We’ve all been caught flailing our arms around, clambering on furniture, or pacing back and forth just for that one precious bar of phone reception- but what about climbing a mountain to get some?
Oksapmin High School teacher in PNG, Glenda Giles, recently went through quite an ordeal to accomplish the simplest of tasks last month. Upon returning to the Sandaun Province after spending a month back home in New Zealand, Glenda experienced a situation that she shan’t quickly forget.
Extreme weather can ground general day-to-day life in PNG with life interrupted by a mud-slide or flooding. However, this particular incident featured a whirlwind! Glenda wasn’t caught in the whirlwind herself thankfully, but she was caught in the aftermath and its affects.
Glenda said, “Many Casuarina trees were spilt or uprooted. It affected the area from Tekap right through to here. The PNG Bible church was blown down. However, the whole community worked and has helped to get it back up again. At the school two sheets of roof came right off my house and it seems that the satellite phone dish got damaged also. Fortunately some of the young village men came immediately and nailed the sheets back up so nothing got wet. Plastic roofs came off the girls’ toilets and shower blocks plus some parts of the girls’ and boys’ dorms. The primary school radio aerial came down but fortunately not the one at the Health Centre…”
Although the whirlwind caused a fair amount of damage, it was interesting to hear what proceeded after these observations. The knocking out of the satellite phone dish and the school radio inevitably caused communication issues! Glenda, a student called Caleb and a teacher called Jethro all needed to contact various people urgently.
This led to a 7 hour excursion across challenging terrain and around the nearest mountain towards Oksapmin School just so that Glenda could send a text to her loved ones to say she was ok and so Caleb and Jethro could book flights with MAF!
To us, this would seem crazy but this is what it’s like in many places across the developing world! It’s a lesson for us all. The next time you feel a surge of frustration when you’re sending a text on a train whilst going through a tunnel, stop for a second and count your blessings! It won’t take a 7 hour mountain climb to tell your friend that you’ll be arriving in 10 minutes!
*Disclaimer: Images used are not taken from the event described in this blog. Images used are to merely give reader a visual to help illustrate what it’s like in PNG.*
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