Village development : working together / by John Mills and Geti Kila

Village development working together by John Mills and Geti Kila Or John Mills is Medical Officer with the General Health Systems Development Project, Papua New Guinea, and Mr Geti Kila is Primary Health Co-ordinator in the National Department of Health of Papua New Guinea ore things get done, better and faster, if they are done together. This is the experience of village development committees (VDC) in Papua New Guinea. And it was our opinion too, as we witnessed the villagers at work together in the district of Angoram, province of East Sepik. We were visiting the area with a team of WHO and national primaty health care workers. The long journey to the village started at Port Moresby, capital of Papua New Guinea, at five o'clock in the morning. A three-hour flight to Wewak, the provincial capital of East Sepik, was followed by a three-hour drive, fording many rivers, to a rural health centre at Timbunke, on the north bank of the Sepik River. We then embarked on ten-metre-long dugout canoes for a four-hour voyage up-river to the Blackwater Lakes before we finally reached the host village. A traditional welcome We arrived by moonlight to a tradi- tional welcome of flower garlands, drums, singing and dancing which literally shook the earth. Th~ village had built a big new open-sided, palm- thatched meeting hall especially for this important event. Several newly- built houses had been prepared to provide shelter for the visitors from afar; later they would be the homes of local residents. Neighbouring villages helped to pro· vide food for the many outsiders who had arrived; some provided additional overnight shelter. In an area with high rainfall this is a prime necessity. Initially six villages set up VDCs. Since then the number has increased to 22. In addition, several villages without VDCs have been sending representatives to the district meetings. Development councils are convened W OR LD HEALTH. November 1989 to stimulate discussion on ways to improve the quality of life in the community. They choose their own projects freely. The East Sepik Depart- ment of Health believes that any social ... And in Papua New Guinea, a com- munal effort in building a canoe. Used for transporting market produce, the canoe has a carved crocodile head at its prow - to ward off the real reptiles. or economic improvement at the vil- lage level will eventually improve the health of the villagers. Many villages have chosen as their first priority the building of a new church or a new "haus tamboran," which is a sacred repository for lo~l cultural and traditional artefacts, and serves as a meeting house for the village elders. Other projects included new cocoa gardens, piggeries, crocodile farms, new houses for the elderly and disabled, new pit latrines, and improved village water supplies from streams, wells and rainwater tanks. It was very striking to see how much had been achieved in a very short time by communal effort, with little or no external support. The VDCs can gal- vanise whole communities into working together. Most villagers devote at least half of the working week to community projects. The main regular work that most of them are engaged in are fishing and gardening. The village development com- mittees are excellent examples of bottom-up planning and self-reliance in action. They are already very popu- lar, and more and more villages are joining the scheme. •