Things that are in short supply at the moment.

1. Staff. Lots of staff away or on courses, which means the ones left are stretched pretty thin. 2. Crepe bandages. We have a young boy with about 22% burns which need regular dressing. We are running out of bandages. 3. Humour. But, to be fair, I didn't bring much with me. 4. Electricity. The generator has been having issues... That is, the back-up generator. The main one isn't working. So power is being rationed carefully. 5. Emergencies! We haven't had one in 2 days! But I shouldn't speak too soon...

Safe arrival

It's always surprising how familiar and how unfamiliar PNG is when I arrive. Someone was speaking Pidgin to me at the airport in Cairns and I was struggling, but once I landed and was driving towards Rumginae, it clicked into place again.  There are power issues with the generator here, so I am typing this to upload when there is power for the Internet. There are power issues here with current elections, which have been peaceful in this general vicinity so far.  On the way up on the plane I complied a list of things that will be good about having limited Internet access: 1. I will have to lose Words with Friends games more slowly.  2. I have had to cull my twitter list and will therefore save enormous amounts of time. In theory.  3. Diminished temptation to google spoilers for movies or tv shows I am currently watching.  That's all I can think of for now. 

Return to Rumginae

The new technology to hit this part of PNG is the mobile phone. It's just like nostalgia: I carry around a mobile phone that doesn't send emails or have a web browser. It doesn't even have predictive text. It does have a pretty bright torch, which is good for finding your way to the hospital when generator power goes out at 10pm. The people who used to call by radio now call by mobile. And they still often say 'over' when they have finished speaking, or 'roger' when they agree, but the nice thing is that with a mobile phone, I can interrupt a long-winded story to steer someone back on track.

Probably not always a good thing.

And yet, the circle of life, death and resurrection continues. We have seen preventable deaths and difficult births. I see staff finding out new things about medicine, but also about life and about compassion. We laugh together when someone tells a good story, we get angry together when children come in who have been injured deliberately by their parents. We pray together and we celebrated Christmas together and we stitched up people who got injured in drunken New Year's Eve celebrating together.

Yep. Good to be back.