Carolyne Nimop is sitting on a wooden bench in the sunshine next to her colleagues Giniat Upagi and Yane Pasen: Carolyn and Yane are both rural magistrates, while Giniat is a Peace Officer.
All have travelled for days to reach Loupom Island, where they are taking part in child protection training – a workshop focused on giving village courts officials the necessary skills to handle child cases in the rural legal system.
“Giniat, Yane and I are from the Wopten One village court,” says Carolyne. “We walked for three days on bush tracks across several mountains before reaching the coastline, and traveled another 45 minutes by boat to Loupom Island to attend this training.”
In total, there are more than 50 court officials from Amazon Bay in Central Province in attendance. The training program is one of six workshops being rolled out in Central Province by ChildFund Papua New Guinea in partnership with the Department of Justice and Attorney General, and has the funding support of the Australian Government through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP).
For Sally Beadle, ChildFund’s PNG’s team leader for gender and child protection, the workshops ensure that officials working on the frontline are aware of their roles and responsibilities. She says: “Village courts are a critical partner for promoting internationally established equal rights and protections for women and children at the local level.”
Giving birth is a very personal experience. For many women it is both challenging and emotional.
While homebirths are increasing in popularity in Australia, fewer than 1 per cent of Australian women will give birth without the care of qualified health professionals, compared to more than half of women in PNG.
Australia is only 160kms away from PNG, that’s closer than Sydney is to Newcastle. Melbourne and Sydney are six times further apart than Australia and PNG. We tend to forget what close neighbours we are in distance, yet we are so far apart in basic healthcare.
Giving birth is often a life-changing experience for Australian women, but for our closest neighbors in Papua New Guinea, giving birth all too often ends in death.
There is an extreme shortage of hospitals, clinics, doctors and nurses in PNG (The Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital has 410 doctors. This is one of many hospitals servicing the city of Brisbane. The whole of PNG has fewer than 400 doctors).
The rates of maternal mortality in PNG are simply unacceptable. As Australia’s closest neighbour, we cannot continue to allow PNG’s mums to lose their lives in situations that would be unthinkable here in Australia.
We can help.
ChildFund Australia is making sure that women in remote communities have better care at the time when they need it most, by training village health volunteers and upskilling rural clinic staff.
ChildFund provides delivery kits which contain a plastic ground sheet to give birth on, soap to wash hands, gauze to wipe a newborn babies’ eyes, and a sterilised blade to cut the umbilical cord. These reduce the risks of infection and possible death for both mother and child.
ChildFund also distributes lighting kits so that health workers can see what they’re doing. With proper lighting, it is possible to determine whether the whole of the placenta has been delivered and, if not, ensure a woman is referred to hospital. Retained placentas are leading cause of infection and hemorrhaging and can result in death.
These are simple things, but in PNG, simple things save lives.
