You'll never guess what I heard in church today...

“If any of you have cell phones with you today, please turn them off or put them on vibrate.”

I never thought that I’d ever hear this from behind the pulpit in Papua New Guinea ~ just goes to show you how uninformed I was! 

Cell phones are becoming increasingly popular in PNG, which is amazing when you stop to think about the number of people that don’t have electricity in their houses (I don’t have numbers on that though...I’ll have to look that up sometime).  In the village where I did village living last fall, there were about 11 houses and the closest electrical source was a 30 minute walk, at the local plantation-run store.  When we visited the village at Christmas, we learned that one of the families had recently pruchased a cell phone.

When I was living in Madang provice last fall for my orientation, a new cell phone company had recently started up and was placing new cell phone towers all over the place.  They also had billboards up all over town, and they were giving away T-shirts and baseball hats—really getting their name out.  Now the same thing is starting to happen down here in Alotau, and cell phones are really catching on.

It is understandable that people should find cell phones handy, as most don’t have access to a land line phone ~ there is a phone book for the entire country, and it is about the size of my area phone book back home, maybe 2 inches thick.  And the cell phones are set up so on a phone card system where you would purchase one for a certain amount of money, calls and text messages cost x, and when you run out of money you would just purchase another phone card. Pretty handy. No year long plans that you have to sign up for, like you do in the States.