Showing posts with label PNG elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PNG elections. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 July 2007

It's nearly over!!


Standing outside the Mt Hagen market,wearing my Merri blouse and carrying my PNG umbrella to keep the sun off my face!!

This week we’ve had trouble with the phones, both mobile and landline so I’ve been totally out of range and unable to email. I’m in town today so I’m able to use the internet cafĂ©.

Only another week and I’ll be on my way home. Not before time I might add…....as a consequence of only having only one TV channel I’ve inadvertently become addicted to McLeod’s Daughters!!

Last Friday I sat in on a meeting between the College Board and the Office of Higher Education. The college has introduced teacher training to its curriculum this year and are now seeking accreditation. It was very interesting and fortuitously the work Samuel and I are doing in the library ties in very nicely with the prerequisites the college needs to fulfill to attain their goal things like continuous improvement, quality management, documented policies, etc.etc. (sound familiar Bayside Library?)
PNG would have virtually no schools teachers or nurses if it weren’t for the missionaries and church schools. This is a fact the government readily understands and higher education facilities are developed by forming partnerships between the government and the church schools.

Election # 4
The saga continues looks like they’ll now finish counting by the end of this week and announce the final results on July 30. Along the way fights have broken out when seats have been declared and when the final results are announced we can expect some more. Last week in town there was a huge funeral procession, 100s of people painted yellow and piled onto the back of trucks to attend the funeral of a tribal leader who had been killed during the election hoo haa.

Thursday, 31 May 2007

What will she be doing in Mt Hagen?


The question as to what I will actually be doing while I'm in PNG has arisen a few times so here it is.

I'll be based at the Church of the Nazarene Bible and Teacher Training College (let's hope they can cope with a heathen). The library is small and the staff are not library trained. My job will be to provide training and to develop training manuals and also to advise on IT solutions for managing the collection.
I'll be living in at the college which is couple of kms from town. What the accommodation is like and how often I'll get to go into town I'm yet to find out.
Mt Hagen is in the middle of coffee plantations so I'd better be able to get decent coffee. It's a large town of 40,000 people and from all accounts has a touch of the wild west about it.....(I've just watched season 3 of Deadwood so I'm up with the lingo and the social mores!)