By Charles Bennett

World Cup fever has definitely not hit Bougainville. Although many of the games are being shown on the national TV channel, the local relay transmitter in Arawa is often turned off so there is no broadcast.

More importantly though, most houses here do not have power, let alone a TV, and the World Cup goes pretty well unnoticed.

Luckily, one of the New Zealander VSA volunteers based in Arawa does have a TV so I was able to watch and add my support for the crunch game with Paraguay. Despite our vociferous backing, we were unable to change the result (we were watching a replay at least a day old!)

People here love playing and watching sport though. On Sunday I went to the sports field to watch the local soccer league. There are separate tournaments for men’s and women’s teams and the standard and commitment is really high – many of the teams train 4 or 5 nights a week. The matches draw a pretty big crowd, and it seems like most of the town either plays or comes to watch.

The other activity that almost everyone in the town takes part in is attending service on Sundays at one of the many churches. The efforts of missionaries in Papua New Guinea since the 1800s has resulted in PNG being a devoutly Christian country and there are churches of many denominations – Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, Lutheran and several others.

I attended a Catholic ceremony last weekend and it was a great experience – there was a large church, which was very full, and the service lasted more than two hours, including plenty of singing. It was a good test of my developing language skills – the whole service was in pidgin and I was able to follow most of it.

The biggest project-related news this week is that our new Community Development Facilitator, Wilson Moanari, has started work. Wilson has lots of local experience and is going to be a really valuable member of the team.

Wilson’s role is essentially to help us understand what people in the communities want, and to help them to understand what we are doing.

We have to make sure that our work is in line with the needs of local people and they have the will and the ability to maintain these water systems in the future. When the construction phase of our project ends, the health benefits of improved water supply and sanitation will only remain if people in the community work together to keep the facilities working.