Right now my brother, Brian, is somewhere in rural Papua New Guinea conducting solar workshops. He holds these workshops once or twice a year in different parts of the world. While he travels to disparate locations each time he’s bringing solar power and relevant training to rural communities currently dependent on petroleum generators. Every time he goes we struggle to imagine precisely what his life is like for the weeks he’s off grid.
We do have to imagine, because we get little (if any) communication from him while he’s doing the workshops. Between travel fatigue, the workshop schedule and the lack of reliable telecommunications we often won’t hear anything from him until he’s done with the project. This particular trip our last communication was before he left the States. He flew from Hilo to Sydney, Sydney to Brisbane and Brisbane to Port Moresby before taking a local flight to Goroka. We heard from his host after he landed. His host said Brian’s bodyguards were there and would safeguard him for the rest of his travels with bow and arrow.
Obviously there aren’t many ways we can connect to the experience he’s having. We know the basics of his work in villages already: He installs a small solar grid that generates cheap, clean power then trains locals to maintain it. But that doesn’t cover the sights and sounds of his adventure. To get the slightest of glimpses, we’re going to travel to the Jacksonville Zoo tomorrow to see a cassowary, a bird indigenous to New Guinea.
Cassowaries are large (see: leg bone in the photo above) flightless birds known for their aggression and razor-ship talons. They’re pretty too and rarely in zoos because of the danger they pose to keepers. It’s not much for context, but I don’t trust my kids to properly handle bows, much less arrows. Besides, the bird is as foreign as a bird can get, so at least the kids can use that as a base for just how different Brian’s life is right now.
