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Peace
Corps Volunteer Juggles In New Guinea Highlands
New
Yorker Tom Cutrofello joined the Peace Corps in December 1990 and was
placed in a remote area of Papua, New Guinea, where he now teaches
mathematics and juggling.
He
reports there are 300 boarding students in his school in Koroba, a
remote area of the highlands occupied by the Huli tribe and not visited
by outsiders until 1940. Australians, the first Westerners to arrive,
discovered subsistence Huli farmers who raised sweet potatoes and pigs,
and dug trenches up to five meters deep across the countryside for
irrigation, to keep pigs out of the gardens and for tribal warfare.
Missionaries
and other Australian colonizers started settling the Koroba are in the
mid 1950s with the goal of stopping tribal fighting and modernizing the
Huli way of life. Cutrofello says the past 40 years have wrought many
changes in Koroba. All his students wear Western clothes. His high
school received a $10 million grant from the World Bank in 1981 and
built 16 classrooms, 10 dormitories and 17 houses for teachers.
Cutrofello lives in a modern house with three bedrooms and an upstairs
loft with a solar water heater on the roof. The previous occupant (a
former Huli teacher and amateur guitarist, left him a giant poster of
Elvis in the kitchen.
Cutrofello
began the Pandanus Nut Juggling Club last summer to occupy the time for
both he and his students during the slow weekends, and named it after an
indigenous tree with coconut-flavored nuts. All 15 current members are
female, and he says juggling is viewed as a woman's sport.
In
its six months activity, members have made significant progress. A 7th
grader named Kip learned three clubs in just a couple of hours, juggles
four balls and can pass seven with Cutrofello. Cutrofello says she does
not want to try five balls or pass clubs because it would mark her as
superior to her friends in a society where individuality is not entirely
acceptable.
In
conclusion, Cutrofello wrote to say he believes the math he is teaching
is important, "but somehow I feel that the juggling lessons will
have more of an impact on their lives in the long run."
He
invites both visitors and donations of juggling equipment. Contact him
at: Koroba High School; Papua, New Guinea.
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