Wed, 05 May 2010 4:33p.m.
By Charles Bennett
My name’s Charles Bennett and I’m going to be working with Oxfam New Zealand as a Water Engineer on a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) project in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, an island region 500 km to the east of the Papua New Guinea mainland.
Over the next four months I will update this blog to share my experiences in this amazing country and hopefully give some insight into the practicalities of Oxfam’s work in the field.
I will be working with Pauline Komolong and Everlyn Mikasimo who are transferring from the Goroka office to work on the new project in Bougainville. The objective of the project, funded by the European Union Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Programme, is to install gravity-fed water supply systems in 15 communities in central Bougainville over the next two years. Alongside the water supply, a programme to promote hygiene and improve sanitation will be implemented, with the construction of 1000 new latrines planned.
Since arriving in PNG, I have spent my first week at the Oxfam office in Goroka, a town in the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea. Oxfam works on a number of programmes in the Highlands, within areas such as livelihoods, women’s rights and health promotion.
Goroka is approximately 1800m above sea level, meaning the climate is cooler than in much of PNG. The town is centred around a large market, full of locally grown fruit and vegetables such as bananas, avocados, tomatoes and sweet potatoes. It is thought that people in the PNG Highlands were cultivating vegetables around 9000 years ago, making them some of the earliest farmers in the world. The most significant crop is now coffee, with coffee grown throughout the Highlands exported around the world from Goroka.
Next week I am travelling to Lae, a town on the east coast of the mainland, to procure materials and arrange shipping for transport to Bougainville. One of the challenges of working in Bougainville is the geographical isolation and limited availability of materials. Many of the materials required for the water supply project are not available locally and must be shipped from the mainland. As the ordering of replacement materials would cause significant delays it is especially crucial that we order all the materials we need and that the materials we purchase are correct and in good condition.
To help with this, I have been creating drawings to identify the components needed and calculating the quantities required for the first stage of the project in Bougainville.
This week I also visited Appropriate Technology (AT) Projects, a social enterprise NGO that partners with Oxfam in the Highlands. AT Projects is a highly innovative NGO and has developed a number of products to help people in local communities. An example of this is the AT Loo, a Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) Latrine that they have developed with a number of improvements to maximise hygiene, promote replication and reduce costs. We will be using moulds developed by AT Projects for construction of latrine slabs in the project in Bougainville, and I visited AT Projects to understand the principles behind the design and construction of the slabs.
