first planned Christmas visit back to her father’s village on Biak Island in 2005 took a tragic turn when her dad died suddenly of a heart attack earlier that year. “We pushed forward with our trip because my dad said to my mum once, ‘If anything ever happens to me I want to be buried back home next to my mum and
Lele says she has found her ‘island home’ with husband Mitch and their four daughters
dad in my village’, so we did everything we could to bring him home,” she said. “So it was a bittersweet kind of experience for me, being able to go home and see where my dad was from, and my very first time to
plant my feet on my land.” Lele was able to visit once more in 2009, but has not been back since, although she says PNG feels just as much home to her. “I’m just blessed to be on the land of Papua, so whether it’s
the west side or the east side, every time I come to PNG, it’s home, you know? That border down the middle that separates us is just a border, it’s man- made. We are one land.”
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