We all needed a break after 3 weeks in Kamiatum, and were happier than ever to return to our rooms in the Salamaua Guest house. Mittie was there to welcome us and we were soon de-jungled with (cold) showers and dry clothes and after about an hour of foot surgery on my part and a quick lunch, Claire and I both went and slept for 2 hours on our beds, bliss! The first day was very much focused on relaxing and enjoying small luxuries like chairs and tables and not wearing boots. Tea made from a kettle on the gas cooker would also have been a luxury, had the boys not polished off all the "sunshine" powdered milk whilst we napped, so we spent the next 3 days drinking black tea!

Friday was the day of the party, which we'd been looking forward to for weeks. Mittie had volunteered her canoe to take us across the bay to collect sago for the decorations, so after breakfast, Claire, Alicia, Paul and I went down to climb aboard. I took the front paddling seat, feet firmly inside the narrow hull, Claire and Alicia climbed onto the platform and Mittie got in at the back to steer. It was already sitting pretty low in the water, not being designed for more than about 2, so when Paul climbed on it was the last straw, the water came over the edge, the hull filled and the canoe flipped, neatly placing the other girls on their feet in the shallows, whilst Mittie and I, firmly wedged in the hull, were submerged completely! So Paul volunteered to stay behind and the rest of us carefully climbed back on, bailing as we went. We paddled soggily over to the far side where Mittie lives with her family and beached the canoe before setting off on the hunt for sago and firewood. We were also looking for Mittie's missing woofer, which had been borrowed by someone but his hunt proved fruitless and we returned to the canoe laden only with 9 mangoes we'd been given on the way. At the canoe we found the sago leaves neatly placed across on the boat waiting for us, but they looked nothing like the sago we knew - more like spears. Alicia returned with Gobi, Mittie's daughter on another canoe and the three of us paddled the big canoe back. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping Mittie strip the sago spears to reveal the leaves, to hang from the roof whilst the kids attached flowers to the bottom as decoration. After everything was ready we went for a quick swim and then got into our grass skirts, bilums and leaf necklaces, ready to go and help Mittie with the traditional cooking for the party. It was 5pm and there was still no sign of the boat with Adam coming back from Lae with the supplies, but as the light started to fade and we were ready to cancel the whole thing, a boat appeared on the horizon and started approaching the beach. It turned out that Adam had not only shopped for food and alcohol, but was also bringing Sam over and Rosetta and Priscilla from the TPA for the party which was a nice surprise for us. It was around this point when Angus decided I wasn't allowed to do any more work and delegated jobs to the boys which was great so I could relax and help make rum and vodka cocktails instead! The food wasn't ready until fairly late, but was an amazing spread of traditional food, including a chicken stew type thing cooked in a pot with hot rocks and 3 types of rice - I was in heaven! So we ate a lot of food, drank a lot of cocktails, then beer, then we had to send out for more beer, then we actually drank Salamaua dry... A lot of the villagers had come up to just watch us having a party and sat on the wall by the sea all evening while we danced to both western music and some local music Rosetta found on a radio... At about 1 Adam whipped out some surprise sausages which we barbequed - because we needed more food...? People were drifting off to bed gradually and as Andre tried to go - at about 4 - he realised he couldn't find his and Adam's room key so the last remaining of us up spent about an hour hunting in the grass for a key - that we didn't find. In the end Mittie gave them another room and we had to wait to find out in the morning that her son had found the key, put it in his pocket, then forgotten and gone to bed!

The next day was definitely a recovery day! I was exhausted having gone to bed at 5 and got up at 7.30 in torrential rain! It had rained so much in an hour there was ankle deep water all round our hut - luckily it was on legs! The few of us up went for a morning swim before Adam, Sam, Rosetta, Priscilla and Mittie all jumped in her boat and headed off to Lae. The following day we had recovered more and were ready to back up to camp. We'd decided to go up in the afternoon, giving Adam time to get back but it turned out the boat man had decided to increase his fare by 10 times and by the time this was resolved they'd decided Adam should stay in Lae until Friday to help with the Finnish TV crew that Trekforce were working with on a programme called "Mad Ventures". So we had waited the whole day and in the end trekked up in the baking heat, arriving after dark, totally exhausted and having to re-set up camp. I managed to have a bath on my own in the moonlight which was quite relaxing - if a bit cold and scary!

The next few days saw the moving of the concrete slab. It all took a lot longer than expected as it was a lot heavier than we'd thought! Claire and I started off by emptying out the water from the hole after all the heavy rain - it resembled a well a lot more than a toilet at the moment! - and then we got everyone round to try and lift it - including Councillor Steve, Crazy Steve (who had serious guns - we though we'd be fine!), Paul the carpenter and Paul the medicine man! We'd put lot of "jungle rope" cables underneath, due to lack of more conventional materials, so we had 2 people on each. We tried to lift - it didn't budge. We then tried numerous other methods, including levering with a wrecking pole and various logs and lifting one edge at a time. It wasn't going anywhere. We succeeded in raising it onto some rocks and logs, causing a slight crack in the process, but that was as far as it was going. The following day we had more success as after a plea from Steve at a village meeting the whole village turned up and we had about 50 able bodied men to help! We put long bamboo poles through all the loops of rope and had 3 people on each end, then a few others on the underlying sheet, there was a lot of shouting in a lot of different languages, finally a call for "go!" and then it moved and hole was covered for good.

The following day I was on admin - with my new admin partner Angus. Everything went pretty smoothly, but it followed the normal trend in that no one was really working on my day of housework! Only Paul and Callum were well enough to go and collect materials for the building, everyone else had bad feet, or flu-like symptoms and stayed home! In the evening Angus and I made taro curry. Taro was new for us but it was amazing - sooo tasty. It was a bit of a combination of potato, onion and asparagus - if that's possible. We also made a surprise crumble for pudding, dry toasting the flour and oil and oat crumble over the fire and stewing mango and guava for the fruit bit. Yum - another pudding success!

The project went pretty quickly from this point, the structure was up in a matter of days with a lot of help from Paul the carpenter, Levi, Andreas and anyone else who happened to be around. Their building style was incredible, very few measurements, just a lot of sawing, macheting and hammering nails! We had great fun helping where we could and finally feeling the project was moving on.

That weekend, whilst doing our clothes washing as normal in the river, Any and Yarro turned up with a shrimping net and said they'd take us shrimping up the stream, so we laid our clothes out on the baking hot rocks, then set off up the river, looking under rocks and shaking bushes, whilst Any was poised with the net. The ones we collected we put in a banana leaf that we'd folded into a bag and I was charged with holding this - fine until they started jumping around and trying to get out! We found quite a few, mainly small shrimps, but the girls were not satisfied, so they arranged to come back in the afternoon and do it properly! We headed back to welcome Adam who had finally returned from jungle training the crazy Finnish guys with Sam, he had been really missed! In the afternoon the shrimping took a more serious turn and involved blocking off sections of the river with rocks and sand and banana leaves so it dried out, then hunting for shrimps in the dry bit - where they couldn't escape. It became a large scale operation and we had about 20 girls helping us look! We also bumped into a group of women returning from church with their hymn books so Angus and I sang some hymns with and to them in the middle of the river bed! They didn't know a lot of the ones in their book! The following day Alicia, Paul and I went to church with Any, Ruth and Yarro - a different church to the hymn singing lot, this one was Lutheran. It was really lovely from a singing point of view as there were loads of kids there all singing beautifully and clapping, but I didn't understand a word of the pidgin sermon - it sounded like he was shouting about the fires of hell from his tone! After feeling like we'd had the sin knocked out of us, we spent the rest of the day enjoying the Sun and sitting in the river to cool off, before going and playing volleyball with some of the locals - luckily mixed teams so we didn't do too badly!

The last bits of the project were the roof and walls. The roof tiles we made by stitching sago leaves together, the walls were stripped sago branches. Both of these jobs took ages although the sago was more relaxing as the leaves were brought to us to stitch. We had to go and collect the sago branches from downriver which involved time spent in the "sago graveyard" which smelt really putrid and was swarming with mossies. Once we'd collected it all we had to carry it back up to the site and then strip it with machetes to get it smoother and the right shape before hammering it to the walls. This last stage of the project also included the horrible "duckling day". Family members would associate my feelings on this day much like the "puppy day" of our Bulgaria holiday.. Basically some small children had kidnapped some tiny ducklings from the main river, half an hour away and brought them all the way up to the village. They didn't look well and after we confiscated them and tried to look after them giving them water and me trying to mash up a worm for them, they didn't look any better. Eventually, later in the morning, the first one died and the other was looking really sick, so Adam put it out of its misery. Alicia did not deal with this very well at all and everyone was just in sad and bad moods for the rest of the day.

In our last weekend in Kamiatum we were invited to Winkler's 5th birthday party - Any's smallest brother and Crazy Steve's son. They delivered a hand written -in gold pen!- invitation to our camp. Angus decided to give him his Trekforce T-shirt as a present from us, despite the fact it would take him about 10 years to grow into! We went up to the house to find loads of decorations and food laid out and we appeared to be the guests of honour. After an embarrassing meal, where we really wanted to sit on the floor with everyone else, we moved in and sat on the tarpaulin with the kids and then started playing games with them like "duck duck goose" and cat and mouse. We also did the hokey kokey with them, which they loved! Some of the boys finally tried betelnut - chewing the nut with lime and mustard - which was apparently revolting and did nothing for them at all! The locals kept laughing and calling it "PNG beer"! - poor substitute...!

On the last day in Kamiatum, they had an official opening for the toilet. It was supposed to start at 9am and last all day, but we turned up to find - unsurprisingly - no one! We were sent away by an embarrassed Steve and told to come back at 1! When we did it was amazing! they had built a wall of sago across the path to the guest house and when we were all assembled they burst through it in traditional dress and did loads of dancing with their drums as we walked up and took our seats by the guest house. It looked like the whole village had turned up. Steve had had to go to Lae so Joel, who was the school chairman I think, did the speech and welcome and then we all had to go up and say our names and say thank you etc and good bye. Adam made a final speech, then the sing sing began with more traditional dancing and a very bizarre performance from some of the boys. Dorcas, who is 13, choreographed their dance, which involved some kind of backing track on a tape or maybe CD player and a whole group of boys miming being in a band with wooden instruments. The funniest bit though was when one of the old me in a bark thong came on and started dancing along with them - so surreal! Am still trying to get the video on youtube! We had another amazing feast, with all our old favourites - pit pit in coconut, loads of sweet potato, fish and chicken. We had the official opening for the toilet which, to my surprise involved Joel summoning me to go and cut the ribbon. I was a bit confused but obviously happy to have the honour of doing it after our weeks of blood, sweat and (maybe not) tears over it! So i went and cut the ribbon and unlocked the padlock on the door and then all the children filed in to have a look! At the end we all had to go up and the whole village came along and shook hands with each of us - it felt like a wedding! Lots of the women presented us with bilums as presents, when Priscilla came along with Mark she was crying which was really sad, I didn't want to say goodbye! After all this we finished off by swapping addresses and then headed back to finish packing up our camp. In the evening there was a torrential rainstorm, but the women from the seventh day Adventist choir still came up to the camp after dinner for us to teach them some hymns, which we dutifully did, often singing the same one five times! We stayed up quite late with them, struggling to hear ourselves under the noisy rain on the tarpaulin, but eventually had to say polite goodbyes and head to bed - after all, we had to get up the next morning at 5 for our final trek back to Salamaua!