Trip to Rabaul and Kokopo

In October 2008, Raul Schneider (Country Director ADRA PNG), Darin Roberts (ADRA Aust Program Manager) and I travelled to East New Britain for a Monitoring and Evaluation trip... with a little tourist activities thrown in.
Here is a sample of the 'Tourist Activities' ...

Flying out from POM to Kokopo and watching a great sunrise over the Owen Stanley Ranges was amazing.

Kokopo main beach and wharf with Mt Tavurvur in the background.

One of my 'dream jobs' would be a vulcanologist and a visit to the RVO (Rabaul Volcanic Observatory) has ticked off a place to visit.

A sample of what Rabaul now looks like after years of ash fall.

Darin and I visited the Submarine Base. The Japanese dug thousands of tunnels into the soft rock and you can understand why the Allies never attacked Rabaul as it was nearly impossible to attack without massive loss of life. Check out the view below from one of the 'windows' in the rock. The subs just came up against the reef close to the coast where the water is said to be 180m deep (about 10 m from the shore)... imagine the fishing here!The next day Raul arrived and as it was my birthday I wanted to take a trip out to the volcano and jump off the Beehive rocks in the middle of Simpson Harbour.

View from the beach at Rapopo Plantation Resort

View from the beach at Kokopo Village Resort

Here is a brief clip showing the eruptions that occur at 5-10 minute intervals, taken from a boat 100m from the shore, under the ash cloud... what a birthday present!

These are one of the Beehive Rocks. About 10m high jump from the left hand side of the rock shown above with rocks jutting 2m out... made it a little bit exciting!



At the end of a memorable day we had a swim at Rapopo Plantation Resort; Raul didn't see Darin taking photos but I did not want to come out until the camera was put away...

Australian Adventist Institution Visit

Over the last couple of days we have had the pleasure of a visit from 14 managers in various institutions in Australia and New Zealand.
They come from Sydney Adventist Hospital, Sanitarium Health Foods (Aust and NZ), Adventist Media Centre and the administration of the SDA church in the South Pacific.
They are on a fact finding and awareness tour of Morobe (Lae), Highlands and Port Moresby (POM).
They will have visited schools, churches, hospitals, aid posts, prisons, Pacific Adventist University (PAU in POM) and met with teachers, nurses, pastors and the Governor General of PNG.

We have had Sid Nicolas and Trish Campbell staying with us. They are managers from the Sydney Adventist Hospital. Marilyn did her nursing training there used to work there as well - many years ago.


Tuesday and Wednesday the group had travelled up to Goroka and then flew out on Adventist Aviation planes to schools and aid posts in the Eastern Highlands.

On Wednesday night we had a 'bung kai kai' (basically a large potluck dinner) at the PNGUM office. Before the meal I took some of the group up the street to the War Cemetery. They also recieved bilums as a thank you.

It was great to meet some old friends from Avondale College days: Paul Ginn (Sanitarium new products division), Joshua Wambillie (undertreasurer at PNGUM here in Lae), David Abel (Sanitarium NZ) and myself.

Thursday they visited ADRA PNG offices after doing some shopping for arts and crafts,

then flew out to POM to meet with the Governor General, staying at PAU while visiting some more communities before flying back to Australia on Sunday morning.

TISOL Family Fun Day

The International School Of Lae (TISOL) is where the girls go to school and on Sunday May 17, the Parents & Friends ran a Family Fun Day. It was full of traditional games for the kids such as sack races, three legged race (Tiarna and I crashed rather heavily), paper aeroplane competition, tug of war, donut eating competition, balloon relays, and egg and spoon races (one girl didn't quite understand how it was supposed to run and carried the egg in one hand and the spoon in the other and just sprinted!)

Marilyn was the 'first aid lady' so we decided to enter in the 'best dressed family competition'.

(Jenaya had just eaten a Chocolate eclair lollie and was trying to smile as well!)

Kambubu Teachers In-Service

After flying from Buka to Kokopo airport, we hired a car and travelled 3 hours down to Kambubu High School. It is situated close to Rugen Harbour and has a boarding school, large coconut/cocoa plantation and school farm.

View from the Administration steps, looking east.

We completed the same type of training as we did in Bougainville but there was another focus for teachers at Kambubu and that was dealing with the senior students issues.

This time we had a manikin

Marilyn says that she was explaining 'internal anatomy'...

When it comes to the HIV crisis here, I not only was able to give them education on HIV (and scare them with statistics), but also gave them strategies to address sexual issues in their senior schools. Gender inequality is probably a lot of the cause, but especially in the boarding schools, the kids are practicing risky behavior and unfortunately in this country they have not got that freedom because a lot of youth are infected with the virus. Country-wide, I believe it is growing by 60% each year.

I also had the opportunity to have time with the boarding students, it was valuable time spent and they were learning and absorbing everything. I give about 2 hours of awareness and education and it is always followed by 2-4 hours of questions and this is the most rewarding. You just couldn't believe what those kids are going through

Kitchen of the Boarding School, which produced amazing food for us

Bougainville Teachers Health In-service

Marilyn has come back from a trip from Bougainville and Kambubu High School near Rabaul (East New Britain). This is her blog.
I started out by catching the early bird flight to POM (Port Moresby) then a flight out to Buka (nearly 2 hours). It wasn’t the best flight as I was vomiting from travel sickness much of the way!
In Buka, the team went to one of the little SDA churches.

L-R: Jim Yawane (SDA Associate Education Director), Joe Ponduk (SDA Education Director), me, Darren Yorio (CPP Coordinator), James Gahare (Health Manager), Jimmy Frumpui (PNG SDA Church Health Director)

After staying one night at Buka we travelled across the small strait of water between Buka island and Bougainville then 4-5 hours along the coast road down to Arawa. James, Me, Ruth Galen(PAU Health/Nursing Lecturer from POM), Jimmy and Jim

Along the road we had four flat tyres. Here is one of those times.

The training was held at Rumba, SDA Church headquarters in Bougainville.

My experience was nothing but amazing.
As I am the SDA Church HIV Mainstreaming Clinical Advisor (long title for 'Jill-of-all-trades') I was helping to conduct a Health in-service workshop for all our SDA teachers in the New Guinea Islands and if you look at the map on the right side of PNG you will see all those Islands. All together for the 2 workshops, 187 teachers attended. I trained them in first aid (including CPR), HIV and AIDS awareness, women and men’s health issues and communicable diseases - all at a basic level. Other people covered nutrition, lifestyle diseases and more detailed men's health issues.
Most of these teachers or should I say ALL of these teachers have never had any health training of any sort in their whole career. Amazing! We had so much fun together.

Using James as a manikin (mankin) as there wasn't any avaliable.

(Do I need to explain this? hahaha)

Training them in CPR was fun, they had never seen it done and they never knew anything like this existed – that you could possibly save someone’s life like this was overwhelming for them.

Where they live, when someone is sick or a child is sick, most of them are nowhere near any medical facility and they handle it by themselves and in most of the serious cases the person just dies. A teacher told a story about a child that had a broken leg. They just kept them resting in bed for a few weeks until the child felt better and now that child walks with a bent leg the best he can. In most cases of malaria, the child may die of high fever with no way of getting medicine to them.

One of the small groups working on basic senarios they may face at school.

ADRA PNG, through the Church Partnership Program (CPP) funded by AusAID, has provided each SDA school in the Nugini Islands with a first aid kit to fix small things. Now, with the first aid training they will be able to help their children a little more.

Receiving my gift

Remember the Bougainville Crisis that we all heard about in the late 80's and early 90's where the people were at war with each other and the army; brothers were fighting against brother for independence. Just seeing the destruction on the island was devastating, the copper mine closed and is still closed and nearly everything was burnt to the ground and nothing much has been restored till this day near Arawa. But the people are beautiful and they are trying to get back on their feet. They have got so many natural resources that could make them a wealthy region.

After three days of the training we travelled back up the road to Buka and flew out to Kokopo airport to complete another health in-service at Kambubu High School in East New Britain. (see next post)