I’m sitting tapping this out on a kitchen bench at my Mum’s place, having spent the last few weeks in Canberra. Being in Canberra for most of February wasn’t what I had planned, but my quick trip south transitioned into a few weeks working from home, as my little niece passed along a daycare bug. It’s been under very snotty circumstances, but it’s hard not to be thankful for the opportunity to spend extra time with the family given that’s often not so simple these days.
But, we’re closing in on the end of February and I thought I’d share a brief look at how 2021 has been playing out for us up in Townsville!
B I G T H I N G S
Let’s start with the big one; our medical and training ship is back in PNG! Our ship had been in Townsville since early 2020 due to covid, but it set sail earlier this month…and getting her ready to go was what I (and a large portion of our campus) was part of for most of January.
As you can imagine we’ve been planning to get the ship back to PNG for many months, but January was the month many extensively detailed ‘to do’ lists were enacted. This included everything from rearranging our clinical areas, to a ship working bee, mass printing, and moving 1000+ boxes of medical consumables onto the ship.
A view from the wharf the day we loaded the majority of medical consumables onto the ship. Everything got moved by people power, things being passed person to person, human chain style all the way into the cabins where things were to be stored.
S M A L L W I N S
The ship’s sailing also marked the end of a ‘season’ and that meant wrapping up projects that needed to physically be put on the ship before it sailed. I’ve mentioned before, but one of the projects that has been on and off my desk throughout 2020 was getting a bunch of our flipcharts translated into Tok Pisin, which is one of PNG’s three official languages (English and Hiri Motu being the other two).
We have a lot of these flipcharts which we use for health promotion and health education as part of what we do in our clinics. These charts, on a wide range of topics, provide information to increase people’s knowledge and understanding of health issues, and promote preventative care. In January we completed the first bunch of charts (six different health topics) that will have a Tok Pisin translation that will hopefully help us better communicate health information to people in locations where English isn’t well understood.
(…a lot of my other tasks are ongoing data tasks, so it was also really nice just to have something that I could tick off the ‘to do’ list completely.)
L O O K I N G A H E A D
The outlook for 2021 is exciting; there are unknowns but there are a lot of plans as well. A few things on the radar:
The ship is positioned in Port Moresby and plans are underway to resume healthcare patrols in Western Province in June (hopefully this will be something I will head back up to PNG to be a part of).
We’re establishing a satellite vocational training campus in Port Moresby to help increase training options for young people in PNG. The campus, ‘The Jetty’, is where I spent 5 weeks last Feb-March, and it’s exciting to see more development underway on the building itself as well as on the training side; there will be a Discipleship Training School (DTS) and Rural Health & Advanced First Aid course starting in March.
We’re working toward getting a fully fitted out medical and dental semi-trailer up to PNG, which will be used for engagement in the schools in the National Capital District.
So, that’s a bit of an overview of where we’re at and where I’m at. We’ll see how much life changes in a few months time, hey?
PS: If you have any questions for me about what I’m up to or what I have been up to please reach out – I’d love to chat with you!