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)