Chris is currently out of the office

The biggest difficulty with Papua New Guinea for me is trying to understand the paradox: everyone is super friendly, and yet the level of violence is so high.  Today (Sunday) we visited the house of my technical assistant.

Everyone we passed on the road said hello and shook hands or smiled.  Our operating theatre sees between 20 and 60 patients a day, virtually all thetrauma cases are the result of violence. This morning I accompanied the nurse-supervisor to the ward.  We were all woken at 8am (sadly, as Sunday is our chance to sleep late) because one of
the national nursing staff had radioed for assistance.  I decided to go for the walk as I was awake.  Before we reached the ward, a patient’s guardian approached me and explained that he has been referred to us from a local clinic.  I read the referral letter before radioing the project coordinator, he had been chopped by his mother over a land dispute.

There seems to be some basic rules of violence in PNG:  All injuries seem to be sustained from bushknives.  All disputes seem to be over land, women or pigs.  Revenge is more violence than the proceeding act, so it’s a fairly vicious cycle of violence following violence.

So, while I’m very glad to be in PNG, I’m also very glad to get to go home one day.  Not that I actually have a home, but I get to go somewhere with less bushknives.

In some ways it seems like I’ve only been here a few days, things move so fast in Tari – but in other ways it seems like I’ve been here forever, it is so easy to understand the challenges in Tari they are often so similar to those in Lae.

Tari General Hospital

I have actually been in Tari for about 2½ weeks. Since then I’ve been woken by VHF radio most nights when the hospital staff need the assistance of the expat nurses, anesthetist or surgeon. Last week the entire team responded at midnight to a lady who had been stabbed, I dealt with the extended family, tried to persuade them to donate blood, ran errands for the medics, fetching oxygen or passing messages to the laboratory technician who was collecting the blood.

Twice since I’ve been here I’ve had to stop the vehicle to unexpectedly bring people to the hospital. One lady was unmissable: she was lying motionless, bleeding in the middle of the road. My new boss and I jumped out (fortunately she is also a nurse) picked her up, put her in the back of the vehicle and drove back to the hospital. By way of an explanation of her injuries she said only “Niupella Meri” (new woman) and immediately it was clear, I had heard it all before so many times in Lae. Her husband had a new wife and this was his way of letting her know. She had been stabbed in the hip punched in the face so hard she was unconscious.

Stabbings and choppings seem to be the most common problems that I see. I see a lot more here than I did in the clinic in Lae. There is a lot going on and I’m rushing about between building projects, helping a nurse move a patient or trying to get a generator started and so I see a lot of our patients who all love to chat. I was given some wonderful presents when I left Lae, most items of jewelry or bilums (man bags) so a group of patients call me “Morobe Mangi” (Morobe being the province that Lae is within, Mangi meaning “boy”) as they can tell where my bag comes from. Being able to speak Pidgin makes my life easy. Although Huli is the first language of Tari, Tok Pisin is the second language and most people understand it. And everyone likes to talk and knows who MSF are, they all remember when the hospital didn’t function and are very glad that it does now. I’m very glad to be here.