BIG FAMILY PICTURE FOR GRADE 10

This is the grade 10 Personal Development course for Papua New Guinea students.

Who am I? mentor? Role model? Peer educator?

We can all be role models in families. Fathers and mothers can be role models to sons and daughters and members of the extended families on how to be kind, caring, responsible, supporting, honest, not cheating, not violent and committed to the safety, health and education of family. Older children in a family can be role models to their young brothers and sisters.

Role models can be leaders in the family, school, church and sporting groups. They are committed to the group, honest, supporting all members of the group, good communicators and decision makers, honest, good speakers, hard-working, strong values, self discipline  and helping members to succeed.

Sporting players can be role models for the younger players, teaching sports skills, having values of fair play and values of living, commitment to success of the team, no violence or dirty play in the game, commitment to training for all members and an honest and loving family life.

Who are in the nuclear and extended families ?

Nuclear family members are parents and children. Extended families are parents, children,grand parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. In Papua New Guinea, the positive extended family gives support to all members. 

Husbands give support to the family of the wife. Wives give support to the family of the husband. All members share in bride price. In traditional families there are strict rules about sex between family members except husband and wife. People are called tambus.

What is a good husband?

He is kind and loving to his wife. He works with her by gender equality and works to lift the esteem of the wife and children. He discusses family problems with his wife and accepts her opinion. He will discuss with her if he disagrees. He has commitment of a leader of wife and children and can be a leader of the extended family. He is not violent and teaches values to family members.

He teaches sons and daughters to be loyal to the family and give support. He teaches sons how to be a good  husband, father and role model. If he has skills in business or fixing cars, he becomes the mentor of his sons and nephews. They learn his skills that they will pass on to their sons.

He is honest in the community and committed to helping the community to grow. He is friendly to neighbours and always ready to help them. He protects his family from danger and makes sure that his sons and daughters go to school. He supports his daughters with gender equality by sending them to school like his sons.

He makes sure that sons and daughters do not go out at night if they are young. He and his wife make sure the young people in the family always tell them where they are going and when they are coming back. He does not want his children to smoke marijuana, take drugs or drink home brew. He does not do these things himself. He protects his daughters from sexual abuse.

He brings home his pay each fortnight and makes sure his wife has money for food, clothes, rent, medicine for the family, school fees and school lunches. He does not waste his pay on beer and other women.

What is a good wife?

A good wife loves her husband and children. She is loyal to them and to members of the extended family. Her husband’s parents and family have accepted her as a good woman and she regards them as her family too. She works hard in looking after house and family. She cooks food, washes clothes and looks after the children.

She may work in a job in the town and brings home fortnight pay that she spends on the family. She and her husband share their fortnight pay. The older children in the family help with house work and looking after the small children.

The wife has values that come from church teachings and she shares these with her husband and children. She wants her family to be loyal, honest and hard working. She wants them to love God and follow the 10 Commandments. The family prays together and each family member says Grace at meals. They go to church.

She shows her own values of love to all family. She loves her neighbours as the Bible tells. She teaches the children not to bear false witness and rest on the Sabbath. She is faithful to her husband and gives her husband loving sex. 

She is a role model for all family members and members of the church and community. She is a good cook and teaches her daughters the skills of cooking as their mentor.

Who need to be cared for in the family?

The family consists of parents, children and members of the extended family. Aged parents may have spent their lives looking after their children. Now it is their time to be looked after. They may come to live with their son or daughter. They will help with looking after the children, particularly if the husband and wife go to work.

The aged parents may be sick and need special care. Others in the family may have disabilities and be unable to work or look after themselves. They may need medical help and hospital care. There may be a person in the family with HIV/AIDS. 

They must not be discriminated against and rejected from the family. They may need support and be taken to the AIDS care clinic for medication. LGBT children need to be loved and supported.

Both the husband and wife will work together to build a strong family with strong love and caring, strong values of what is good and what is bad, loyalty to one another and love of God.

What are the needs of family members?

Families need love, security, cooperation, love, respect, dignity, strong values, self esteem for all family members, gender equality between girls and boys, husband and wife, strong support from extended family, food, shelter, clothing, money for family needs such as medicine, food, school fees, uniforms, books, peace, shared work, shared money, faith in God.

What are important values?

These include respect for other people, truthfulness, love of God, hard work, healthy living, helping one another, honouring father and mother and caring for family as in the Bible, helping other people in need, not abusing our bodies with rubbish food, alcohol, betel nut, home brew and marijuana, respect for life of other people and  respect for women and girls.

Why is strong nutrition an important value?

The Bible tells us that our bodies are temples of God. We must treat our bodies with respect by eating healthy food and drinking clean water. In many parts of the world, this is not possible as rivers are polluted and food is contaminated with poisons.

It is important that we eat fruit, vegetables, grains and nuts as these provide the protein, vitamins and anti- oxidents that keep our body strong. There are foods that are poisonous, damage our bodies and give us cancers. There are poisons in cigarettes, alcohol, home brew and marijuana.

It is important that we do not eat too much fatty food as this blocks up our hearts and can give us heart attacks, diabetes two and strokes.

Many people in PNG eat much fatty pig meat and many die in early age of 48-53. We see the photos of many young people who die and appear in newspaper funeral notices. They smoke cigarettes and do no exercise.

We learn from the old people in villages who live until 80-90 years old. Yet their sons in the towns die at the age of 48.

Young people die early because of their unhealthy lifestyles. They eat rubbish fatty food, do not eat fruit and vegetables, do no exercise, smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer, chew buai and get cancer of the mouth.

Old people live long in the villages because they walk everywhere up and down mountains, drink clean water from the river, do not eat much fatty meat, live in peace, work hard and eat mainly fruit, vegetables, grains and nuts as we are advised in Genesis of the Old Testament.

People who die early had suffered heart attacks and strokes from fatty meat, diabetes two from too much sugar in soft drinks and beer, heart problems from too much salt. We need salt and sugar but not too much.

The Buddhist value is based on the Middle Way. They do not do too much or too little but follow a middle way.

Why is exercise important?

Exercise gives strength to our bodies. We strengthen our muscles and bones. We strengthen our heart and blood vessels and help the blood to pass through all arteries and capillaries. Our cells are supplied with nutrients, salts and water that is pumped through our blood system by exercise.

Exercise burns our nutrients. Sugars are burned off and do not give us diabetes 2 by blocking our liver. Exercise burns our fats that gather in our heart and liver. We must not eat too much fat but a small diet with exercise will not harm us.

Too much fat and not enough exercise will make us fat or obese. So many people in PNG cities and in Australia are fat. We take off weight by eating less fatty food, more fruit and vegetables and regular exercise.

Why is sport important?

Sport gives us the necessary exercise to stop becoming fat. If we play football at school every day and do not eat too much food and drink too much soft drink , we lose weight.

Sport gives us skills that make us strong and able to move. All muscles become strong and allow us to climb mountains, swim oceans and rivers, run for long distances.

If we are healthy, our heart and brain are healthy. We sleep well at night.We are able to work long hours with clear brains and able to make strong decisions. We are not tired.

Sport is important as it makes us a team person. We can play with other people and achieve goals as a team. We learn the rules of team play. We do not play dirty and are not violent on the playing field.

We play to win but are willing to shake the hand of the other team if they win. That is sportsmanship. We often read in the media of a PNG team involved in a fight with the other team when they lost. This is not sportsmanship.

Sport trains some men or women to be leaders. They lead the rest of the team with a commitment to win and play fair, to come to training each week, to master skills as shown by the coach, to accept criticism of the coach and to strive to improve their personal best or PB.

An effective coach is a leader with the skills and experience to guide young players to become star players. This man or woman will be the judge of the achievement of the team and performance of the individual players.

The coach is like a father or mother to younger players and guides them in their lives off the field. The coach may be mentor to a young player who is drinking too much alcohol and having trouble with his wife. Another player may have just lost his job and needs someone to talk to. A good coach will know when a player is unhappy.

Women in sport

We live in a world of gender equality. If men play sport, women should play too. They need the life giving that sport brings us with exercise and healthy lifestyle. There are champion women in the world in all codes of sport who are role models for other women motivated to play sport too.

Many women in Papua New Guinea play no sport and as they grow older, become fat or obese. They are not healthy and face the danger of death through heart attacks, strokes or diabetes 2. Successful women in sport do not smoke, drink alcohol or chew buai. They limit the amount of soft drink they take every week.

The problem is that the sponsors in sport prefer to focus on men rather than women. So the big sponsorship in team sport often goes to the men.

Importance of the media

The media in Papua New Guinea shows photos on their sports pages of both men’s and women’s teams. The media is important in promoting sport as TV sports programs and sports pages will attract other sponsors and lift the money that goes to sport.

The football scene in Papua New Guinea lives on teams sponsored by companies. The companies have taken over the team and links the sale of their product to the success of their team.

That is why team managers work hard to make sure that their team players conduct themselves in sportsmanlike ways. If a football player is charged with violence by the police and charged in Court, that player will most likely be sacked by the company.

The sporting teams are expected to be role models for the young fans in the community and their families. A football team in UK once appeared in Court for rape of two young women. The judge blasted their stupidity as community role models.

Disabled players in sport

Disabled people can suffer a life that is limited by the inability to walk or move about. They may have been in an accident or born brain damaged. They spend their lives in a wheel chair or a bed and may do not exercise. Their life span will be cut short.

Modern society accepts that disabled people need to be loved and cared for in families. Those who are able to move around are encouraged to be involved in sport.

The standard of the performance does not match that of able bodied sports people. But we accept that they are doing their personal best. They are proud of their achievement and the community should be proud too.

There is now an Olympics for disabled people. The sponsorship is not as great. The disabled and women in sport suffer the same problem with sponsorship.

What are the values of other religions?

The Christian values are based on Grace. We live in God’s grace. We are all sinners and cannot bargain with God to find salvation. We live by faith but that does mean that we have to live by works too. We tell God that we are sinners and beg his Grace for salvation. We cannot buy salvation but only beg for Grace.

The Buddhist values are based on (1) the Middle Way and (2) the 8 Fold Plan. In the Plan, we follow the right beliefs, attitudes, feelings, humility, responses, actions, occupation and lifestyle. If we strive for perfection and truth in everything we do, we will live a holy life.

The Moslem faith places total emphasis on Allah through the prophet Mohammed. This faith believes in one God and the existence of Satan. It is a very strict religion that imposes Sharia law in Moslem nations that can have people arrested for immoral conduct and punished at times with death.

Hindu faith believes in more than one God. They believe in reincarnation by which the soul of a dead person moves on to enter another body human or animal. The society is divided into casts and the lowest are the untouchables that are pushed away from society only able to do the dirtiest work.