The Great Wheelbarrow Race held in the Atherton Tablelands sees hundreds of Aussies get together each year to push wheelbarrows along a gruelling 140 kilometre stretch over three days.
Most team up and tackle this huge challenge together but not 15-year-old Jenny. “People kept telling me I wouldn’t be able to do it solo; that it would be too hard for me,” says Jenny. “That’s what made me want to do it even more so I just thought, why not?”
After mum gave Jenny the go-ahead she signed up and decided this could be the perfect opportunity to raise funds for children living in northern Vietnam through ChildFund Australia.
Jenny, along with her sister, has been donating her pocket money each month for the past nine years to sponsor 15-year-old Hue from Vietnam and had the opportunity to meet Hue when her family travelled to the country for a family holiday in 2010.
Papua New Guinea is a surprising place. It is a land of untamed, rugged beauty with warm and friendly people. It can also be a violent and confronting place to live and work.
I am constantly reminded of the incredibly dichotomy of life here: the generosity of spirit contrasted with incredible acts of hate, extreme poverty and affluence existing side by side, a passive acceptance of life coupled with destructive violence.
I have been welcomed by colleagues and rural villagers, and been thanked by people on the street for making an effort to understand PNG and its diverse, complex cultures. I have run the streets as part of the Trukai Olympic Day Fun Run surrounded by 30,000 people. I am working among amazing, life-charged Papua New Guineans who are working to make a difference in their country, and succeeding.
Yet there also exists a darker side to PNG life. To truly understand this, you need to spend some time here, speaking to the locals and seeing the world through their eyes.
Life in Port Moresby is hard. It is an expensive place to live and often unsafe on the streets. People arrive here from other provinces hoping to find work and a better life, yet many find only hardship that traps them here and perpetuates the poverty cycle. Rent for even basic accommodation can run upwards of $250 per week to $2,000 per week in expat areas. Bearing in mind minimum wage is less than $1 per hour and even professionals often take home only $125 per week. Desperation often drives desperate acts, from pickpocketing to armed robbery and car-jacking.
Security dominates everything. It is tighter for expats, who generally live in razor-wire surrounded compounds, moving about in safe areas of the city and often with an escort. These advantages are not available to average Papua New Guineans, who have to navigate the crowded streets, markets and public buses in a heightened state of alert.
I get regular security advice from many of my PNG colleagues, who advise on where it is safe for me to visit, how I should dress in certain situations and how to act in a culturally appropriate manner. And I find it exhausting. Constantly being alert to changes in the behaviour of people on the street, monitoring and scanning to detect potential threats and being mentally prepared for what I will do in a multitude of different scenarios. Will I run? Can I fight back? What if there is a weapon involved?
But security precautions cannot shield me from what I have witnessed on the street. A woman’s bruised face, a female settler living nearby being hit and not being able to help her, accounts of female Papua New Guinean friends being followed by a car when returning to the office from lunch. These same friends won’t travel on buses without a male escort and often aren’t willing to take their children shopping for fear of being harassed. Perhaps most heartbreaking of all was hearing the story of a four-year old girl who was sexually assaulted. These are but a few examples of what many women and children face daily.
