Stephen Ford shares his experiences

I had the privilege of staying in the village of Dogura, Milne Bay Province, for six weeks, working in a primary health care centre run by the Anglican Health Service. My work consisted mainly of shadowing the two GPs there, both on the wards and on patrol in villages in the surrounding area. These patrols were the highlight of my elective as I was given the opportunity to experience something of the everyday life of the villages. After trekking for several hours through jungle and scrub, we would arrive at a village, meet the aid post orderly, and set up a clinic. Children would leave their school for the day, just to watch the consultations (there's no concept of privacy in Papua New Guinea.

Clinics could last for a couple of days as word would spread through the surrounding countryside. Men would be seen first, then children, and finally women, as fitting with cultural expectations. When evening came we would sit in the aid post orderly's hut, made of wood and banana and palm leaves, sharing stories over a meal of kaukau (sweet potato), boiled bananas, tinfis (tinned fish), rice, and greens. The orderly would give a long and excited grace, and then tell us how Jesus was the mechanic of the body. "Uncle," a dentist, would complain that no one wanted their teeth pulled when the clinics arrived and console himself by piling sugar into his tea, before telling us how to find birds of paradise.

I was impressed with the community life
Papua New Guinea is an extraordinary country and I am extremely grateful to those who let me share a little in the life of their communities. Although it is far from easy to present the experience concisely, I can say that I saw a great amount of beauty in the country. I was deeply impressed with the community life of the people of Dogura and Wedau: the way they lived together, sharing in celebration and sorrow. The extent to which people were prepared to help one another when they fell into difficulty (the dedication which relatives showed in caring for patients and keeping them company at the health centre, for example) is also something I greatly admire.

There was also ugliness. For example, the treatment of women in many parts of the country was appalling--their lot was little more than that of donkeys. Germaine Greer's insight is apposite: "The universal 'division of labour' between the sexes was in fact the apportioning of daily drudgery to the female, so that the male could indulge his appetite for sport, play, dreaming, ritual, religion and artistic expression."¹ I have never seen work so unequally apportioned.

Even more appalling was the fact that in Mt Hagen I witnessed a man beating his wife in public with a crowd watching him and doing nothing to halt the battering. That 70% of married women in a country professing to be Christian can report having been beaten by their husbands--reportedly the second highest rate in the world--is one of the most perplexing and difficult issues to arise from my time in Papua New Guinea. ²

Very different from Liverpool
My final journey from Dogura provides an example of my time there with the ubiquitous clergy, women getting the rough end of the stick, and beetlenut. Before dawn I went to the health centre to wake the patients awaiting transfer to Alotau hospital, and then stumbled down the hill with them towards the sea, where our dinghy awaited us. Squeezed into the craft were a heavily pregnant woman with her sister and child, four men (one a clergyman), and me. We set off into the dark, chewing beetlenut and mustard, our teeth made red by the mixture. With sunrise came wind and rain, and underneath the hastily erected tarpaulin shelter I chatted to the priest, while holding the hand of the pregnant woman, who was in agony with every wave that buffeted us, praying that she would not go into labour.

At the priest's village the swells made a beach landing impracticable, so he showed that although the Anglicans brought Christianity to the country, they failed to imbue its people with English reticence. Stripped to the waist, he jumped into the sea with his belongings on his head and waded to shore with waves up to his chin. "Nice meeting you," he said. "We must meet in England when I'm next there."

After we disembarked the men sat and chewed beetlenut, staining the beach red with their spit, the women trudged to the hospital with their respective loads, and I reflected on how different it all was from Liverpool.