Medical Emergencies                 
Archive: May 2009


In the Western world, what do you do after an automobile accident? If you are a witness to the scene then you take out your mobile phone and dial a special emergency number.  Helicopter Lands on Highlands HighwayThen society comes and takes the injured away to the nearest hospital, right?

It's not quite the same in Papua New Guinea. Here there are no ambulances to call or EMT teams.  We have to go fetch our own people if someone manages to get the word out to us that there has been an emergency.  Such was the case for  Dr. Helen and Dr. Jeff the other day when a van full of coworkers collided with a truck on the Highlands Highway.  That's the only Highway we have and it transports goods and services from the port town of Lae into the interior, to places like Mt. Hagen.

Dr. Jeff and VanThankfully we did get all our people out of the wreckage and flown to safety.  But there were so many people involved that it made for a few very hectic days for us. Ever try to stop traffic (shown above) so that you can land a helicopter?

Dr Jeff tending to the wounded; the front
door is almost torn off

We are thankful for our nursing staff and aviation teams, who made for a successful recovery.  Pray the necessity for these sorts of expensive and costly operations would start to slow down.... there have been way too many of these, of late, for us.

... Medical facilities vary in quality, but those in the larger towns are usually adequate for routine problems and some emergencies. However, equipment failures and sudden shortages of common medications can mean even routine treatments and procedures (such as X-rays) may become unavailable...  — US State Department

Helen counts it a privilege to be able to help keep missionaries and PNG Citizens going and able to serve the Lord.

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Insights into Papua New Guinea Life

ANHS Cool ShadesHere is the entrance to our photographic favorites.  Come journey to the "land of the unexpected" as seen in our eyes after 20 years of ministry in this fair country.
See More from Years 2008 to 2005»

Higher Resolution Photos are freely available upon request.  Just email and let us know what you would like.


Keep my commandments and live, And my teaching as the apple of your eye.  — Proverbs 7:2


More News about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Gaire School Trial

Students at Gaire Village, South East of Port Moresby, PNG


A major part of the work is Language-Based Development; Bible Translation is pointless without it…..  — SIL International

 

I (Brian) continue to promote this great educational project in this country.  Recently I have been contacted by Michael Hutak, the Director of OLPC Oceania.  He and others, are interested in having SIL come and join their "Technical Working Group" meeting.  We feel there are many areas where SIL and OLPC could join our combined forces and expertise toward mutually beneficial organizational goals. 

One of the great heartaches of the land is the fear that language and culture will be lost by individual language groups in this country. Elders worry that the next generation will lose the very core of what makes that particular culture unique and their ways of viewing the world around them.  Education (and the learned ability to read and write one's own language) becomes a pre-cursor to knowledge discovery and entrance into the bigger and larger world around us. For younger children we have discovered that learning foundational material in vernacular produces far better academic performance later, once the majority language, English, is learned in the later years.

OLPC solar panel with XOThe OLPC XO laptops are a brilliant piece of engineering and theirgreatest assets are their ruggedness in the field and their extremely low power consumption. A single flexible 10 watt third generation "thin film" solar panel can charge the batteries in an XO.  The charging circuit inside an XO can tolerate a wide range of input voltages, which mean there is no need for external batteries nor a regulator device-- thus reducing costs per child even further in the third-world. 

MIT Labs (Boston) graciously sent over two of the OLPC style solar panels to test in the field.  We discovered two areas in the design that could have prevented success, but they have been corrected.  I am not at liberty here to go into details, but the good news is that by this field testing, the OLPC is even stronger in design than ever before. It has been a pleasure to serve this non-profit group in this way.

OLPC Oceania has now invited us to their next "Technical Working Group" meeting to be held in our capitol Port Moresby, and we (SIL) are eager to meet up with their technical partners and outside agencies that believe in this education movement for the third-world and certainly throughout the Pacific Region.


If the OLPC "vision" were in place in this country, our (vernacular) Literacy efforts might accelerate ten-fold.
— Brian Chapaitis

Continue to pray...  for wisdom that SIL and Wycliffe could engage in a meaningful partnership to make the OLPC movement a great success in Papua New Guinea.  If they were to succeed, then our work in Language-Based development would greatly accelerate in this country.

Wikipedia One Laptop Per Child Article »

Official OLPC Site »

Papua New Guinea School Trial »

OLPC Solomon Islands »


Callers and Visitors at Our House

Somedays we can't get to our work, because the Lord wants us to minister to others instead.  We never know who will just 'drop in' on us at our house.

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... but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.  — John 15:15

I used to think that I had to run to faraway places to minister to people.  Now I see that the Lord sends His harvest my way.  I simply need to share what has already been taught to me in friendship.


After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands;
— Revelation 7:9