Impressed, I nodded and agreed with him that he should come back and compete again. Teaching traditional martial arts in Goroka has been an amazing experience – both challenging and gratifying. One of the challenges is how transient the population in Goroka is. Students of all ages start training and practice consistently, then for various reasons they need to stop. It was a slow process to build a base of students. I see such skilled individuals leave even though I want them to stay a part of our group. While moving around occurs universally around the world, it happens at a
very high rate in Goroka since it is a big town in the Highlands region. Usually the club consists of 70% PNG students and 30% expatriates, but the numbers are always changing. Expats have come from 17 different countries. In PNG, martial arts tends to be more popular among males; however GTSDC has a pretty close ratio of 60% male and 40% female. In addition to the main location, we also have early morning training in a field near my house. Many of the students at the second location are gardeners or security guards or students who have all come from the same part of remote Madang.
Former Goroka student Grace Ward, now living back in the US, arrived to cheer on Nicholas at the Worlds
Some have only moved to Goroka recently and do not know Pidgin very well when they start training. This has led to some very fun morning practices. I translate from English to Pidgin, and the brown belt students,
who have been around for a while, translate from Pidgin to their ‘tokples’ (local dialect) for the newcomers. On top of these three languages, we use Korean terminology throughout the practices and repeat
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