Keeping up with Beth

The people of PNG are so incredibly kind hearted. Everything about them screams Godliness and compassion for other people.

On the Sunday, it was clearly a more relaxed day for all, as everyone seemed to sleep in so I took no stress in getting out of bed or trying to push my body into gear.

I managed to catch up on the blog a little and just sit and have some downtime in the lounge area rather then lazing around in my bed all day like I felt I had been doing. We had a team meeting, just to establish a little better what we were going to be doing, and all the clever practical stuff of how eyes worked- it was so interesting and I know stuff about peoples eyesight that I had no clue about before! The best science lesson I’d had in a long while.

I spent the rest of the afternoon still in the lounge, writing, when the worship band for our chapel service came up and began practicing. It was truly amazing, listening to these talented people, seeing their gifts in practice, all of different cultures and places. In that moment I was reminded of how universal the language of music is. No matter whether you understand the words naturally or whether you just join in, music is beautiful. You can always appreciate it and understand it. It was amazing so I just sat there and listened to them practice for the service that night. It was authentic and came from a place of pure passion for music and God rather than just playing the music for the people. It was almost as if they were just playing for fun. It was inspiring.

That afternoon before dinner, I moved and decided to sit out on the deck on the sofa outside my room. There were a couple of people there- one of the guys off my team and another girl who was part of Primary Health Care and back home works as a nurse.

The nurse left after a while to get ready for dinner, and I was sat chatting to this guy.

We spent a lot of the time just in conversation about the beauty of PNG.

The biggest thing I can’t get over is the passion so many people of PNG have for their country. They know the struggles these people have, they understand the ways peoples judgements are wrong, they know the importance of the work YWAM is providing here- which I was doubting. I have a whole mindset that these people really shouldn’t really need too much of our help unless they are in genuine dire need of it, in fear of changing their society to become westernised when they don’t need or want that. That may counter me being on the ship, and its not necessarily what i believe but I do worry myself over the impact things like this have as these people are happy in their communities. But thats besides the point.

The people of PNG who are helping on the ship, have such huge hearts. It’s often hard to find people who care so much about a place- maybe thats just England. But this man was telling me so much about where we were- the bamo river, and about the culture of PNG and of his town, where he came from up in the mountains. You could hear the pride he had, not only in his country but of his job.

As Christians its not often people make death sound so plain. But its true, as he put it, no matter who we are one day we’re going to be 6ft under along side everyone else. No matter what you believe in the afterlife, we only have a limited time here on the earth. So he told me that was pretty much his justification for being here, helping others. He informed me he was a completely self taught optometrist with absolutely no professional training like a degree etc. There just wasn’t that option in PNG so he taught himself, and that was his work. He would serve the people, giving them sight again, with queues of people waiting for his help. It’s not the same as back home, there isn’t so much the option of just popping down to your local opticians to grab a prescription and go. Even if there was an opticians near by, the people couldn’t afford to spend hundreds on these glasses that it would cost them. This was one point to me that the work of the ship is valuable. As you get old your vision does suffer, its a fact. Many of these people will just sit and suffer with the fact that their vision is going bad, they don’t have too much other option. But this boat going round, with trained optometrist and with glasses to. Offer those, it truly is remarkable seeing these people walk around marvelling at what they once couldn’t see in their own home towns mostly.

This guy was so proud of his work, so proud knowing he was doing good and helping people who were suffering. His heart for the people suffering was incredible and eye opening. To see someone so in love with the people of his country and wanting to serve them, seeing the need to serve them so much that he decided to train himself in this profession was awesome.

We had a few chats over the next few days, mostly him telling me more and more about the beautiful country he gets to call home. What I also found fascinating was the fact that his knowledge of the world didn’t seem to come from experience. PNG is so tricky to travel out of, even flying out to Australia is expensive with all the exchange rates going either which way, so for these people, some had travelled to Australia, but I’m not sure many had gone much further than their own boundaries.

He told me what he knew of England, which had all come of the movies he had seen- the accents and the monarchy he seemed to be so enticed by. He asked me if I had been anywhere like PNG, been to a third world country before. I told him culturally the closest I had been would have been Morocco a few years ago, but that didn’t have anywhere near the same levels. He honestly seemed captivated by the fact I had been there, he wanted to know how it was ‘similar’ and different, and he asked about the people, and the colour of their skin since he knew it was in Africa. It was the first time I could have known or experienced something that a fully grown man who clearly was well off for the area etc, to experience what he hadn’t and be able to tell him such a almost simple thing.

After that he explained how the people of PNG were all so strikingly different for example the colour of the skin varied across the provinces, the shape of their bodies was different and obviously languages varied every few miles it seemed.

It’s incredible to think that this island, just sat in the pacific, could have so much controversy. I find unless I hear them talk, generally Europeans, Australians and Americans can all look the same. You can tell sometimes of different ethnicities, but people have the option to travel. just because they look spanish, they could be from Ireland. Of course there are certain areas that are more obvious than other, and we have those stereotypes about how people look, nevertheless, there is no way to tell for sure until you ask. But each province it seems is so far from the others in terms of their body build. It’s so tiny, you couldn’t imagine having so much diversity. But it is the land of the unknown, it is so unique and beautifully so.

Each day I do fall more and more in love with this place.