Papua New Guinea, PNG, P.N.G.

A lot of my research this time around in Moresby begins with the phonebook: making lists of a dozen or so institutions to call for interviews, call them up, and then see if they’d be interested in talking with me. This means that a lot of what I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks is cold-calling people, which is an unpleasant task both for me and for the person on the other end. Just as surely as I get tired of repeating the same introductory paragraph about who I am and what I want, so too I am sure that the secretaries who have to deal with me have better things to do than to figure out which office to transfer the anthropologist to.

One of the most unexpected aggravations of cold-calling people, however, has been dealing with the phonebook itself. As most readers of my blog know, Papua New Guinea is usually pronounced PNG (pee ‘en jee). And many of the businesses and institutions that I deal with have names that start with some version of PNG: The PNG Chamber of Commerce, the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum, etc. etc. Often times important institutions simply are not listed in the phonebook, and in this case I have to start asking my personal contacts for information about them. But in other times, they are listed, but they are listed under ‘Papua New Guinea’ instead of ‘PNG’ (which is alphabetized between ‘PM’ and ‘PO’ in the phonebook). And best of the the ‘P’ section of the phonebook begins with a section dedicated to companies whose names start with ‘P.N.G.’ since P. is alphabetized before Pa, for some reason. As a result I have to look every institution up in multiple locations to make sure that I haven’t missed it. Sometimes groups are listed twice, or there are ‘see also’ entries. I am sure that there is some reason why there are three separate entries for PNG in the phonebook but this drive me nuts. Of course, since I am probably the only person in the country doing something as crazy as calling everyone with an institutional name that begins with ‘PNG’ I suppose I am also the only one put out.