Last spring, I lived on a little-known South Pacific island called Bougainville, which was just then emerging from ten years of fighting a war of secession from Papua New Guinea. The island's status is still unresolved, but a multinational peace monitoring group—of which I was a member—is in place, and hostilities had ceased by the time I arrived in Arawa, once the island's jewel town.
I'll never forget my first look at the place. We landed south of Arawa and clambered into army trucks, then drove up the coast past spectacular white-sand beaches fringed with mango, papaya, and coconut trees, and past a deep-blue, hazy ocean, with small islands in the distance. But just inland, the war, which killed more than twelve thousand people, had created a virtual wasteland. Schools had been torched; Arawa's hospital, among the best in the South Pacific, had been destroyed; and a brand-new power station had fallen to revolutionary saboteurs, so Arawa, along with the rest of the island, sat in darkness at night. Jungle vines crept up the telegraph poles and over the ruined buildings. Yet the island was beginning to reshape itself. A significant sign of this was the burgeoning market, where Bougainvilleans from opposing sides came together to trade their produce. Every Tuesday and Friday at about 5 a.m., exhausted, barefoot women, bent with the weight of the sacks on their backs, would begin to drift into the market through the swirling mist, bearing the staples that sustained the island during the war—taro, yams, sweet potatoes, leafy pumpkin tops, edible grasses. Fish, crayfish, lobsters, and mud crabs were displayed on a slab of cracked concrete, the only remnant of the village supermarket. There were fruits, too, abundant heaps of mangoes, coconuts, bananas, avocados, papayas, mandarins, and rambutans. The pineapples were the most succulent I've ever tasted; I seemed to have bright golden juice always dripping from my chin. And there was chewy wheat bread, baked in pots set over hot coals in old 24-gallon oil drums. Today Bougainville is moving toward a peaceful future, and markets are beginning to emerge all over the island. One day, I hope, I'll return to taste the fruits of a paradise resettled.
This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #45
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