Two Wilga men, Brian and Derek O’Hare, are throwing themselves into helping make lives easier for poverty-stricken people in northern Papua New Guinea.
Sewing machine man flooded with jobs
DEREK O’Hare was swamped by sewing machines needing repair when he was one of a party of Seventh Day Adventists on a visit to the Ramu region of northern Papua New Guinea.
Father and son combo Brian O’Hare and Derek (a local councillor) were in a group from the Manjimup Seventh Day Adventist Church bent on helping children and adults.
They delivered craft and sewing programs and ministered to the needs of the local community.
Once the locals were aware Brian could fix sewing machines, he was overwhelmed and spent several days servicing the machines.
“They are mostly copies of the old black hand-operated Singers made in China and some very cheap Chinese electric machines but most of them don’t work,” Brian said.
“Things like this are never discarded but kept in the hope that one day they can be repaired.”
People came from a wide area and camped at the Seventh Day Adventist church to attend the programs.
Derek carried out a six-night preaching program with a slideshow which attracted hundreds of people.
There was also a special women’s program involving an interesting sewing project and a kids’ program.
“Imagine teaching a craft project to 500 kids from toddlers to teenagers,” said Brian.
“It was quite challenging.”
They found the lack of resources in schools to be appalling.
The children learn English but very little reading matter is available, Brian said.
Several large boxes of craft supplies and school resources had been shipped over by the group.
“We are now raising funds to buy a shipping container to fill with books and other resources,” Brian said. “This will be shipped over and some of us will be going back to establish a library-resource centre in Ramu with a mobile library service to schools in the district.”
One of the church’s local fund-raising projects is making and bottling apple juice to sell.
So far, the volunteers have bottled about 5000 litres.
Brian recently returned to Ramu to service more sewing machines.
He intends to train two local young men so that they can carry on this work as a small business.
“I will be taking some basic service manuals and have put together two tool kits to present to them before I leave,” he said.
Brian will also be making some on-the-spot arrangements for the library project.
“We still need good-quality books, both child and adult, particularly non-fiction and other teaching resources, including textbooks, Bibles, books on science, history, geography, art, music etc.,” said Brian. “Please don’t use this as an excuse to unload junk from your bookshelf.
“If a book is outdated here, it probably is in PNG too.”
Brian also said the books needed to be culturally sensitive.
Things to avoid included magic and supernatural stories (particularly in children’s books), crime fiction, Readers Digest condensed books, Mills and Boon and books with purely local interest such as Wildflowers of the Albany Region.
Books can be left at the Boyup Brook Community Resource Centre.
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