A Village Day

I spent one day in a village while with YWAM; the rest of the time I was busy with ship work. This did not bother me, as I have plenty of other opportunities to be in villages and few to be afloat. While the cook was wanting some land time, I was soaking up my ship time. The one day I did go to a village was a location where we knew English comprehension was low and some Tok Pisin help would go a long way. It was fun to go with the group and see what they actually got up to after we dropped them off each day.

Busy with clinics

Firstly, the primary health care (PHC) team met with the leaders and confirmed where they would be working for the day. They then set up a place to wait, a place to register (blood pressure measured and babies weighed) and areas for the doctors to consult, for the pharmacy-in-a-backpack to be used to fill prescriptions and for the nurse to do wound care and other tasks. We drew a crowd, both of medical issues and as the entertainment of the day. Doctor-patient confidentiality takes on a new meaning when half the village is within earshot! Although we tried to reduce the closest crowd to family only, it was with little success. 

Translating the women's talk

After the bulk of the patients had been seen, we broke into two groups for teaching sessions. The women talked about family planning and problem signs in pregnancy. The men spoke about domestic violence, among other things. Translating the women’s talk into Tok Pisin was a challenge. We didn’t exactly cover terms for pregnancy and family planning at orientation! Still, we got the message across…I hope. In another education session earlier in the day we had spoken about the importance of washing hands to prevent germs causing illness, but I wondered how much we really communicated. Here were the outsiders talking of bugs you cannot see which make you sick. Why is that any more believable than spirits you cannot see being the cause of illness? Both rely on a worldview of managing that which is unseen.

Just as we were packing up to leave the village, we found ourselves with two more patients. A mum had returned to her house to find that her husband had got frustrated with the kids, so beat them with a stick and threw them out of the house. Their house was on stilts, so being thrown out involved falling a long way down. I know domestic violence is a huge problem in PNG. It is talked about in the media here as well as at home, but usually it is not staring me in the face. Usually it does not come in the form of two small boys who are clearly concussed and a mother with tears in her eyes.

We did what we could. We provided pain medication for the boys. We convinced the mum to bring the most injured boy to the hospital for observations overnight and guaranteed to bring them back to the village the next day. We let the other boy stay to ‘sleep it off’, because we had no right to do anything else, as much as it went against the medical conscience of the team. We celebrated the next day when the boy who went to hospital was alright. We prayed that the beatings will not continue and that the children will grow up strong and healthy. 


When I looked into the teary eyes of the mother holding her two small boys, with tears in my own eyes, I think then we truly communicated, without the need for any words in any language.