5/6/97

For the llove of llamas

    There's something ... different, about Consul-General Daniel Lew.
    He doesn't glide along in chauffered limo between luxurious Savyon villa and heavily-guarded Tel Aviv embassy; not Daniel: he lives on a moshav, and the consulate is a converted chicken shed.  
    Daniel didn't rise through his country's diplomatic ranks to win a plum posting in Israel: he's not a diplomat, and not even from the country he represents.
    You won't find him beset by raptly-attentive reporters, eager to hear his official views: his country offers no opinions, nobody would care anyway, and the people who call on him are mostly kids.
    No attaches bustling about his consulate, no clerks, secretaries or spokesmen. But llots of llamas. 
    Meet the consul-general of Papua New Guinea.
    Daniel runs the affaires d'etat of PNG from his home in Moshav Ramat Raziel, between Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. But as honorary consul he is not paid, so, of course, he runs a llama zoo on the side and dabbles in art and publishing, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a lapsed Melbourne lawyer.
    The only thing consistent about Daniel is the non sequiturs.
    Alright, then, first things first: why Papua New Guinea?
    "I was looking for some place exotic, and ended up there for six years. I met all the wrong sort of people. After independence in 1976, they became the right sort of people. You know, politicians. They didn't forget me."
    His weathered, 58-year-old face radiates spunky charm. Here's a guy who just wants to have fun. His wife Sonia doesn't seem to mind.
    "So we got here in '87, bought this place and ended up with a chicken business. We hate chickens. For nine years we rented out the shed, but we were looking for a better way to enjoy our moshav property." A book called “Alternative Farming Lifestyles” led to the obvious solution: no, not llamas; alpacas. Llamas were an afterthought.
    Right then: so where does a Melbourne lawyer representing Papua New Guinea on a collective farm in the Judean Hills get llamas from?
    South America, of course.
    Of course not.
    England.
    He was leafing through llama magazines (don't say you didn't know there were llama magazines!) when he read about the British Camelid Society. (The very educated say "camelid" where they can say "llama," but truly pretentious llamallollogists llike to say "artiodactyls." Thought you'd like to know.)
    Anyway, to cut a llllllllong story short, Daniel and Sonia went off to Llondon and came back on an Ell All 747 with 13 royal subjects: Hal, Oliver, Jack, Lance, Albert, Onslow, Banquo, Yago, Freddie, Ziggy, Pepper and Peanuts.
    If camels look like they were designed by a committee, then llamas look like they were designed by a committee appointed by Binyamin Netanyahu. It's an animal that just does not look complete, as if the job was abandoned in the middle: they sketched in four legs and a neck and then resigned.
    But that's getting on the beaten track.
    Llamas, Daniel explains, are gentle and friendly, they love short people (i.e. children), and each one has a distinct personality though all of them spit (the llamas, that is, not the children).
    Visitors feed them, pet them and cart-ride them (the llamas, the llamas!). When kids get tired of the real thing, they can make their own replicas out of clay and llama wool. Spitting images, as it were.
    (Are you reading this story very carefully? Bet you didn't notice I only named 12 of the 13 beasts. I left out Lomez, as a test.)
    (I also failed to mention Daniel's poodle Monty, who absolutely hates llamas.)
    After the Melbourne lawyer llama farmer Papua New Guinea consul has poured you the only authentic Papua New Guinean tea or coffee served in bone china in Israel with opera music wafting in from the vicinity of the milkshake machine, you will naturally be craving a little Haitian culture. You won't have far to go.
    It's all under one roofed chicken coop: Haiti arts and crafts for sale on one side, moshav bric-a-bracs in a corner, a rack of miscellaneous shmontzes near the display of "exclusive" llama pottery, a technology department consisting of one old typewriter bearing a "NIS 40" price tag ("I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever sell that thing"), and behind the bales of straw (which are next to the dusty consular desk), a magnificent collection of PNG randomalia: figurines, masks, carvings, ritual objects, a drum and a crocodile-ornamented canoe, which no chicken coop should be without.
    These last items are called "objets d'art," which enables Daniel to sell them for thousands each, though the naked tribesmen who made them would probably have a good giggle to hear it.
    It's an impressive museum-quality collection, though. Daniel couldn't say for sure how old the items are, but he said he could hazard an educated guess: "Let's see. They sat in a Jerusalem warehouse for 20 years before we acquired them, so I could guarantee that everything here is at least 20 years old."
    Daniel and Sonia scrape off the llama spit and put on the Ritz a couple of times a year when the occasion arises that the esteemed consul-general of Papua New Guinea and his wife are invited to a diplomatic do. This is always a chancy event for the Lews: the fear that some senseless ambassador might try to wow his guests by serving llama steaks.
    Back at the ranch, the Lews are having one of those family squabbles we're all familiar with: Daniel wants to move the 13 llamas into the house in wintertime. It's easy to see why the wife is against it.
    "The wife? Nah. She's all for it. It's the poodle who's opposed."