04-11-2013, 12:53 PM
Pretty amazing to hear all the garbage from shorts over the years about IOC being disliked by locals. This helps tell real story:
Southern Region
Thursday 11th April 2013
Remote villages need govt help
By Paeope Ovasuru
Situated along the Purari River in Gulf Province is the Pawaia tribe’s 13 villages, surrounded by thick rainforests, high mountains and deep valleys.
For this tribe, though PNG gained independence 37 years ago, their way of life is still more traditional and no basic Government services have reached them.
According to Albert Kerut, a community representative, most of the people live without the basic services they rightly deserve as citizens of this country.
“We feel that we have been left out for so long,” he said.
Mr Kerut appealed to the Governor of Gulf Province Havila Kavo, who was at Wabo station to open the Interoil Wabo community complex and landowner’s tradestore.
Wabo is a Government station with a rundown health centre and an airstrip.
Mr Kerut said mothers gave birth under trees and traditional huts, attended by village birth attendants; people die from curable diseases and snake bites almost every day.
“With the health centre, there’s always no medicine to treat the patients and if the situation is critical, patients are rushed to Kapuna, Kerema, Port Moresby, Mt Hagen and Goroka hospitals on InterOil charter planes and helicopters,” he said.
He revealed that like the health services, education was also a big struggle for his tribesmen. “Our small community has been struggling without any help from the Government for its infrastructure for a long time,” he said.
“But we are thankful to the Prime Minister Peter O’Neill for his Government’s free tuition policy that will assist us with the development of the infrastructure for our school,” he said.
Head teacher of the only school in the area, Wabo community school, Daniel Ibuna said the school catered for grades one to five while six and seven are dissolved and grade eight students are sent to Chimbu Province, which is only 35 minutes by plane.
He added that the school was in dire need of infrastructure and a shortage of teachers had forced some of the classes to be dissolved. Mr Ibuna is appealing to anyone who will help the school because he says appeals for help over the years have fallen on deaf ears.
And like many remote areas around the country, roads are nonexistent.
The only way to access this remote area is only by plane.
Mr Kerut said the only help that they had received in terms of bringing some sort of basic services to the Pawaia people had been through Interoil’s oil and gas exploration in the area almost 10 years ago.
“Interoil has used its own initiative and resources to help the people,” he said, adding the project had come at a time when the Pawaia people were not ready in their own human resources.