An Avalanche of Cockroaches

Papua New Guinea, 1970

In 1970 I lived in Goroka in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, where my daughter, Adrienne, was born. On one occasion my husband had to work for a couple of weeks in the town of Kainantu. We flew there in a small Cessna, the usual mode of travel at that time, as there were very few roads connecting places. This was always a very beautiful, if sometimes hair-raising experience. Small aircraft often had to more or less duck between the mountains, as they could not reach the altitude to pass over the top. The scenery was always magnificent, densely wooded, deep ravines, sheer cliff faces, and tiny mud-hut villages, with thatched roofs, surounded by beautifully kept produce gardens.

In Kainantu we stayed in house that had previously been a trade store, that is a house acting as a shop where a huge variety of essential goods and foods were sold. These trade stores were common all over highlands and I regularly shopped in one in Goroka.

On our first night in Kainantu, I opened the cutlery drawer in the house, and found seven huge cockroaches running round. I was so horrified. My husband and I set to work, spraying all the nooks and crannies in the kitchen, but we never bargained for what then happened. Cockroaches came pouring out from everywhere. It was like a nightmare. We couldn’t kill them as fast as they appeared, and many escaped, who knows to where; certainly some to other parts of the house. As it was, the kitchen floor was covered in them; dead and dying cockroaches heaped up on the floor. We both felt like our skin was crawling, and we still had to sweep them up and wash the floor. That was such a horror show.

That house had a big, deep, old-fashioned bathtub. When we finally cleaned it all away, I filled up that bathtub and had a very long soak until my skin stopped crawling. It wasn’t the end of cockroaches, of course, but we got them down to managable, about the best anyone could do in PNG, where they were just part of life.

Despite the cockroaches, living in PNG was a magnificent experience, particularly in that place at that time. The first white people, the Leahy brothers, only entered this part of the highlands sometime in the 1940’s, so village life was still very traditional. I regularly bought beautiful fruit and vegetables in the Goroka market from men in traditional dress, wearing bird of paradise headdresses. I now think it was a great privilege to have had that experience.