Two Years in New Ireland – Or How I Missed the Start of the Thatcher Era…

 

Following on from my previous post – here is how I came to be in New Ireland, and some of my experiences there.

I was studying civil engineering and unadventurously living at home, having gone to an all boys’ schools and swopped that for a class full of guys at Queens. A likely 40 year engineering career in the DOE (Dept of Everything) beckoned.

In the summer before my final year, I met a Fr Austin Healy, home on leave from Sierra Leone. He described how he was overseeing the building of classrooms and health centres around his mission station. Once you get the right angles right, he said, everything falls into place. It was a light bulb moment – if he could do this with no more than a theology degree, what would I not be able to do with my civil engineering degree? I could amount to something, avoid a lifetime in the DOE, and have girls admire me. One girl in particular, anyway. So I signed up for a 2 year stint with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO).

In those days, VSO presented you with a shortlist of potential postings. You were allowed to put them in order of preference, although there was no guarantee you would get your first choice. Mine were PNG, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Fiji. I plumped for Fiji first; who wouldn’t? Sierra Leone was last. My mum had warned me that Sierra Leone was “The White Man’s Grave”. She must have known something, because my friend Roe was sent there and was invalided home after 4 months. I got my second choice of PNG, and headed out there in September ’78 at the age of 22.

When I arrived in the capital Port Moresby, I still did not know that I was going to New Ireland. As a raw graduate, with zero practical experience, I was destined for the second city of Lae, to be taken under the wing of more experienced engineers. New Ireland was a one-man-band posting; about as far as you could go from HQ in Moresby. The incumbent there was not fitting in, for reasons I can’t recall. My boss asked me if I would replace him. “You’ll love it Michael”, he said, “200 miles of coral strand.” And so I went, finding myself anointed with the title of Provincial Local Government Engineer for New Ireland.

A little about VSO. The “Voluntary” bit is a tad misleading; we were paid the indigenous rate for the job. A lot less than an expatriate contract certainly, but still enough for a person without dependents to live comfortably. VSO checked out the potential placements and matched them with putative volunteers, giving us a certain amount of training, and being a shoulder to cry on if needed. In order for a placement to be deemed suitable, it had to incorporate a certain “volunteer ethos”. My job fitted the bill because the Local Government Engineer was there to look after small community projects such as village water supplies, which would only get built with sweat equity input from the local community. . An admirable thing about VSO in PNG is that everyones’ salary was put in a common fund and then divided out equally, so that a doctor was paid the same as a nurse, etc., with some funds being kept back to support worthwhile projects.

In the 1970s, PNG was volunteer Nirvana. As I mentioned in my previous post, there little grinding poverty, but the indigenous third level education system was not yet producing medical, technical or social development professionals in any great numbers. PNG seemed to attract plentiful foreign aid money, possibly because it was seen as a largely compliant test bed for NGOs’ developmental theories, so there was enough dough to fund droves of us volunteers. There were over 100 VSOs, to which could be added Canadians, New Zealanders, Aussies, and lots of mission volunteers.

On arrival, I was accommodated in a handsome fibreboard house with corrugated tin roof in the capital, Kavieng, sharing with Greg, a Canadian business development volunteer; also of tender years. There was a ceiling fan in the main room, rainwater from the roof into a tank for our water supply, a flush toilet and a fairly regular town electricity supply. Although it was hot and humid, we were on the pig’s back compared to the our fellow volunteers “down the road” who were in bush materials houses, with gas Tilly lamps and dry toilets that went “Splat”.

Greg and Mike’s house in Kavieng.

There were a scattering of about 15 other volunteers spread throughout the main island – teachers, nurse trainers, etc.

Volunteer nurse trainers at Lemakot Catholic Mission Hospital – Paudie (Ireland), Annie (Canada), Sue (Australia) Eileen (NZ). Their house in the immediate background.

I had set off with high ideals of largely eschewing expatriate society and getting really “integrated” with the Papua New Guineans. In this, I failed miserably. My PNG colleagues were generally friendly with good English, so having a bit of chat and banter was no problem. However, it was just so much easier to be relaxed with my fellow volunteers, or indeed other young non-volunteer expats. This was partly because we were almost all single with no long term plans, whereas the locals were mostly family people who were settled. But it was also because they had the common experience of a tribal background ( I know, OWC, don’t say it!), whereas we had the common culture of Monty Python, John Fowles novels and Boney M. In truth, as someone just emerging from his chrysalis, I was on a high most of the time, with a sense of belonging to a group of people who I admired in the main, and a sense of my own importance that I simply could not have imagined a year or two ago.

There was no actual work up and running for me when I arrived. The first task was communicating with councillors and Provincial Assembly members about how my organisation might be able to help communities in their area. We could supply my “expertise”, plus technical staff that my HQ was to send, plus materials, for appropriate projects: village water supply improvements; small wharves; aid post orderlies’ clinics; classrooms; and even small sections of road. In return, the community had to supply the labour. Initially, this was meant to be free labour, but a practical compromise was that the workers would be paid half the rural minimum wage. When the requests did start to roll in, I had to do assessment visits. This was easier said than done, given the watery enviroment, lack of roads, and considerable distances to be covered. One of the main means of transport were locally fashioned timber canoes with outboard motors on the back, known as Mons. Sturdy vessels mostly, but a bit scary when there was a beam sea.

A Mon, with the Provincial Minister for Technical Development at the helm.

Nothing was “shovel ready” until the back end of my first year. My very supportive boss down in Moresby then started to drip feed me various talented foreman and carpenters who could lead the practical work in ways that were beyond me. There were also off-the-peg design drawings for buildings, wells, wharves, etc. – no point in re-inventing the wheel!

Newly built Aid Post Orderly’s House and Clinic

An “Irish Bridge” being constructed.

One small advantage of being a total greenhorn engineer was that I had no preconceived notions about needing such things as concrete delivery, heavy plant or power tools. Just as well, as virtually everything was done by muscle power. Also, I went with the flow on the pace of construction – social and community interactions trumped clocking on times at every turn. Patience was needed in spades, and I found considerable reserves of that.

Installing home made concrete liners for a village well on a low lying small island.

Making a small concrete dam on a hill above a village.

Happiness is a gushing standpipe down below!

Constructing a causeway to a wharf at a mission station and village.

Woman proudly sitting on the construction stones which she has lifted out of the local river.

Making a temporary platform prior to constructing a deep water pierhead.

Using a home made rig to drive the pierhead steel piles.

The finished product, intended to help the community to ship their copra to Kavieng. About 60 local women and men made this.

All too soon, two years was up, and I was heading home in late 1980. It was lovely to be back, but Maggie T’s brave new world was a cold house for a young civil engineer, and many others besides. There were no worries now about my stagnating in the DOE; they simply weren’t employing any of us. The ROI provided a congenial port in the storm for a few years. And the particular girl must have been impressed – we have now been married for 37 years.

I have wondered about the effect of my two years in New Ireland. Of course, I got lots out of it, but what did I contribute? Due to my technical inexperience, and inexperience in dealing with people, there were plenty of things that could have been done better, to say the least. And I did not have the opportunity to pass much of what little I did know to a Papua New Guinean, but that was more a failing of the system than mine. The average age of a VSO was 20 something back then; now it is 50 something. For the most part, that must be a good thing.