There's rather a lot of procedures and paperwork to be processed before these volunteer assignments eventually result in a trip to the airport to commence a flurry of flights to the destination. Initially, there's a wait while the client chooses someone from a range of interested volunteers; followed by a 3-day briefing every 2 years (in Melbourne this time), then: several contracts to sign, a detailed health check, arranging for the correct visa, the in-country arrangements, agreeing and processing travel/flight details, accommodation, etc...... This one took four months from my registering interest in the assignment to actually getting on the first of four flights to reach the destination.
I was originally advised that I would be flying out of Perth very late at night, arriving in Cairns at 5am and then waiting for five hours for a flight to PNG - I declined that option!
As the last assignment to the resort in Alotau, PNG was my 50th for the organisation (and a record), it had created a little flurry of interest.
I was scheduled to leave via northern Australia (well: the only destination south is to Antarctica) on a Tuesday - on the Friday before, TWO category 5 cyclones hit the north - lots of damage but, luckily, no lives lost and it had all cleared by the time I was there.
SO - first flight was from Perth: 1,229 miles to Alice Springs in the 'dead-centre' of Australia. Then 902 miles to Cairns (I don't understand why airlines quote distances in 'miles', not 'kilometers'?). It makes me smile when the airline gives their 'safety briefing' and always includes the flotation jacket - even if you are flying over nothing but endless barren desert! Anyway: imagine an aircraft packed with squeezed in cattle-class passengers, barely able to move at all, and trying to find, unpack and then don their flotation devices - impossible: arms and elbows in all directions? Anyway - crash into the sea and you're probably all dead anyway?
Overnight in Cairns, up at 03.30am, head to the airport (first person at check-in, had to wait until they opened immigration, first person into the terminal), arrive 350 miles later in Port Moresby at 8am and hang around for the next flight of just 263 miles to Goroka at 3.30pm. However, we had made arrangements to meet my assignment manager from the head office in Canberra who was in Port Moresby on her way out and we had a most interesting chat.
And so on to Goroka, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (at just over 2,000m we were several hundred meters above the town) with a population of about 19,000 (who all seemed to be on the street around the markets) where the change in temperature from my previous assignment on the PNG coast (and it was 40°C at home the day I left) was really dramatic - it's COLD up there! The daily temperature range was from around 11°C (40°F) to a top of around 20°C (73°F). Often accompanying the persistent rain, would be thunderstorms - with peals of thunder reverberating for 20+ seconds per toll! A unique aspect of the cold was that the gizmo I use to regulate my blood thinness (for the artificial heart valve) was just showing a thermometer on the screen - telling me that it was too darn cold to operate. There was actually some sunshine and it worked after I warmed it up for a while later in the day!
From living in a private bungalow on the beach at a *** resort; my accommodation this time was in a basic but comfortable house amid lush green mountains. Upstairs were three bedrooms, I had one with a bed room and a sitting room (the other bedrooms were unoccupied), and a large balcony with an amazing view over a huge valley to PNG's highest mountain (Mt Wilhelm at 4,509m, or 14,793ft) - often the valley would be filled with cloud. Downstairs was a 'bathroom' (well, a concrete floor with a drain and a bucket with a plastic scoop for water), a kitchen, sink, laundry tubs, table and chairs. The toilet was out the back (known colloquially in Aussie as a 'dunny') and was a volcano-like concrete pedestal over a pit (no 'seat') - it felt a little strange not to flush after a performance. The host facility was aiming at self-sufficiency including dealing with human waste; they'd even developed a toilet with a baffle which separated the liquid output from solid and used the urea (diluted) as a fertiliser and (after some months) the solid became compost. Yes, they had adapted the design for female and male engineering. To reinforce the standard being catered for - there was an illustration (and instructions in pidgin) in every toilet showing and describing just HOW to sit on a toilet! I guess that the illustration was for the illiterate. They had hydro-electricity to the guesthouse; plus solar, wind-power and a diesel-powered generator; plus: grew their own chickens, vegetables and produced honey....
As mentioned, it was darn cold at night (and usually raining) so three thick blankets made for a cosy sleep. Even the local staff were complaining about the cold! After living in the heat and humidity of the PNG coast and in a Perth summer - the change was rather dramatic, probably exacerbated by my Warfarin-induced thin blood. The accommodation was solar powered, so: no heaters in the rooms, or for water. I needed to place a plastic bucket on the path outside every night and a guard would take it away, fill with hot water and return it about 06.30am. When delivered, the water was sometimes piping hot (far too hot for a 'shower'); so: if using soon after delivery, needed to add some cold water or be scalded! Of course, the 'heat' quickly cooled in an open bucket in the chilly morning air so one needed to promptly convey the bucket to the 'bathroom'; adjust the temperature if it was too hot, then proceed to soap up, scoop and throw water over one's self for the morning shower before it chilled, or you froze into a solid block. Then towel off before totally freezing! One interesting morning, after throwing warm water over my blue body and dripping wet, I realized that I was standing there, freezing - and had left the towel in the bedroom upstairs!
This assignment was to an amazingly diverse organisation which was adapting technology suitable for the most under-developed, rugged and remote locations - either in mountains requiring days of trekking carry heavy gear or 14 hour trips in small boats to remote islands, ferrying equipment, staff and labour.
Activities included:
- Building footbridges over remote ravines and rivers, saving locals hours of mountainous trekking or dangerous fording flooded rivers.
- Providing ways of capturing and storing water for isolated villages.
- Sanitation in the form of toilets and hand-washing facilities - including to some 300 schools where kids traditionally defecate in the school grounds. And dealing with situations where the water table was barely below the ground level.
- Aiding villages with community development.
- Community Home Based Care (CHBC) - Running courses for HIV-AIDS volunteer workers who treat infected people in remote villages - because the situation is only getting worse, and the infected are dying, ignored by other villagers.
- Building unique incinerators for hospitals (and others) to incinerate waste and contaminated needles, etc.
- With donor support from an agency in Canada - supplying solar lighting to remote first-aid posts and villages with no electricity.
- Just before I'd arrived, they ran a course for hard-core prostitutes on how to handle and save their income - I was told that some of them were running out of the classroom in tears!
Just to demonstrate the depth of the problem with local health - the CHBC programme mentioned above tested 61 women in a small village - and all 61 of them had a sexually transmitted disease (some had several). Apparently, lack of knowledge means that if they have some nasty discharge it's just accepted as 'normal'! The trained staff can give them a dose of a series of pills which can cure them (except HIV-Aids, of course) - they just don't know it's a problem and that there is a solution!
Typically for the highlands: there was virtually nowhere flat, unless it had been excavated out of a hill to construct a house or building. My temporary home was toward the lowest point of the property - so EVERYWHERE was a steep 'up'. The workshop and main offices were next up a steep concrete path, then up over 100 steep steps to a meeting room and the guesthouse (which was the subject of my first assignment). On days when the rain was pelting down I felt like a salmon swimming upstream as the water would cascade (Niagara style) in bucketsful down the concrete stairs. Apparently, if it has not rained for eleven consecutive days - the locals consider it a 'drought'!
One day, a staff member told me that his home village was on a bend in a river - in heavy rain the river went in a straight line and swept right though the village, drowning six people, including his aunt and uncle.
I have an iPad, an iPod, a Kindle and a laptop when I travel and I'm versed and happily using the vagaries of all of them. However, I'm w-a-y out of step with the most common means of communication on our entire planet - the mobile phone. I have a very basic mobile phone (one of my daughter's hand-me-downs) that I usually have no cause to use at all; occasionally, someone will call me on it. I was rather chuffed with the fact that I'd NEVER sent a text message - my daughter reckons I'm 'proud' of the weirdest things! However, in PNG, I was using a dongle to connect to the internet (which is based on mobile phone technology) and that required swapping the SIM card out of the dongle, into my mobile phone with dual SIM cards (that I had acquired for use in Vanuatu), entering long numbers from a pre-paid card to get credit - then sending a very short text message ('1D' for instance for 'one day' and 60mb credit) to a four digit number and swapping the SIM back again. Try that exercise with one functioning hand. I needed instruction on how to send a number in a text message! While I'm 'confessing' here - I've also never had cause to use an ATM! Plus a few other little quirks that I'll keep to myself .... for now!
THEN - I was given ANOTHER mobile phone which was registered to a local network with cheap calls to other members of staff and frequent contacts.
Talking about the proliferation of mobile phones - virtually 'everyone' now has a smart-phone and a distasteful side-effect is that Papua New Guinea has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of searches in the world for 'porn' when related to total searches. While there is, apparently, no proven correlation (and it's historically been a problem) there are high levels of sexual and domestic violence in PNG. A survey in Bougainville revealed that a staggering 41% of women there claimed they had been raped by a 'non-partner'. A statistic apparently repeated throughout the country. Plus who knows how many more go unreported?
Also: child kidnapping is almost habitual ... a local businessman received a call on his daughter's mobile phone saying they knew he had K20,000 ready to be taken to the bank and that they had kidnapped his daughter and wanted the K20,000 as ransom. The guy told his brother in Brisbane; he used the mobile phone's lost/locater facility, told the father that the kidnappers were hiding under a bridge just out of town - the police found them and safely returned the daughter. AND: that's also in the 'goodness-gracious-me' class because if you ask the police to call, they may well say: "Sure, just bring us some cash so we can buy some fuel for the vehicle."
BTW - kidnapping of local children was reported by the local radio on virtually a daily basis. The raskals grab children off the street (or at the local markets) then demand a ransom of around K500 (about$250), or wait until a reward is posted and then claim the reward.
Talking about the 'markets' - this assignment was located about a 30 minute drive out of the main town off the main road then up a steep, rough road and I was horrified every time we would drive in and out of the town environs. Just outside the limited town boundary, on the main road, the streets were packed with small 'stalls' (perhaps just someone sitting on a stool with a tiny table selling betel nut) amid the most disgusting array of huge amounts of garbage and litter I have seen anywhere, even in the most deprived locations. Pigs would be rooting around seeking anything remotely edible. It was frequently raining, so there would be the added embellishment of thick mud and 'liquid garbage'. It was a truly disgusting sight. The 'toilet facilities' were in the bush behind a small thicket - where a woman was raped on about a weekly basis. Incongruously, the Governor of the Province (a woman) lived just behind all that squalor and impending disease disaster!
On a lighter note: I learned from an acquaintance from my days in Porgera (PNG) that my book 'Globetrotting By Vintage Car' was a contributing factor in inspiring a relation of his driving a Hillman Imp across Siberia - a refreshing quirk to enliven my day by 'inspiring' someone unknown!
From the first night on-site, in the wee small hours, I could hear an odd, rhythmic, thumping sound permeating the silence - at first I thought it was a dog scratching itself. Then there were noises on the roof (which kinda ruled out a dog?). It was flying foxes and the sound was their wings beating as they flew around and landed in the breadfruit trees to eat the fruits. The breadfruit that grew in abundance in the highlands was not edible for humans but the locals used the leaves in their underground cooking, or on roofs in place of thatch.
The power in my accommodation was purely solar, so: no heating, no refrigerator and no power-points (so could not charge any of my appliances). The office was powered by a diesel generator but only from 8am until noon, then 1pm until 4pm, Monday to Friday. However, the guesthouse and meeting rooms right at the top of the premises, up a very steep hill and about 100 steps, had 24-hours electricity via hydro-power from a stream running down the boundary of the property; so (after hours and at weekends), it meant climbing up the steep hill to work and charge my equipment.
Adding to the local ambience were a few small earthquakes. Buildings would be swaying around, with corrugated iron roofs making popping noises - but I'm used to that: this is a comparatively still 'young' country and on the move with earthquakes and active volcanoes. Just before I left, there was one slightly stronger than usual: I could hear it coming with a rumbling sound, then the workshop roof pinged and popped, then my abode rocked around for a few seconds and I felt it pass by like a wave on down the hill! I just kept reading my Kindle. Kokopo, where I was in the middle of last year - was having a series of rather strong quakes.
I've experienced some s-l-o-w email services in my time and I appreciate that I was up a 'mountain' in a remote area of PNG - BUT: it could take 15 minutes to open a one line message and that was after waiting ages for the programme just to open! I was getting quicker service between 2am - 4am! Then there was the lottery of having a Mb allowance that regularly expired and the provider kept pruning some of my credit - I'd go to bed at night with, say, K10 credit outstanding, open the computer next morning and it's down to K6.47 (or something odd) or zero.....umpteen messages of complaint ultimately yielded a detailed response claiming the charges were correct, but made absolutely no sense to me! So: I took to loading just K3 (about $1.50) every day for 60Mb, valid for 24 hours at a time. Even then, the charges were erratic and the Mb counter could be skimming along with nothing open, the allowance cut out at 50mb (not 60) and the time at 23 hours (not 24)!
Every weekday morning there was a fruitful briefing with all the heads of departments, where they (and me) reported what they would be doing that day, and any problems encountered - while I can pickup pidgin at bit...thankfully, the meetings were mostly in English.
The arrangement with these two assignments was that, because I was advising the guesthouse's restaurant, I was served lunch and dinner on Monday to Friday. Which was a good arrangement and gave me the chance to give them regular feedback on the meals they produced. The only 'problem' was the huge amounts of food I was expected to consume. They started off serving me a huge plate of the main course (such as chicken, fish or some meat), another plate heaped with rice and potato and another with a range of fresh vegetables (broccoli, carrot, peas, boiled banana...). After several attempts, I convinced them to serve me on ONE plate, but it was still loaded a 'mile high' - PNG style. I had some basic ingredients in 'my' kitchen for breakfast and weekends (no refrigeration) and quickly adopted a method we used in Cambodia to keep food out of the range of industrious rats by suspending anything remotely edible in plastic bags from nails in the walls. The rats were still getting into the plastic bags - so I hanged the bag in the bathroom from a hook in the centre of the room! In the damp climate: bread went mouldy (green and furry) within a few days - perhaps I should have gone into penicillin production?
I find it interesting how life and theories evolve - take numbers for instance: apparently the basis of numeracy developed in India in the 700s (but with no concept of 'zero'), slowly integrated into Arabia and then to Europe. In PNG (where there are up to 800 languages, no one seems really sure) communities developed independently. One region only had the concept of one and two: so, for instance, 'two' became 'one-one', three became 'one-two' (in the local lingo, of course). Another region's numeracy evolved around body parts and was based on 'twenty-six' (all fingers and toes, both ears, eyes, nose and mouth).
We were also training volunteers to deal with people who are helping to fight the (still-) growing HIV-Aids crisis in PNG. I've never been in so many disturbing discussions about: 'menstruation', 'infidelity', 'discharges', 'sexually-transmitted-infections'...and so on. The client's 'home-based-care programme' was treating an average of 1,360 Aids patients per month from only ten villages (and that's just locally!).
I was asked to create presentations to teachers and parents about the effect on them and the kids with their school actually having toilets, and how that COULD then impact on home village life. Next: I was asked to contribute towards a presentation to young girls about their first period - apparently: they get no information from parents or teachers. The tricky endeavour for a mere male was creating a presentation aimed at young girls - apparently the more mature girls, and the female teachers, just do not attend school when they are menstruating as there were no facilities! Menstruation is known locally as 'sik mun' ('sick moon' - oh, you get the inference...and you are learning pidgin!)
2.5 billion people on this planet do not have access to a toilet! In India, there are three times as many mobile phones as toilets - they can call another country, but not go to the loo!
One of my client's other undertakings was keeping remote airstrips open and we heard stories like a pregnant woman in a remote village who had been "bleeding for three days" being able to be airlifted to a first-aid post for treatment because the remote airstrip was maintained. Plus the more personal stories like a staff member taking a few days off to be with his wife as she gave birth, only to learn two days later that: "the baby did not make it".
The programme of placing solar lights in remote first-aid posts curtailed a quaint custom. If the prospective mother went into labour at night in the dark (no electricity) the midwife may hold a mobile phone in her mouth with the torch facility turned on to see by. The local network provider is Digicel and this has resulted in children being named 'Digi'! One of the female staff members was named 'Kotix' - not sure about the naming connection there!
I've lost track of the number of hotels and businesses in various countries where I could walk behind the counter, or into private offices and no one would be concerned. This assignment had a system where keys were locked into various master key tiny 'safes' affixed to walls around the extensive property and opened via a four number code to gain access to the keys to rooms/offices. I had the access codes and was usually the first one into the main office at 07.15 - 07.30 ... office and workshop workers started at 08.00 Monday to Friday.
One can be embroiled in some 'interesting' questions and discussions on assignments in under-developed countries. For instance: on this one, a member of staff asked me: "Why are some people white, while we are black?"
If I reiterated only some of the tales about the convoluted lives of just some of the people in the immediate vicinity, you would be flabbergasted. They would make the most outrageous TV soap opera seem believable! Questionable parentage, incestuous relationships, selling family land without consultation, assault, rape, under-age relationships...you name it, then multiply exponentially .....
In the realm of 'what's happening with technology' - I can now use my Qantas ID card as my 'boarding card' for flights and I have two 'Q-tags' which I can attach to suitcases and a gizmo will read the tag and acknowledge the destination without those silly paper things being attached.
In the last few weeks of the two assignments, there was a combination of seemingly unconnected happenstances. I had really finished all that I was required to do. A few weeks before the end of the four month stint, I was informed that the boss's son and girlfriend were coming from the UK. Although nothing was said, I knew that I was in the prime accommodation and offered to leave two weeks earlier than was scheduled on June 24. Then I heard that there was an assignment in Fiji that needed to be started before June 30 and they did not yet have a candidate. SO: I lodged my CV and application, waited a few days and was selected. The result is: home for a few weeks then off to Fiji on another assignment.