Wamena: in local language there is no name for this place.
'Wam' means pig
'Ena' is tame
When the Dutch first arrived here, they saw Father Enda's wife in a field.
She was carrying a piglet
in her hands.
Then the Dutch asked, "What is it?"
People here replied, "Oh that's Wamena".
The Dutch then said, "So this area is called Wamena".
We can't separate the pig from human activities.
It's not that pigs are equal to humans.
No, 'Wam' is still 'Wam'. They are pigs.
But the role of pigs and humans is tied together; they are related to one another.
Humans have used pigs in almost every ritual they have.
During the human life cycle, from when they are still inside the uterus as a fetus
until their death, they'll use pigs.
In times of marriage, death, adat (indigenous ceremony), and illness
When people got sick, they would kill pigs.
everything
Many pigs began to die from 1995.
That's when many pigs started dying.
I had 27 pigs.
Twenty died and I have only seven left now..
When we found out the pigs had Kondoyu disease, we felt hopeless
All in all, 40 pigs died.
See that long house? It’s all empty – all dead.
I have only one pig left. We tried to nurture it until it gave birth to many other pigs.
We shared its kids with other neighbors, so now we have got plenty.
They are just piglets and newly born.
A virus is the cause of this disease.
When the virus infects the pigs, it multiplies itself through the feces.
From feces and every secretion – from saliva – the virus infects other animals.
The transmission period is fast.
I tried really hard to save my animals.
I thought and prayed; I went to get some medicine from the government
They gave me this tiny bottle for injection.
But I gave an injection to all the animals, including the piglets. Usually we don't do this
The first step to handle this virus is to vaccinate your pigs
The second step is to gather all your animals in one stall,
so you can contain this disease. So, even if one gets infected, it does not spread to the other pigs.
Thirdly, if animals in one stall are infected with this cholera disease,
we can reduce the effect by spraying disinfectant.
I bought a syringe. I bought it myself at the drug store
Whenever we took our animals to the government clinic, they gave our animals an injection, but we had to pay.
We thought that the government would help us for free.
After doing that for several time, we finally started doing it ourselves.
But still the pigs died.
So, we tried other options.
We bought penicillin and other drugs at the drug store and we injected the animals.
After that the pigs were fine.
So, we thought maybe this government help didn’t suit our animals
If many members of society do the vaccination, I'm confident that we can control this cholera disease
The government never comes to the villages to conduct surveys about who owns animals.
They have never done that.
So, they don’t have any information about this.
If they start consulting, maybe they can help us. They have never done that in my village,
so they don't really know, actually
When their animals get sick, people often look to adat ways. They don’t look for modern medicine
The most that they will do is give tetra (an antibiotic for human) to their pigs.
Is that helping? It creates more disease.
So, I think the government pays very little attention to us