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What a week it’s been here in the Gulf of Papua New Guinea!\u00a0 I’ve\u00a0really learned what village life is all about this week.\u00a0 Our team of\u00a0seven left on Tuesday to go on patrol to villages along the river and on the coast in order to give children routine vaccinations and treat sick or injured patients in the village.\u00a0 Since travel in this part of the country is by boat only (or dugout canoe in the case of the natives), most of the sick aren\u201at able to be brought to Kapuna hospital.<\/p>\n
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It was quite an experience to say the least, but overall, a good\u00a0one!\u00a0 We stopped at three villages a day, and we spent the night in\u00a0whatever village we happened to be in when the sun went down.\u00a0 When we reached Old I\u201aAire (our first stop) our boat pulled up next to an old, half-submerged log sticking out into the water.\u00a0 I found out that this was their dock and was contemplating how get off of the boat and up onto land carrying my bag without getting wet when what I swear was the entire village ran to the river bank to greet us.\u00a0 The adults were clothed but all of the children were naked, carrying bow and arrows made out of local plants.\u00a0 It was wild.\u00a0 I somehow made it up the log and was looking forward\u00a0to standing on solid ground when I realized that the walkways through the village were nothing but logs suspended over the muddy earth.\u00a0 As it turns out, all of the villages are designed this way because the ground is essentially swamp and muddy all the time.\u00a0 Y’all who know me will be very impressed with the fact that I only slipped once in four days in the villages.\u00a0 Someone was definitely looking out for me.<\/p>\n
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Each village was much different than I expected! I imagined that most people would live as they did in my experiences in the small towns in Mexico, with people living in shacks and eating food with little nutritional value. The villages in PNG actually seem very untouched by the rest of the world, and with the exception of the people’s clothing and nails in some of the houses, everything that the people survive on and with comes from the land around them.\u00a0 The villages were actually quite beautiful; there were coconut trees and beautiful flowers growing everywhere\u00a0and all of the houses were raised on log posts above the ground.\u00a0 I was amazed to find out that all of the houses are built completely by hand (the logs for the framework\/floor\/and material for the walls are all cut with an ax).\u00a0 Some of the houses were actually pretty big; since the material comes from the land, the size of the house is not dependent on the wealth of the family but only on how much work they want to put into it.\u00a0 The people cook over fire, sleep on the floor, bathe in the muddy river water, and use\u00a0these dreadful, long-drop toilets built in the bush.\u00a0 I felt like I had\u00a0stepped back in time.<\/p>\n
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Over the course of the week I did get to eat some interesting\u00a0food.\u00a0 The staple of the PNG people is a food called sago, which is\u00a0basically the inside of the sago palm tree scraped out and beaten with a stick until the pith separates.\u00a0 They take that and cook it inside a banana leaf and flavor it by adding coconut, banana, or even grubworms (thankfully, I didn\u201at have to eat any of the latter!).\u00a0 We also had dried fish, crabs (every day!), oranges, banana, coconut, and some kind of weird thing from a tree that looked like a Christmas ornament and tasted a little bit like wood.\u00a0 We also snacked on sugar cane (my favorite).\u00a0 I stayed up late telling stories with the nurses on the last night, and they told me I was becoming a true PNGian, and they were proud of me for eating all the\u00a0village food.\u00a0 They said I even ate foods that they wouldn’t eat\u2026haha.<\/p>\n
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The friendliness of the village people was amazing to me.\u00a0 We\u00a0didn\u2019t know a soul in the village on the first night, but immediately after we arrived one of the men came and offered his house to us for the night (he then told us to wait outside while he ran in and made sure it was okay with his wife).\u00a0 I loved seeing the patients when we held clinic.\u00a0 The kids would run over and play with my hair and sit in my lap (until I pulled out their injections) and we were really able to treat a lot of patients.\u00a0 We saw many with probable malaria, pneumonia and bronchitis, and injuries from\u00a0wild pigs and bush knives.\u00a0 I also got to see a lot of pregnant women and do their antenatal checkups.<\/p>\n
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I was reflecting yesterday on my village experiences this past\u00a0week.\u00a0 Y\u2019all know that I love being outdoors and don\u201at mind getting dirty and all that, but that at the end of the day I really need my hot shower and comfortable bed.\u00a0 Knowing that I was going to be thrown even further out of my comfort zone, I was a little nervous what the week was going to be like.\u00a0 In Ephesians 6:7, Paul writes this:\u00a0 \u201cServe wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will\u00a0reward everyone for whatever good he does.\u201d Now I’m not necessarily a vocal complainer, but in my head this week I pretty frequently thought about how horrible the heat was, how dirty I felt, how I hadn\u201at washed my hair in four days, etc.\u00a0 Over and over again, though, I had the same response to these thoughts \u201cit’s not about me.\u201d\u00a0 Realizing this made the work so much easier.\u00a0 I think that, as humans, it’s very easy for us to get wrapped up in our own needs and desires, but as Christians we are called to serve with the same humility as Christ served.\u00a0 When we give up our own\u00a0self-interest, we can really serve with joy, love, and kindness.<\/p>\n
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The cool thing is that we\u2019re not alone in our struggle to serve and do God\u2019s will.\u00a0 Christ gives us the power to lay aside our own personal needs and concerns, and once we figure out how to serve others, we’ll gain the desire to do it more.\u00a0 Over the course of the week, working in the heat and dirt stopped bothering me (as much).\u00a0 Isn’t it neat how that works?<\/p>\n
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The hospital has been fairly busy this weekend.\u00a0 Yesterday I got to help reduce an ulnar\/radial fracture in the arm of a little boy who had fallen off a roof, and spent two hours cleaning out wounds of a man who had been attacked by a crocodile while washing in the river.\u00a0 He was really lucky to even be alive.\u00a0 Last night Manar and I hosted a little dinner party for some of our new friends and I got to practice cooking PNG-style (and decided I can\u201at wait to have French fries and ice cream when I get home!).<\/p>\n
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We had church this morning (for three hours!) and I was asked to stand up and share my experiences from the village patrol.\u00a0 They had a special prayer for Manar and I as we are leaving tomorrow to go work at Kikori hospital for the next two weeks.\u00a0 It is so cool to me how much the community has welcomed and included us in everything.\u00a0 I\u2019m really going to miss a lot of the people here but am excited about working at Kikori (very\u00a0busy and lots of babies!).\u00a0Thank you all so much for your continued prayers! I miss you all but will hopefully be in touch soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a week it’s been here in the Gulf of Papua New Guinea!\u00a0 I’ve\u00a0really learned what village life is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}