“In 1981, my family moved to a village on the Karawari river in Papua New Guinea. In those years, I saw the country through the eyes of a child. Growing up in the village, it seemed that everything necessary for life came freely from the jungle and river. Days were filled with splashing around on canoes, fishing in the river and foraging for whatever we could find. Life seemed bliss. In a country with over 700 unique languages, ours was spoken by only 4000 people. We were generously adopted into clans, seamlessly integrated within the culture and quickly became family.”