Development - Both Good & Bad
Since the road to our bush village of Telefomin was “opened” at the end of last year, we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of vehicles driving around. A year ago, I knew exactly how many vehicles we had in this settlement, I could watch them drive into town in the morning and back out to the villages in the afternoon. The road was only about a mile and a half long! It was a big community celebration when the hospital got a Land Rover Ambulance, which came in under-slung from a helicopter. Ryan once flew a dirt bike in from Vanimo, on the north coast, and I admired its yellow paint job for the 6 months or so it drove around, before it disappeared. (Probably broken with no mechanic to fix it!)
But now we have a road from the mining town of Tabubil, about a 3 hour drive away. And, although the road and bridges over the various rivers are not yet complete, we have had buses, trucks and, most notably, a large influx of diggers and massive dump trucks coming and going.
Roads bring development, overall, this should be a good thing, a blessing to this community. Once the road is completed and safer to drive, the cost of store goods should decrease as they don’t need to be flown in. The communities with airstrips close-by have already started to drive cargo to Telefomin as the flight time is less than from Tabubil, which saves them a lot of money.
But sadly, roads bring unwanted things too. The population of Telefomin has roughly tripled, bringing people who are up to no good, as well as the construction crews and honest folks. At the end of last year we had solid, metal security doors added to the MAF houses and bigger, more secure fences have been suggested. This is in response to the break-ins from last year and also the increase in drunk young men hanging around. The Police have trained 33 more reserves to assist them.
But this is all just a part of life. We can’t change PNG, we can only pray and try to be a positive influence. Telefomin is our home and we are a part of this community, but we must respect that we are still foreigners, despite having lived here and served this community for almost 8 years.
The view from our back door. Just 15m from our house is a building site. The diggers scrape off the top soil, put it in the dump trucks which haul it away and bring back gravel from a local limestone quarry which got opened up a couple of months ago.
We’ve been told the area next to our house will become the new market.
As we take Koda for walks, we see the scars of the excavators everywhere. We get a lot of rainfall here, so big drainage ditches are really helpful. But we can’t help but see the mud from the heavy vehicles damaging the old roads, and get frustrated at the new road that’s being built through the middle of the Elementary School…
With PNG’s 50th Independence celebrations only 3 weeks away, the pressure to get key parts of the construction finished is high. For the past month the construction crews have been working 24/7, which has made sleep and rest challenging.
Please pray God would give us the strength and energy we need to safely get through the next month until the overnight construction ends!
The road connecting our house to the town. Because these diggers and dump trucks are so massive, their coming-and-going over the past 6 months has caused the old road surface to sink into the soft sub-surface. As a result, they’ve had to dig up parts of the road that are particularly soft and fill it in with rocks and gravel to avoid having to do minor repairs once a week so they can keep using this main artery through Telefomin.
