportion of the people to even have a chance at this position. I met with former PM Sir Julius on three different occassions, once in New York and two times in Port Moresby. I personally thought he was a cocky little shit but we did have some good meaningful conversations because he could speak fluent English. I doubt very much he could have held the same kind of conversations with a lot of the people in PNG even if he did speak just a little bit of their language. It is not that I am smarter than anyone in PNG, because that probably isn't the case. It was because Sir Julius and I spoke the same language. He was able to communicate with people outside of PNG as well as within.

By the way. To the person who said I sit in my University in America and tell others how to live, this isn't so. I am a private professional international agriculture economics consultant. I have worked in over forty different countries. PNG is my passion. I love the place. I will not reveal my name on here. We talk politics. If the wrong person found out I talked this stuf on here I would never be allowed to enter PNG again, let alone get another assignemnt there. but that is not just a PNG thing, that is true of almost every country in the world. Government leaders hate to be told they are screwing up, especially by a consultant. They believe after getting bad news they should "Kill the messenger"

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.