Transcript
CLIVE PHILLIPS: When you fly in you never thought you were looking at a drought. It is not the African style drought where there is nothing growing etc, but the reality was that for the best part of 40 percent of the population, estimates suggest about 2.4 million were affected, was severe shortages of water, as many of the smaller creeks and rivers dried up and the failure of their staple crops. So sweet potato, cassava, and the like. All of which, particularly in the Highlands but also elsewhere take a long time to germinate and actually produce. People had lost, through a combination, initially of frost in June of last year, and then subsequent drought, basically their year's supply of food. So what we found was people not without food but struggling on things like bananas - what they would call emergency food, if you like.
DON WISEMAN: They always had some food?
CP: They had some but the reality was most people were going to one meal a day, were reducing the size of what meals they did have. By October/November time those that had saved some money had spent that buying in some food. The government had done some food distributions but not in a consistent manner and not enough to sustain people.
DW: Initially then your focus was on what?
CP: Our focus was on water, water supply, so enabling people to have better access to water and more storage for water. Addressing health and hygiene issues - we were seeing increases in diarrhoea, typhoid - water borne diseases that really come about by people being forced to use an ever smaller number of water sources, which they are using to collect their drinking water, to wash, to do all sorts of activities in.
DW: If all the creeks have dried up, where are you going to get the water from?
CP: You are going further. You are going to the big blue wara, as they say. So they would go from their normal source, which still might be 30 minutes away, a small creek, into one of the bigger rivers. That in some instances could be a two hour journey, there and back. in difficult terrain.
DW: So were you piping this water or..?
CP: Our first intervention was to provide water containers and soap. So water containers so that people actually had containers to allow them to store water for longer. We then in time ran a number of infrastructure projects which piped water from sources - not usually the bigger rivers but where there was a distant source. One example that I saw two weeks ago, from a source that was 3 kilometres above the valley, the team has secured the water there, built a small dam, put a pipe line in that now serves a community down the length of that pipeline and into the local health centre. So trying to meet people's need for water close to their homes but also key infrastructure like health centres.
DW: I know OXFAM does not have a huge team or huge resources, so presumably you are only able to deal with or help out scattered villages - you can only help out a few. Just how broad a reach did you have?
CP: Yeah exactly. One of the challenges in PNG, aside from whether it is budget or your own resources, is the sheer spread of the population, particularly in rural areas. We were working in three main provinces, and we worked with communities, reasonably well spread out, but we reached about 100,000 - 120,000 people. Some of that was just through the provision of water to a health centre that hadn't had water. In one instance one health centre had been reduced to cutting open saline drips to wash new-born babies and help mothers who had just been given birth. There was no water. We have provided water to that health facility. Others were more direct interventions in the provision of water into communities.
DW: It is inevitable of course that there will be more droughts in this sort of country. What you have done is very much a temporary thing, isn't it, so some fundamental changes need to be made or improvements need to be made to the infrastructure available. Is that your feeling?
CP: Yes, I would say that some, or a large proportion of our response have been things that will benefit the population in the long run, so connecting a community or a health centre to a water source that has worked throughout the drought means that hopefully they will never dry out in the future, unless we get really, really extreme conditions. So that has helped to build their resilience for the long term and reduce the risk in the future. Again the establishment of community gardens has helped regenerate seed production at community level, which is something that had fallen away, but undoubtedly there is more that can be done. We can't reach everywhere. Similar projects will deliver more of that resilience, particularly when it comes to water supply. Trying to address hygiene and that side of things is more challenging. We still see challenges with people not using toilets at all, open defecation, getting disease as a consequence of things because people just don't wash their hands and the like. That type of thing is relatively simple thing to keep ourselves healthy, [But] it takes a lot of work to challenge an attitude of the population, so there is work to be done there. In our coastal communities that we have worked in, particularly in remote islands, water will always be a challenge so we need to start potentially looking at whether it is de-salination as a mechanism to ensure water supply, things like that.
