POLITICSPeter Obi: Anger in South-East over Gov Soludo’s outburst

 noway believed Soludo would be attacking his family( Obi) in a time like this, all in the name of politics; I feel like crying. “ Southeast leaders will noway speak against all the bad effects against the region but are always quick to speak against their family. “ Is it not shocking that the zone had the most invalid enrollment by INEC with the least enrollment but none of them made an inquiry about what caused it. “ Southeast deserves better leaders because utmost of our leaders have failed us. The numerous problems we've moment are caused by our leaders. ”

NEWSSenators debate CBN’s move to redesign naira

 President has approved and they're seeking our legislative support, it would be ridiculous for our blessing. Let them go ahead( with) what they're doing. ” Replying, Senator Albert Bassey Akpan representing Akwa Ibom Northeast Senatorial quarter submitted that CBN does n’t need legislative support to carry out its statutory responsibility. He said “( The) extant law doesn't bear support of the National Assembly to do its job. No, it does n’t. The Central Bank is carrying out its nonsupervisory functions and I recommend the Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking and Financial Institutions and so there should be no farther discussion on this matter. ”

The Bridge

 The voice of the voiceless ,the one who has built so many ,an icon ,a mentor ,your good your works speaks volumes ,

The bridge 

The solicitor ,

Your hand work is speaking ,we will never go back or hide but will work tiredlessly for Victory to c

ome

Editor's Roundtable Just Put Some Eyes on There Podcast

:20 How a Cash-Strapped Start-up Became the Internet’s Food-Nerd Utopia. (Chris Crowley, June 18, 2019, Grub Street) 

“The ultimate distillation of a conversation going on with all the slow bits cut out and all the best parts included.” - Aaron Gilbreath

In 2006, Ed Levine launched Serious Eats, which quickly became a go-to place on the internet for the food obsessed. To coincide with Levine’s memoir, Grub Street created a “meta-food experience” by speaking with writers involved in the early days of the website. The Longreads team discusses how the oral history format seems to get people to lower their filter and allow personalities to come to the forefront. They also talk about the ambitious lengths people went to to get a story during this period of the blogging internet, and how that ambition often wasn't reflected in the low rates and long hours they worked. 

8:20 The Strange Story of a Secret Literary Fellowship. (Daniel A. Gross, June 16, 2019,The New Yorker)

The Optics of Opportunity. (Hafizah Geter, June 19, 2019, Gay Magazine)

"Racism isn't a revelation, it's ever-present and we're always dealing with it." - Dana Snitzky
"And it's not a surprising reveal at the end of a story." - Catherine Cusick

The team discusses the New Yorker’s story about a secret literary fellowship funded by Barnes & Nobel owner Leonard Riggio’s family foundation and a rebuttal companion piece to the story from Gay Magazine.

Geter is a main character in Gross’s piece and both writers were participants in the fellowship but, as our editors discuss, the structure and framing of the pieces differ greatly. In Gay Magazine, Geter asks who gets to tell a story and critiques the New Yorker’s editorial choice to frame Gross’ piece as a story about wealth. The editors question the down-the-rabbit-hole structure, which posits racism as a mystery's big revelation, rather than, as Geter shows, the glaring center of the story, which shouldn't come as a surprise. The team talks about how opportunity and predation are intertwined, and the difference between people who feed hope and those who feed on it.

24:08 They Welcomed a Robot Into Their Family, Now They're Mourning Its Death.  (Ashley Carman, June 19, 2019, The Verge)

"I didn't expect my friendly home robot to die." - Catherine Cusick

Jibo was one of the first social robots engineered to normalize the notion of "a robot in every home," to appeal to children, and to become part of the family. Jibo’s eyes, facial recognition responsiveness, and personalized greetings fostered a bond with owners, who developed pet-like affection for the dancing digital personality. Now, the company that makes Jibo has been bought out, and Jibo owners have been put on notice. His servers are shutting down "soon," but no one knows exactly when.

The editors talk about how to say goodbye to a robot you didn’t expect to "die," the challenge of trusting the reliability of something that corporations can unplug at will, and how consumer relationships to home assistants are complicated by their intentional emotional appeal.

Set Up For Failure, How Iran Captured 10 US Sailor at Farsi Island

Despite the United States Navy's insistence that "U.S. Navy Forces deployed globally are ready in all respects," ProPublica’s ongoing investigation into the Navy's combat readiness has revealed otherwise.

In the latest installment, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, and T. Christian Millerreport on how failures up and down the Navy's chain of command, coupled with a toxic "can't say no" leadership culture, contributed to 10 US sailors getting captured by Iran in January, 2016, after navigational and mechanical glitches put their ill-suited vessel into Iran's territorial waters.

In the wake of the Farsi Island incident, the outlines of the Navy’s fumbles were widely reported. But ProPublica reconstructed the failed mission, and the Navy’s response to it, using hundreds of pages of previously unreported confidential Navy documents, including the accounts of sailors and officers up and down the chain of command. Those documents reveal that the 10 captured sailors were forced out on dangerous missions they were not prepared for. Their commanders repeatedly dismissed worries about deficiencies in manpower and expertise.

Foley spotted a blue flag atop one of the boats. He pulled out a Navy reference manual. The flag belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Foley shouted that the men were Iranians.

Nartker was holding up a wrench and pointing at his engine to indicate to the Iranians that his boat was in need of repair.

Inside the engine room, Escobedo made quick work of the repairs on the water pump and then started up the engines. With each movement, the more maneuverable Iranian boats blocked him and the men aboard them racked their weapons. He could see them squeezing their triggers.

“Stop boat!” they yelled. “Stop boat!”

Nartker decided to ignore the shouting men.

"Go!" he yelled at Escobedo.

Escobedo believed that if he followed the order, the Iranians would begin firing. He thought the rounds would cut clean through their boat. Someone was going to get killed. Rather than gunning the boat, Escobedo simply looked at Nartker: “Sir.”

Nartker later told Navy investigators that he had considered grabbing his M4 assault rifle and trying to shoot his way out. But he thought that if he began shooting he could start a war. He had never received a briefing on the region from the Navy, but he had been reading The Economist magazine. He knew about the looming nuclear accord.

Nartker’s superior officers had ignored protests. They had assigned him a mission beyond the capabilities of the gunboats. And they ordered him to proceed, even knowing about the shoddy equipment and the late start.

It was wrong to punish him, when so many others shared responsibility. Nartker, Fuselier wrote, “was set up for failure.”

These Room Alone

knew I was pregnant the moment my boyfriend fell back onto his side of the bed. I pulled the blue blanket over my naked body, willing it not to be so.

In elementary school, when we were bored in social studies or math, we’d play MASH, but only the girls. We’d write the letters for mansion, apartment, shack, and house at the top; 1, 2, 3, and 4 (for number of children) on the bottom; the names of four boys (for the men we might marry) on the left; and four types of vehicles on the right. Then we’d draw a spiral in the center, count the lines, and begin moving around the square. Our future in pencil. I don’t remember enjoying the game or trusting in it the way the other girls in fifth grade did, their hushed giggles. Most girls didn’t like it when I added a 0 to the children, RV to the housing, a category of careers instead of men. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.

We were raised to follow the narrative of life — college, marriage, career, children — as if this were the only story. In my 20s, I started checking off items like I was playing MASH. I didn’t get far. During my first semester of graduate school, I listened to a nurse on the phone tell me I was pregnant, and when I told my boyfriend of four years, he proposed. This is an odd detail, but that afternoon he had bought a new watch. I remember staring at the black band and feeling the spiral tighten, my choices being crossed out. I said no to all of it. This was not the story I wanted.

***

It took me a long time to realize I was pregnant, to realize I was carrying something inside me.

Unlike most of my girlfriends in high school I had never dreamed about a future filled with children. I did not make lists of possible names for those children or talk about whether I wanted girls or boys. My friends knew they wanted two boys and two girls and what they would name them. Not for a single second did I look ahead and see myself with a child. Was there something wrong with me, something missing — did I lack the maternal gene? I felt I was supposed to want children and look forward to that day when they would arrive. It was the culmination of my two older sisters’ desires when they became mothers. It was assumed I shared their desires, but I did not. In my fantasies I had multiple lovers but remained unattached to any. I was a singer, an actress, and finally a writer: my essential solitude the common thread. Never was there a child waiting in the wings for me to hold.

***

Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

After reading your words, I went on a walk to think about what it was I wanted in high school. I went back to my mind at 16 , at 17, those years when decisions were made for me, when I didn’t think beyond the borders of Texas because no one else did, and my parents never offered it as an option having never left the state themselves. I didn’t grow up in a small town, but it felt that way. On my walk, I remembered, clearly, how I had hoped for one thing — to be far away. The rest of my yearnings I don’t remember, not really.

I’ve always felt the pull of elsewhere, somewhere I don’t yet see. How that desire perplexed me at a young age because I couldn’t name it, just fought against all those who tried to warn me against myself. And there were many. You think you want this now, but you’ll see. By the time I finished college, most of the people I knew were still living in my hometown or returning to it, having children, buying houses, choosing color schemes. I respected their lives, I did, but I didn’t see that for myself. What I wanted was still far away, and it wasn’t until graduate school — when I sat in professors’ offices listening to them tell me I must keep going, I must pursue a Ph.D. — that I recognized my secret self, ambition. Everything I wanted, I wanted alone.

About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

I don’t know exactly when I got pregnant. I can’t say what I might have felt at the time of conception except to say the last thing on my mind was making a baby. It was not a momentous occasion. I’ve read about sex being enhanced because the couple thought they might be making a baby — that thought never touched me. It only finally occurred to me I might be pregnant because my symptoms couldn’t be explained by anything else. You see, the father had been told after undergoing tests that he was sterile. Until those tests I had dutifully used a diaphragm, carrying it around with me in its blue plastic case with the accompanying tube of spermicide. I hated the thing, but I used it because I knew the worst thing that could happen to me was to become pregnant. At 19 I had nothing about me to recommend I become a parent. About a great many things, I was unsure; about my unsuitability to be a mother I was certain.

***

I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot.

My boyfriend and I met in college and dated, off and on, for a total of four years. He followed me to graduate school, to Lubbock, where he got a job teaching history at one of the middle schools in town. I was 23. I was following the narrative of life. Begrudgingly. Our relationship felt weary, obligatory at times, something I’d try to break free from every few months, but here we were, together. Here we were, in a gray sky bearing down without the deluge. And here we were, driving to a nondescript building one morning in October, the day after I sat through a counseling session with a nurse, who told me about my body and what it carried in an office that looked like a craft area for a kindergarten class. I restated my choice, my decision, my certainty, then I listened to the steps of the procedure, how long I would bleed, when to call a doctor. Did I understand? Was I sure? If so, come back in the morning at 7:00. Don’t eat anything after midnight. We’ll give you a Valium. I remember my only worry: how we would pay for it. The next morning, I wasn’t surprised by the gathered protestors outside the Women’s Clinic on 67th in their coats of indignation, their posters of blood and Bible verses. I was surprised by the crowded waiting room, all ages and races, the way we tried to give one another the privacy we had surrendered in the parking lot. I slumped down into the Valium, considered the affluent couple in the corner, their gray hair and look of shock, as if their bodies had betrayed them. I remember the numbing shot in my cervix and a painting of blue flowers on the wall and the sound of the vacuum and the way I trembled in the recovery room, sipping Sprite from a plastic cup and throwing up into a trash can and being told it was time to leave.

When the father was pronounced sterile, the outcome did not surprise him though it surprised me. I had never considered not being able to get pregnant since I lived in constant fear I would get pregnant. According to the doctor, there was some minuscule possibility I could conceive. The word miracle was used. I remember that. After receiving the doctor’s prognosis, I stopped using birth control, secure in the medical knowledge I couldn’t get pregnant. In late September, I was beset by all manner of physical symptoms I couldn’t explain. Without telling Bruce, I went to the health clinic on campus where I described what turned out to be morning sickness and was told I must be pregnant. I protested but took the test and sure enough six months after the doctor’s declaration of Bruce’s sterility, I was pregnant.

I did not run home to share the good news with Bruce. I called it a mistake, the latest in a long line of terrible mistakes I had been making or that had befallen me since I had met Bruce. It never occurred to me that this might be the only child he might conceive, his one chance at parenthood. Picture a young woman, more like a teenager, who finds herself pregnant and all she can feel is a desperate fear. Perhaps she isn’t a sympathetic character, perhaps she should have felt maternal stirrings, but she did not. There was nothing but the sense that with each passing day she was losing more of who she was, and she had already lost too much.

***

It was the years after, for me, when I lost myself — in drinking, in danger — but it wasn’t the aftershock from that October morning. I am sure of that, though the years with Dean had something to do with what became a recklessness in me. When I left Lubbock to pursue my Ph.D., I learned to act as if there were no rules except the ones I ignored.

What I did, I understand, I did alone.

Dean and I get back to his apartment, and I crawl into bed drowsy and queasy. I pull the blue blanket over me while he paces the hallway, his athletic figure darting back and forth in the door frame. The air conditioner clicks on, because this is Texas, and 20 years from now in 2013, the House will close the clinic we just left, along with half of the others in the state. I begin to doze off, hear the jingle of keys, and call after him, a question. “You have to stay with me, in case I hemorrhage,” I say, but he looks toward the front door and mumbles, “Call the school.” I hear the key turn in the lock and shuffle to the bathroom. Make sure. What I did, I understand, I did alone. I want to be kind, to say Dean couldn’t handle what he had seen that morning, but he saw only a waiting room and fists pounding on his truck when we pulled out of the parking lot. We stayed together out of some perverse, young person view that if we had gone through such a thing together, we had to honor it. When he proposed again that next spring, I said yes. Surely there’s a word other than mistake.

***

In 1970 the state of New York led the way, offering legal abortion on demand through the 24th week of pregnancy. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade wouldn’t legalize abortion nationwide until 1973. Unlike one of my high school friends who had to fly to Mexico for an abortion and another who was secretly admitted to a high-end clinic, I made an appointment over the phone with Planned Parenthood.

It was a cold day when we drove to Syracuse. The day was gray, the waves choppy with small white caps, foamy, spraying when they rolled to the shore of Lake Cayuga, the wind biting. There was nothing fresh about the day.

We left early in the morning to make my appointment. The drive was silent. The decision had been made. There was nothing further to be said and we didn’t say the nothing that was. We parked in a lot by the nondescript building. I checked in at a small metal desk, filled out forms, verified I was 18, then was taken back to the medical part of the clinic. Bruce stayed in the waiting room, empty or nearly so except for him.

I was treated kindly. I had a vacuum aspiration, and I remember the noise of the suction and the pain of the contractions. Then I was moved to an empty recovery room and lay on a narrow bed. It was as if the clinic had been invented and staffed just for me.

My recovery room was a row of chairs against a wall in a very small room, more like a hallway. All I remember is white. Maybe it was the white gowns or the white trash can or the white cup I trembled in my hand. We were lined up, not looking at one another, huddled into ourselves until a nurse asked if we could stand. I wonder about the difference between the solitude of your narrow bed in the 1970s and a chair among many in a hallway 20 years later, but nothing’s that different, not really, not even now, because we still shoulder these rooms alone. I told only one person back then — a long distance phone call — a friend who responded by naming girls who snuck away for abortions before we even graduated high school.

One month before the wedding, Dean called to ask, “Ph.D. or me.” I flew from Dallas, where my mother had bought me a white dress, and I sat in the Lubbock airport bar sipping wine when Dean walked in, resignation on his face. I understood — I could chase ambition or I could stay in Texas. I had to cross one of them out. I left Dean in the parking lot, then wandered the empty corridor of the airport in a daze until morning. I got on a plane, and I got on with my life. Later I would come to understand how I sidestepped a story I didn’t want to live. Now, it’s a story I tell.

***

I didn’t tell anyone about the pregnancy and the abortion. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d share back then, and I had no one to share it with. Did I feel any regret? The girl I was felt relieved. I felt spared from a great calamity. And I felt grateful above all else that abortion was legal, that Bruce could afford to pay for it, and that I had someone who shared my feelings going forward with the decision. I felt lucky my life could resume. I held onto the idea that my getting pregnant wasn’t my fault and that I had been given incorrect assurances I couldn’t conceive. It was Bruce who felt guilty about what he put me through because unbeknownst to him he had passed along the doctor’s false assessment and I got pregnant, I bore the consequences, I had to make the decision and I had to undergo the procedure. It was me, not him, who would have to say I had an abortion when I was 19. He wouldn’t have to admit a thing. I would have to reveal this piece of information for the rest of my life on medical forms. I would have to count myself among the countless women who had abortions. I would not stand apart, unscathed.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, andSlice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press

How to Catch a Cyber Sextortionist

While a student at Belmont High in Belmont, New Hampshire, Ryan Vallee — under the name of Seth Williamson — would initially befriend teen girls by texting them about their favorite ice cream or the name of their pets. They thought he was being sweet. He was after clues to their social network passwords. His aim? To hack their accounts in a bid to extort them for nude selfies. If he didn’t get what he wanted, his demands escalated.

The problem was that a lot of students were not reporting the behavior. They were trying to get through, heads down, not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Seth’s victims seemed to share that trait. A girl named Mackenzie, who was harassed by Seth, told me that when she learned who a few of his other victims were, she realized that none were in the popular crowd. They were consigned to the insecure middle, where every misstep was perilous. Staying quiet seemed a reasonable choice.

As Stephanie Clifford reports at Wired, one by one, exasperated and terrified, the girls reported Seth Williamson to the police. When Raechel Moulton, Belmont's only detective, realized she had a serial cyberstalker on her hands, she called in the Feds -- who have far greater power to investigate cyberbullying than state officials. It was just a matter of sorting through his IP address trail before the sting took place.

RYAN VALLEE WASN’T one of the popular kids at Belmont High. But he had two advantages his victims did not. He was a boy, and therefore not as vulnerable to slut-shaming. And he understood how to harness technology to seem powerful, controlling and terrifying victims for years with only a smartphone and a computer.

This information was critical: It meant Vallee was back online, breaking the terms of his bail. Moreover, if agents could catch him with whatever device he was using, they would also have his browsing and messaging history. With evidence that strong, they could circumvent Vallee’s “some other dude” defense. The government got an order that required Facebook to deliver daily reports of IP addresses and login times for the M.M. Facebook page. Meanwhile, O’Neill took over Mackenzie’s Facebook. Copying the instant-messaging patois he learned from his teenage daughters, O’Neill posed as Mackenzie, alternately flirting, challenging, and being mad at him. “The more he talks, the more he logs in,” O’Neill said. “The more he logs in, we can identify where he is.”

There's a Fine Line Between Discovering and Interloping

In this Nov. 14, 2005 file photo, clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, in India's southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Islands. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh, File)

John Allen Chau was killed by the famously isolationist residents of North Sentinel Island when he attempted to bring them Jesus. Whatever you think about his religious motives, he also represents a trend in “authentic” tourism — an entitled, colonialist trend — that evinces a profound disrespect for the humanity of other people. At The Walrus, adventurer Kate Harris digs into the essential egotism of travel to encourage us all to find a more respectful way of exploring our world.

Survival International, a non-­profit that works for tribal peoples’ rights, has documented a troubling rise in the popularity of “human safaris,” in which tourists seek out fleeting, zoo-like glimpses of uncontacted Indigenous peoples. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of the same archipelago as North Sentinel, you could, until recently (and possibly still), peer out of a tour bus at the Jarawa, a group of hunter-gatherers through whose traditional forest territory the Andaman Trunk Road was built. Similar sightings of Peruvian and Brazilian Indigenous tribes are available if you quietly ask the right guide. And, if these experiences aren’t ­thrilling enough, several organizations offer “first contact” treks, including ones in Papua New ­Guinea to visit “undiscovered tribes” who have “never seen a white man.”

Done well, tourism focus­ed on local peoples can give them more control over their destiny and widen the hearts and minds of travellers to the wonders and complexities of the world. Done poorly, tribal tourism denies people the dignity of being left alone—denies them, even, recognition as people. Either way, travel has a tendency to bring out the Chau in all of us. We want what we want when we go abroad, which often is the untouched, the authentic—even as our arrival, by definition, undermines those very qualities in a place or of a culture and contributes to the slow, involuntary conversion of one way of life into another.

THE SHAME OF A MEN

 An anthropologist on a return visit to a remote village in Papua New Guinea learns that all the village’s young men are terribly wounded.

A few months ago, in April 2019, an eyebrow-raising headline appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian: “Botched penis enlargements: Papua New Guinea doctors warn of nationwide problem.”

The article reported that over the past two years the General Hospital in the country’s capital city, Port Moresby, has treated more than five hundred men who injected baby oil and other foreign substances into their penises to make them bigger. The medical professionals who sounded the alarm about this practice warned that it seems to be widespread and is a growing threat to men’s health throughout the country.

I read this story and sighed. I knew that those doctors were glimpsing only the tip of a ghastly iceberg.

*

Only a few weeks before the Guardianarticle appeared, I had returned to Gapun, a remote village in an all-but-forgotten corner of Papua New Guinea where I have been doing anthropological research for the past thirty years. The village is much further off the beaten path than any doctor working at Port Moresby General Hospital is likely to have traveled. Getting there from the nearest town can take two days, but this time I made it in a record fourteen hours.

Leaving from the nearest town with my traveling companions — three health workers from a local NGO — I rode in the back of a truck with no shock absorbers on an unpaved road cratered with potholes. For nine hours. At the end of the road we climbed into a flimsy outboard motor-powered canoe, bobbing on ocean waves up the coast before entering an immense mangrove lagoon and, after three hours, arriving at the end of a shallow, narrow creek. From there, we shouldered our bags and trekked for an hour, through viscous mud and clouds of mosquitoes, across slim slippery waterlogged poles that villagers call “bridges.”

Finally we arrived in the small windless slit in the rainforest that is Gapun; a village with a usual population of about two hundred people. 

I first came to Gapun in the mid-1980s, as a PhD student in anthropology. I ended up there because I was interested in language, and I wanted to study how a language dies. Papua New Guinea attracted me partly because it was exotic; to anyone who had grown up daydreaming over the photos in National Geographic, as I had, Papua New Guinea — with its people who wore vibrant bird-of-paradise feathers in their hair, and cassowary bones the size of knitting needles through their septums — was the epitome of exotic.

They whispered to me,‘Did you bring any medicine for sores?’ 

Mostly though, I went to Papua New Guinea because that large but sparsely populated country (it’s the size of California, but only about eight million people live there) contains the greatest abundance of languages spoken anywhere on the globe. About eight hundred different languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea — note: separate languages, not just separate dialects or variants. Many of them are spoken by groups of five hundred people or fewer, and most of them are still undocumented.

I sought out Gapun after being directed there by an Australian linguist who had never visited the village himself, but who had heard from villagers who lived nearby that the people of Gapun spoke a language unique to them, one that was tiny; so tiny that, the linguist reasoned, it might be moribund. It was, and I have returned many times since my initial visit to document the villagers’ language and understand why it is dying (it currently is spoken by only about forty people). I have lived in Gapun off and on for a total of nearly three years, and with the help of a linguist colleague, I recently completed a grammar and dictionary of the language. It was precisely to present them with that work that I had decided to make my way back to the village, after an absence of nearly five years.

*

I arrived in Gapun feeling ebullient, merrily anticipating how the villagers would react to my gift of a grammar of their heretofore undocumented, dying language. It didn’t take long, though, for my happy mood to be eclipsed by a looming crisis. On my first morning back, as soon as I left the communal men’s house where I was staying, two young men who were standing on the side of the path that leads into the rainforest called out and motioned for me to follow them. They made a beeline into the dense tropical undergrowth.

I tagged after them, and as soon as we were out of sight and out of earshot of any inquisitive villager, they whispered to me, “Did you bring any medicine for sores?”

“What kind of sores?” I whispered back.

“We have sores on our ‘shames,’ ” one of the men said, using the desultory euphemism for ‘penis’ that Christian missionaries had coined long ago and imprinted in Tok Pisin, the pidgin language spoken throughout the country (the language now replacing the villagers’ local language).

I had known both the young men who stood before me since they were babies, and they knew that they didn’t have to feel shame about their “shames” around me. Because the nearest health facility with any reliable supply of medicine is hundreds of miles away, and never visited by villagers, I also had medicine; in fact, the only reason I had made it all the way to the village this time was that I had managed to convince a local NGO in the far-off town of Madang to do a “patrol” into the rainforest, bringing with them whatever medicine they could get ahold of. I had piggybacked onto their patrol, to act as their guide and to facilitate their entry into the village (and also, not incidentally, to spare myself some of the not-inconsiderable expense involved in traveling there).

As far as medicine was concerned, villagers had little experience with it, and I knew that they believed that antibiotic tablets could cure everything from stomach aches to heart palpitations. So before anyone handed out any pills, I wanted to know what the young men were talking about, exactly.

“Show me,” I said.

They each dutifully lowered their shorts. I immediately saw the sores — open wounds festering at the base of their penises. The sores were big and raw, and they looked painful.

But something else looked strange too.

“Wait here,”I told them.

I went back into the village and searched for the male nurse who had traveled with me to Gapun. I found him sitting in the men’s house, chewing betel nut and chatting with a few village men.

I asked him to follow me.

We went back to the two young men in the rainforest and I asked them to show the nurse what they had shown me. They pulled down their shorts again and the nurse wrinkled his nose.

“Did you inject anything into your cocks?” he asked them brusquely, eschewing the prim missionary-inflected euphemisms.

The two men nodded sheepishly.

*

Papua New Guinea is a country that rarely gets noticed by Western media. Most North Americans and Europeans hardly know where it is. To the extent they can venture a guess at all, many think it lies in Africa, rather than the Pacific ocean, where it in fact is located, just above Australia.

Whenever Papua New Guinea does garner attention, it is always for something bad. Last year the country made international headlines on three occasions. The first was when, in February, it was struck by a devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake that affected half a million people, of which three hundred thousand required life-saving assistance. What followed were reports of how tribal fighting and government corruption effectively hindered many survivors from ever receiving any help at all.

Several months later, Papua New Guinea was again in the news, this time because polio had reappeared, for the first time in eighteen years. The outbreak of that highly infectious, deadly disease was attributed to the abysmal state of health care throughout the country.

The final occasion when Papua New Guinea made headlines in 2018 was towards the end of the year, before it hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Port Moresby. The reason for the headlines this time was that the government, in anticipation of the summit, had purchased forty new Maserati automobiles, at a cost of approximately $150,000 each, to shuttle visiting dignitaries from the airport to the newly built convention center where the summit was to take place (the Maseratis were later joined by three Bentleys). After a public furor over the expenditure, the government insisted that it had always intended to recoup the cost by selling the cars to the “private sector” after the summit. Subsequently, though, in an outcome that surprised nobody, the Maseratis disappeared, only to be rediscovered on a wharf in Port Moresby after further public outcry, while a number of other cars purchased for the event still remain unaccounted for.

This depressing trend of bad news continued unabated into 2019, this time with the report of a national health crisis caused by men injecting baby oil into their penises to make them bigger.

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The flaccid members I saw on the young men who stood with their shorts around their thighs certainly were big. Cartoonishly big. The reason I went and summoned the nurse when I first saw them was that in addition to being pockmarked with ulcers, the young men’s genitals looked alarmingly bloated. The heads of their penises were dwarfed and almost buried inside a gelatinous-looking mass of puffy, squishy flesh.

Having no medical training, I thought that maybe the swelling was due to an infection caused by the sores, or maybe by a venereal disease the men had picked up from one of their sexual partners. The report from the Guardian about the botched penile injections hadn’t appeared yet, and I had never heard of anyone injecting anything directly into their genitals.

Every single male in the village between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three underwent this procedure.

The Papua New Guineans nurse, though, had been on patrols in other rural areas, and he had seen this sort of thing before. The answers the young men gave to the nurse confirmed his worst fears. Throughout the area where Gapun is situated, it turns out that badly paid health workers (health workers!) supplement their meager income by selling syringes, baby oil and a white powder containing God-knows-what labeled “Growim Kok” (Penis Grower) to ingenuous men, telling them that mixing the baby oil with the powder and injecting the resulting fluid directly into their penises will result in massive, impressive organs. In this case, a young Gapun man had traveled to a nearby village to visit relatives six months previously, and he heard about the practice there. A few young men showed him the results of their injections, and he was impressed by what he saw. He obtained a few syringes from the men, and purchased a few bottles of baby oil and Growim Kok, and returned to Gapun to spread the news.

The young Gapun villagers to whom he reported his discovery upon his return were all enthusiastic, and they took turns injecting one another with the oil mixed with the mysterious magical powder. Every single male in the village between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three underwent this procedure. None of them had any idea what they were doing; it’s a wonder that none of them struck a vein and killed someone. The injections hurt, the men said, but the pain passed and they were happy with the results.

Until the sores started to appear.

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That evening, the male nurse and I summoned all the young men in the village to a private meeting in a secluded corner of the men’s house. The nurse told them in quiet understatement that what they had done was not good. Under no circumstances should they perform any more injections on anyone else. He distributed copious amounts of antibiotic tablets, and he explained how to take them over a period of the coming two weeks.

Then he calmly informed the men about the fate that might await them: their injected skin might develop even bigger gaping ulcers, he said. It could turn hard, or worse. It might die. If the sores the men had developed remained but stopped hurting, they needed to travel to a hospital as soon as possible, because numbness meant that necrosis had begun to set in.

When I heard this prognosis, my heart sank, partly because I know that villagers are unlikely to ever undertake the several-day journey required to get to the nearest hospital. But mostly I know that even if they did make it there, the underfunded provincial hospital would likely send them right back home, since it has no doctors who could treat such a condition, which would surely require surgery.

The young men sat pensively, chewing betel nut and letting the nurse’s words slowly sink in. I took the opportunity to ask them why they did what they did. They became animated. Having a big penis would give their girlfriends overpowering sexual pleasure, they said. The young women would “writhe like snakes” and “bellow like pigs,” they told me in their inimitable Papua New Guinean idiom, giggling. But they pointed out that they did not regard this pleasure as a magnanimous gift. On the contrary, they explained, it was like a spell or a hex. Making a young woman writhe like a snake or bellow like a pig was the strongest form of love magic. It would ensure that any woman who slept with you would follow you wherever you went and do whatever you asked.

A big penis, in other words, was a means of controlling women.

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The Guardian newspaper article about botched penis injections quotes one of the doctors who sounded the alarm as saying, “I don’t think it’s particularly a PNG [Papua New Guinea] thing, in every society, adolescents and young men have a thing about their penis.”

At first glance, that might seem like a reasonable observation. But I wonder. Even though male anxiety about penis size is definitely not restricted to Papua New Guinea (a US-based internet survey of over 25,000 men in 2006, for example, reported that 45% wanted a larger penis), is the “thing” that young men in Gapun have about their penis size the same as the “thing” that Americans have, or Germans (who apparently win the trophy for performing the most penis enlargements in the world)?

In the West, penis anxiety seems to be bundled up with issues of body insecurity and self-esteem. Researchers who have addressed the phenomenon have identified what they call the “locker room syndrome” as a possible cause of the insecurity: men compare their own penis to those they glimpse in bathhouses, showers and gyms, and they often find their own lacking (psychologists report that this syndrome often arises in childhood, when a boy observes the larger organs of an elder sibling, a friend, or his father). In other cases, the sense of inferiority tends to center around a perceived inability to sexually satisfy a partner; an inferiority stoked, psychologists say, by exposure to pornography.

In Gapun, I have never heard any indication that men think much about the size of their penises in relation to their fellow villagers. And pornography is all but non-existent. In the thirty years I have been coming to the village, I have never seen a single erotic image or magazine (they are difficult to come by, partly because they are illegal in Papua New Guinea, which in its constitution has declared itself pledged to “Christian principles”). There is no electricity in the middle of the rainforest, nor do villagers own any generators. Mobile network coverage arrived in the area about five years ago, but it is patchy and unreliable. Only two villagers currently own mobile phones, but they are mostly turned off, since rarely do the men who own them have money to purchase any pay-as-you-go minutes.

Levels of abuse that … are unique outside of a war-zone or state of civil unrest.

Many young men have watched a few minutes of pornography on the mobile phones of relatives and friends they stay with when they travel to other villages. But they are hardly porn consumers. And while the snatches of pornography the men have seen may well excite their imaginations (even if it also repels them — the very idea of oral sex, for example, totally grosses everyone out), it seems a bit of a stretch to assume that the young men’s limited exposure to pornography would be enough to make every single one of them eager to insert a syringe full of baby oil into his penis, and press the plunger.

Rather than assume that those men in Papua New Guinea who modify their genitals to make them bigger do so for the same reasons that men in Los Angeles or Berlin do, maybe we ought, instead, to listen closely to their own explanation of why they do it.

To control women.

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In addition to earthquakes and political corruption and botched penis injections, Papua New Guinea also regularly makes headlines in the Western press because of something else bad; something very bad: namely, the fact that sexual and domestic violence towards women occurs throughout the country at absolutely staggering rates. Aid organizations and NGOs report that gender violence in Papua New Guinea occurs at epidemic levels and affects more than two-thirds of families in the country. Some studies say one in two women will be forced to have sex in their lifetime. Others report that 60% of men interviewed indicated that they had participated in a gang rape. The Aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has labeled Papua New Guinea’s sexual and domestic violence a humanitarian crisis, with levels of abuse that it says are unique outside of a war-zone or state of civil unrest.

Violence against women in Gapun is nowhere near as horrific as it is in other parts of the country, where women accused of witchcraft are subjected to prolonged public sexualized torture, dismemberment and being set on fire and burnt alive. Nevertheless, over the years, I have noticed a steady erosion in relations between women and men, with young men behaving much more aggressively to young women than their fathers generally did. Wife beatings are more common nowadays than they were twenty years ago. Rape — which was unheard of when I began my work in the village in the 1980s — occurs occasionally and, as far as I am able to determine, increasingly.

NGOs, journalists and researchers have suggested several reasons for the alarming rates of gender violence in the country. They include Christian messages that advocate patriarchal authority and wifely subservience, and the introduction of alcohol, drugs and firearms into communities. But a leading cause, most people seem agreed, is men’s response to their increasing feelings of disempowerment in a post-colonial society.

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Papua New Guinea has experienced monumental changes during the course of the twentieth century. Saying that the country has traveled from “Stone Age to Space Age” in a single generation is an overly fondled platitude — and an inaccurate one besides, given that most communities in the country hardly have access to space-age anything, including services like primary-school education or basic medical care. But the tired cliché does nevertheless express the magnitude of the impact that white people have had on the lives of everyone in Papua New Guinea.

Like a gigantic, implacable bulldozer, the twentieth century crushed the life out of everything most people in the country had ever believed or accomplished. Christian missionaries quickly and irrevocably broke the backs of indigenous religious beliefs, replacing villagers’ dead ancestors who could be importuned or coerced with a dour, punishing, implacably deaf and unreachably distant white God. Labor recruiters and settler colonialists introduced money into what had previously been societies that had been built on the exchange of gifts. Underfunded and understaffed schools (where they exist at all) teach children to be dissatisfied with their lives, letting them share crumbling Australian-made schoolbooks that contain drawings and photos of things like highways and cities — providing the pupils with glimpses of a life of opulence that they can’t really imagine but that, clearly, exists somewhere else.

The theme that emerges as a consistent, sobering subtext in all the negative headlines that reach us about Papua New Guinea — and a theme that also is consistent in all the research done in the country — is that its societies are convulsing. The descriptors used indicate unequivocal alarm. Words like “break down” and “dysfunction” are common. Violence, everyone is agreed, is everywhere. Communities throughout the country are undergoing far-reaching transformations that the communities themselves cannot control.

In such an uncontrollable world, maybe it isn’t so strange that young men turn inwards, fantasizing that they can control something — that they can control anything — by modifying their bodies. Like anorexics in the West, who address their perceived lack of control by disciplining their own flesh and dominating it, perhaps young men in Gapun, and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, have begun trying to enhance themselves in a muddled attempt to rectify injuries that they and everyone around them has endured, at the hands of colonialism, Christianity and modernity.

The inconsolable tragedy is that the outcome of injecting non-organic fluids into their penises, in fact, is not controllable at all. The outcome, on the contrary, is intractable. It may well result in the young men becoming impotent for life.

Or, if the skin around the injections begins to blacken and die, it may result in something much, much worse.

A few days after the nurse dispensed his medicine and his somber auguries, the NGO health workers left Gapun, and I went with them. I said goodbye to the villagers with a dull, leaden heart. I felt bereaved. The grammar of the villagers’ language that I so naively had hoped would be greeted with acclamation had been paged through politely, then put aside. I understood why: villagers had other things on their mind. An entire generation of young men had permanently, and perhaps catastrophically, maimed themselves. None of them would ever be able to afford to travel to far-away Port Moresby to see the single surgeon in the country who might be able to treat them. Like the majority of men throughout the country who have subjected themselves to a DIY penis enlargement, the young villagers in Gapun are on their own.

And as the disastrous effects of the botched injections increasingly make themselves known across Papua New Guinea, it seems to me that to call what is happening a “nationwide problem,” as the doctors interviewed by the Guardiandid, is to understate the point. What health officials — what all of us — should be talking about instead is a nationwide calamity. Or, better: a nationwide symptom of a global disease; one with far deeper roots, and one I fear will continue to have much further-reaching consequences, than the wounded shames of the young men of Gapun.

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Don Kulick is the author of A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, out this month from Algonquin Books. 

Kulick is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on topics that range from the lives of transgender sex workers to the anthropology of fat. He has conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia. He is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including an NEH Fellowship, an A. W. Mellon Foundation Guest Professorship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he directs the research program Engaging Vulnerability.