I’m sitting in my cabin, trying not to get crumbs in my keyboard which is not going as well as I’d hoped. It’s Saturday and we don’t have clinics heading out today, so the ship is pretty quiet; becoming a cabin hermit, emerging only for meals and board games that often happen in the afternoon, is a perfectly acceptable way to rest and recharge for the week ahead. As an introvert, I appreciate the occasional cabin hermit day, and after a busy few weeks with the ship back out in Western Province on outreach it seemed like a good idea. It also seemed like a good idea to sit down and try to tap out a bit of an update about what’s been going on around here lately (and around here involves a rather long stretch of coastline and a river!) as it’s been a while since I have written.
So maybe a bit of a recap and then what’s currently happening?
LAND BASED PATROL
(June – September)
Back in June, I headed out with a team of 7 to Western Province on land patrol, where we’d be living and working in the villages and communities we were serving in. I’ve written previously a little about what patrol life was like here and here, and our two-week trip morphed into being just a few days shy of four months before we came back in to rejoin the ship.
I love a good map. During our land based patrol my team spent time in Lake Murray, the Fly River, and the Treaty Villages. (Now with the ship on outreach we’ve added the Bamu River to that list as well.)
‘Full’ is my favourite descriptor for my time so far in PNG (and I’ve now been in PNG more than six months: crazy!) and patrol was certainly a full couple of months. I was stretched and grew a lot personally and professionally (for a theatre/operating room nurse, primary health care is preeetty different) and grew a lot in my understanding of what it looks like, and the challenges involved in getting healthcare services into remote places in this country.
Our patrol focus was originally maternal and child health (routine childhood immunisations, antennal, and family planning), with the addition of assisting with the COVID vaccine rollout from midway through and eventually we began COVID testing towards the end as well.
And then we hit COVID and became part of a COVID response team.
Encountering COVID cases wasn’t unexpected; watching the covid situation develop in PNG, we knew that it was likely just a matter of time before we found a pocket of it somewhere, especially when you actually go out with testing kits. But there is still something different about knowing it’s in the community in theory and looking someone in the eye and telling them they are positive for a disease that for some people they didn’t actually think really existed until a few minutes ago.
And knowing the stats, a lot of those positive cases will be ok.
But we’re also working in remote places where the nearest health centre is often a few hours paddle away and those centres don’t have oxygen and some people will not be ok.
It’s hard. And it’s routine. But that doesn’t make it any less hard, you know? (I’m still looking for the words to be able to talk and write about it more but that may take me a while.)
We flew back to join the ship in Port Moresby mid-October, as our local colleagues continued on with the response in that area.
LAND BASED PATROL II
We came back to the ship to help get things ready for her to head back out, and after the joy of using a washing machine for a few weeks (seriously, after four months of hand washing your clothes a washing machine is a very cool thing in life) I flew back out to Western Province as part of a small medical team ahead of the ship. This time it was just for a week as our ship finished up some final things in Port Moresby before heading out to Western Province.
We set up clinic in a lot of the same communities we saw a few months ago so it wasn’t uncommon for the last entry in those kids books to be your own hand writing.
SHIP OUTREACH
It was the end of a fun season when our zodiac turned up at the health centre we were working from to pick us up and take us back to the ship. Through our four-month land-based patrol there were multiple plans of places when the ship may pick us up, and even though we flew back to the ship in Port Moresby and then back out again to Western Province on patrol for a second time before it happened, it was special to be picked up by one of our boats as it meant that the ship was finally out in Western Province, and ship outreaches were about to be underway.
Our ship in the Bamu River where it hasn’t been since 2019 due to COVID.
Since then we’ve spent four and a bit weeks running outreach from the ship. There are about 40 of us onboard currently, compared to 115ish that would be here for outreach pre-pandemic, so we’re a smaller team and things do look a bit different, but we’re out here sending two primary health care teams into villages to set up clinic each day. Our focus for clinic is primarily routine childhood immunisations and COVID vaccinations, as well as testing for COVID and malaria, and offering family planning and antenatal services when we can.
Our two medical teams are usually going in different directions to villages for clinic each day, but every now and then we’re heading in the same direction, just different drop offs, so we get to pack the whole team into one zodiac.
Our boats always try and get us as close to shore as possible but sometimes it’s so shallow that there’s a bit of wading required to get into the village.
… or a bit of a walk through the mud.
An overflowing hand of empty COVID vaccine vials is one of my favourite things at the end of a clinic day. We are currently completing people with dose two of AstraZeneca if they’ve already received the first dose and are super thankful to have the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccine to give those who haven’t yet received a vaccine. For rural areas having a one dose vaccine really is huge!
COVID testing
A few weeks ago, thanks to some new surveying equipment we’re very thankful to have on board, we’ve been able to get as far west (closer to the Indonesian border) as we’ve ever been, reaching villages progressively more and more hours of travel away from the closest health centre. This basically means that the further out we go the fewer people interact with health services, so we’re able to get clinic to more remote communities that often wouldn’t access services otherwise.
This was quite evident each time I was looking in the children’s clinic books (the books where every interaction between the child and health services is documented) as many of these kid’s books showed that they had only ever been seen by patrol teams, which hadn’t been regular and often had a year, if not more, between entries.
It’s easy to get caught up in task work as the days are busy and there is always something to be doing, but there are also grounding moments that remind me of why we’re out here.
One of those this week was adding “Seen by YWAM imms clinic” to a book (what I write before prescribing the immunisations that are due) under a list of other patrol teams and being reminded that we are another member in the system of a much larger team of people that care and try to get services out. In another book there was an entry from a health worker finished with ‘await immunisation team’, and while it was months between the two entries that was us, and we were able to get there for that kid.
A stack of baby clinic books all written up for what immunisations the little one is due to and ready for them to be prepared and given.
This was our clinic set up in the village as far west as we were able to get this trip. Would totally recommend the perched in a house clinic set up.
ON THE AGENDA
Currently, we’re in the middle of ship outreaches, bringing clinic to communities in the Bamu and Fly River. We have another week here before we sail back down to the Treaty Village area for the final weeks that will wrap the outreach season for 2021. From there we’ll sail back to Port Moresby where we’ll be for Christmas, restock, and relaunch for 2022.
It’s been a full six months and I’m incredibly grateful for your continuing support, whether that be in prayer, finances, or touching base with where I’m up to. I appreciate it, a lot .
PS: If you have any questions about what I’m up to or what I have been up to please reach out – I’d love to chat with you! If you would like to consider donating to help support me financially in the work I do here please check out this link for more details.