Family life at Okapa as a ‘missus bilong dokta bilong kuru’

This 50th anniversary of the first diagnosis of kuru brings back so manymemories and these reminiscences are for all the ‘kuru wives’, especially Wendy Alpers and Fay Hornabrook. John and I went to live in the Fore area early in 1966. It was expected that we would live at the government administration centre of Okapa as John, we found on arrival, was often required to double as the medical officer for the Okapa Subdistrict. We did sometimes manage to escape the colonial pressure and spent periods living in the Glasse’s house in Wanitabe and in the kiap’s hut (house built for the use of patrol officers on patrol) at Purosa. Travelling to and from Okapa with a young family was always exciting, and often totally worrying! From Goroka, you would take a single-engine light aircraft that bobbed between the mountains. Sometimes there would be no seat for you and you would be squashed on the floor (no seat belt and knees tucked under your chin) in the tail of the plane behind all the cargo, which was often made up of Carleton Gadjusek’s equipment! Road travel was by army-style four-wheel-drive vehicles that slowly edged their way along the narrow ledges of the steep valleys and bumped through river crossings not infrequently getting bogged. Monday was not a good day to travel because each village was required to work on their part of the road on that day (figure 1). Many of the roads were a pile of rocks with bridges reduced to a few planks. This meant lots of forced stops where you took the opportunity to buy kaukau (sweet potato) and small sweet pineapples from the women in the nearest village. Travel between villages and hamlets was by walking along narrow paths between the kunai grass and over stiles built along the fences of diwai (wood) and bamboo, which kept the pigs out of the gardens. And much of the walking was up and up. I can remember going toMugaiamuti early one Sunday morning to help with an autopsy and being pulled up the steep muddy track with a stick of bamboo held over the shoulder of a sturdy and helpful local kuru assistant. Single-log bridges over gushing rivers were a fearful ordeal for me. I would give the baby and toddlers to the sure-footed local guys who would whisk the children away to the other side of the ravine in no time. I would then falteringly and fearfully slowly step across sideways like an injured crab clinging to a