Learning to Sew Morota

One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with in the village was the simple fact that I don't have any trade skills. I am a sub-par carpenter, a mediocre mechanic, and there weren't all that many computers out there for me to tinker with. Not only that, but another student had come to the village years before me and, inevitably, I was compared to him. He was a pilot. And a mechanic. And a fat man the size of an elephant. (Being fat is a good thing here. It means you eat well and are strong because of it.)

Unfortunately this was a source of stress for me while I was in the village, mostly because I felt like I didn't have any of the skill sets that were respected in this culture, and the skills I do have, such as teaching literacy, take a long time to implement. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I learned. One of the things I had seen men in the village making before was a roofing material called morota.

Morota is somewhere between a thatched roof and a roofing shingle. It is made from the leaves of a sago palm sewn together around a long thin piece of wood. This wood comes from the inside of a buai, which is another kind of palm. They use a small vine called kanda as both the needle and the rope.

Since the workday was happening next door to the house we were living in, I was one of the first people to arrive. I asked my wasbrata (watch-brother. Essentially we were adopted into a family, and they looked out for us) to teach me how to make morota, and he quickly explained the three materials we would be using. He grabbed a stick, a vine, and a pile of the sago leaves and began. In Papuan culture, most teaching is down by demonstration and repetition, and so rather than explaining the steps, he simply began, saying, "Like this."

It was easy enough to pick up, and soon I was sewing morota on my own, though my leaves often looked uneven when compared to the ones made by the other men. When I had finished my 2, in roughly the same time it took Peter to make 4, we stacked them in a pile with some others to let them dry, and went home.

 Another day, I got to help Peter adjust the morota on the roof of our kitchen. There was a leak in one of the leaves, and so we had to lift some others up to give that area greater coverage. Each of the leaves is tied to a wooden rafter below it using more of the Kanda vine that was used to sew the leaves together.

 It was great getting to learn one of the ways that these people have used the resources available to them in nature to make the things they need to survive!