Economic Development Open Day

On Thursday, 18 June ADRA held the Economic Development Open Day at the local Eriku Basketball courts.
ADRA PNG's Economic Development Sector includes the Micro Finance project (SED) and the Rural Economic Development (RED) project.
There was a collection of stalls operated by the women from the SED program and also our partners from the RED program.

This is the Cocoa Copra Institute showing types of cocoa and the budding of hybrid clones to existing root stock.

The range of fresh produce in Lae is amazing, temperate vegetables and fruit from the highlands and tropical species from the coast... year round.

The Marching Girls (women) opened proceedings, very enjoyable. As they did their turns they slide their right shoe and looked to the right...and the women in the crowd loved it, with whistles and laughing... I suppose it was the PNG equivalent of 'showing a bit of leg'.

Marilyn with one of the dance/theatre groups that performed... the 'snake man' and his family.

If you want to see the music and dance of this group, check out Raul Schneider's blog listed on the right to see Mathias dancing.

Janice, one of the SED volunteers, who does flower arranging as her business. Her range of gingers is amazing-you cant quite see the hairy ginger hanging down on the left.

Part of the ED team at the end of some very hard days, Lorraine (sitting), Grace (at the centre) and Bonifas, Gabriel probably took the picture.

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)