Cris taught us how to make a “bilum” – a bag traditionally made from natural rope. It is now generally made from thin plastic-y string by lowland/coastal people (which is where I was for POC/village living), and wool-yarn by inland/highland people (which is where I am living now, at Ukarumpa).
The bottom picture shows some string bilums that were given to me as gifts when we left the village. There are different patterns associated with different provinces in PNG. The two on the left are a "mountain" pattern that is from the Sepik; the one on the right, if I remember correctly, is from Morobe (incidentally-I didn't get any with the Madang province pattern, which was where we were living; that one is more complex/time consuming, so they didn't have time to start and complete it in the amount of time they had to make them before we left)
The bilumin my hand is the one that I started when I was learning how to make a bilum. After I got the hang of it, Cris helped me, so that it would be finished by the time I left the village.
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