Funding has come through from AusAid, so Graeme, Kathy and Jaynee are off to Kundiawa Hospital, in the central highland province of Simbu, Papua New Guinea. Mt Alexander Hospital aka Castlemaine Health (where Jaynee has been doing a spot of work in the IT and Pharmacy departments, and Graeme is Director of General Services) has had a relationship with Kundiawa over the last 10 years, whereby Castlemaine staff pop over every so often to help out with particular projects. This time, we'll be helping the hospital retain their accreditation status by addressing areas which came up at their previous accreditation inspection; Kathy will be advising on infectious disease control (a role she performs over at Maldon Hospital, a few miles from Castlemaine), Jaynee will be putting in a computer network, and Graeme will be advising on just about everything, as well as playing footy with the kids (he's downstairs doing that now as I write this).
Friday 11th
David drove Jaynee to Graeme and wife Jenny's house in Castlemaine at 3am, where we met up with Kathy and hubby Les. Les then drove the three of us down to Tullamarine airport for the 6am flight to Brisbane. A change of plane, and we then headed off to Port Moresby (the capital of PNG) arriving early afternoon. Its very hot and humid, especially after our freezing cold start this morning. We checked into our hotel, received a briefing by the security consultant hired by AusAid, then had din dins and crashed.
The next morning, Graeme had some fast talking to do at the airport, where the small but perfectly formed plane which was to take us to Kundiawa sat waiting patiently on the field. You see, we had a total of 99kg baggage allowance for the first 2 flights, but we hadn't heard back from Air Niu Guinea with the confirmation of our additional allowance before joining the checkin queue... and the standard allowance was only 16kg each. For 3 of us. Kathy and Jaynee practised their smiling-in-the-background skills, and with the help of an email from an ANG staffer rather usefully available for display on Graeme's Blackberry phone (I usually hate thost hings), we and all our goodies were allowed on at no extra charge.
The 1 hour flight to Kundiawa was uneventful. The plane climbs pretty high for a long time out of Port Moresby, but the mountains rise to meet it. The scenery is spectacular, with houses only occasionally in view, dotted by the roadsides, which themselves aren't much in evidence except where they run along the ridges. Mind you, there aren't that many roads. The foliage is thick on the mountain slopes, as you would expect, and brown rivers snake along the valleys between the slopes, which are contorted into the compound folds that indicate a great deal of squishing of sedimentary rock in the land's infancy. As the plane dropped into this landscape, Kundiawa came into view; quite good view, as the plane banks sharply to come around into the correct approach for the runway, and Kathy and Jaynee were on the correct side to take some vertiginous photos. Annoyingly, a) Jaynee's camera chose this point to request fresh batteries, and b) we don't have the correct USB lead to transfer Kathy's photos from her camera. Hopefully by the time you read this b) will have been rectified. I particularly like the shot where you can see quite a few veggie gardens; the chap sitting behind us pointed them out proudly as being his.
The hospital is probably the biggest single organisation in Kundiawa, with a series of single storey buildings built in the 1960s by the Japanese. There is also a small 3-bedroom double storey house on the grounds, where visiting staff stay. There is a Polish student doctor called Artur staying there already, so Jaynee and Kathy share the second bedroom and Graeme has the third. The second bedroom has twin beds, one of which Kathy says is rather hard. Jaynee declares that she is used to hard matresses, so takes that one. She becomes convinced that somehow that bloody matress manages to be harder than sleeping on the floor....
Sunday saw us heading for the town of Goroka with Kathy's opposite number from the hospital, John, the Infection Control Officer. A large gathering of traditional SingSing groups will be performing, as part of the annual independence day celebrations. Most of the road is good tarmacadam, with deep concrete gutters either side for the runoff during the rainy season, but some of it is a shocker. There are often landslips in the mountains, and they can frequently take out a section of roadway. Even if they don't, some of the tarmac isn't up to snuff, and simply crumbles away under the triple onslaught of heat, rain and heavy vehicle traffic. Forewarned, Jaynee asked to be in the front as the anticipated up-and-down (and possibly sideways) nature of the trip had her worried about motion sickness. Never an good look, vomiting over the back seat of your host's vehicle; a Toyota Land Cruiser in good nick, too. Our driver, Rolex, knew the road well, and the exciting bits were negotiated with aplomb, although the trip of approx 80km took a little over 2 hours. Roadside stops included buying sugar fruits - similar to passionfruit but very sweet, with more easily crunched seeds, and buying flower circlets.
At Goroka, we paid a (relatively) quick visit to the hotel bathrooms, the bank and the roadside market selling local craft items and woven shoulder bags in a huge variety of patterns called billums. The billums were displayed in a colourful array on a long stretch of wire fencing, and Jaynee was irrestibly reminded of the paintings and prints displayed in a similar fashion for sale along the fence of Hyde Park in London on weekends. After some happy haggling, we left with 3 billums and some carved doodads and headed off to the show. A chance meeting with Peter, who is currently working in the kitchen at the hospital saw him tag along for a ride back there afterwards.
The show had more than a dozen traditional SingSing groups, who perform their tribal dances and songs. The warriors from the Murmur Group from Siassi Island performed an extended dance showing the hunt for various animals.
Not all performances included storytelling, although we saw another that had a husband and wife alternatively telling each other off, to much laughter from the audience. Most were music, chanting and rhythmic procession; think of line dancing with extra feathers and jiggling. Lots of jiggling. The costumes were varied, in the main consisting of grasses, shells and feathers, with body decorations in coloured muds and oils. After being asked for her permission, this magnificantly dressed lady kindly consented to her photo being taken.
On the way back to Kundiawa, we stopped near the top of Dublo Pass (approx 2500 m above sea level), where a short walk onto a rock spur gave a magnificent 360 panorama. Goroka is down in the valley in the middle of the photo below, with John and Rolex (from the hospital), Graeme and Kathy on the track back to the roadway at the edges of the photo.
Another stop at the Mt Sinai Baptist Fellowship church, a large example of a traditionally built timber-framed roundhouse with lathe and woven rattan walls. On the opposite side of the road from the church is a small shrine. You can just make out one of the flower circlets decorating the Land Cruiser's wing mirror - that's Rolex in the driver's seat.
Finally back to the hospital and our little house. Even though we are at a much higher altitude, and its not as humid as Port Moresby, the weather still seems pretty hot to us.
Monday 14th
Kathy heads off with John to investigate the infectious diseases policies and procedures in place. This takes on a particular emphasis when we hear that an outbreak of cholera includes one case just within the border of Simbu province. Jaynee and Graeme met with the CEO Dr Francis Wandi to discuss the agenda for the week. Jaynee spent the day scoping the task of networking as many of the admin computers as will be practicable in the time available, and tried to make sense of the hardware that had already been delivered. Apparently an IT person known to the Chairman of the hospital board had provided the list of this hardware, but nothing else, and was now nowhere to be found. Sitting in the CEO's office were 2 slimline PC boxes, another larger PC case, one flat screen monitor, keyboard and mouse, one 24 port patch panel, five cat5 backplate and faceplate assemblies, a bag of cat5 sokets and a bag of cat5 plugs. And a large roll of cat5 wiring. Jaynee had asked Francis last week before leaving Australia if the server was there and if the cabling would be put in before she got there, and the answer had been "Yes" and "We'll try to get that done", but no cabling could be done as no-one knew where it was supposed to go. Worryingly for Jaynee, there is also a cash register drawer, which seems to come bundled with an expectation that somehow she can get the Revenue office (who take patient's payments for treatment) to be directly linked into the accountant's finance software.
Jaynee also met Brown, a local from Kundiawa who had started up his own small IT business and was in the process of setting up an internet cafe. Brown would be doing the cabling, so Jaynee promised him a first-cut cabling design that would let him start tomorrow morning. Jaynee also met Yoba, who works in the admin office. You know how (if you're lucky) there's often one person who knows where everything is, and who seems to be able to actually get things done? Yoba is that person, and fortunately for Jaynee he is pretty cluey about IT and is going to be looking after whatever network she manages to get in here. Both Yoba and Brown are self-taught, so Jaynee is determined to involve them both as much as possible during every phase of the exercise.
Most important of all, even though Jaynee brought the wrong cable to attach Graeme's laptop to the house's tv, she has the right cables to hook up to the flat screen monitor and the finanace director's PC speakers instead, so these are taken over to the house every night so that Graeme can show DVD's to a local audience gathered in the carport. This goes down a treat.
There are lots of people living in the hospital grounds. They are relatives of patients, who stay close in order to keep them company, and also act as carers for them, bringing them their meals from the hospital kitchen, and taking them for walks if they are able to exercise. These people simply sleep on the ground, under a tree or banana leaves, and cook over small open fires. These are the children who follow Graeme around as if he were the Pied Piper. In fact, he's better thatn the Pied Piper, because he always has treats for them in his pockets, and plays ball games with them. Everyone knows Mr Graeme, and their faces light up as they greet him.
Tuesday 15th
No show by Brown, which lets Jaynee finish off her network design in more detail. All the walls are solid breeze block, with no skirting boards or ceiling coving, but with a suspended ceiling of acoustic ceiling tiles. This means that pretty much the only alternative is to fit wall sockets and then take all cable runs from them vertically staright up into the ceiling, running along ceiling joists to the next vertical down to the next socket (or router). As we only have 5 full socket fittings, Jaynee decides that all vertical cable runs that will be connected to routers will be terminated only in a plug, and plugged directly into that router.
Jaynee and Yoba investigate another stash of boxes and discover one large cabling cabinet and a ripper UPS unit, which is a relief, as the electricity supply is eccentric at best, and downright lethal at some times. The cabinet is surplus to requirements, so they take it into the Medical Records office to serve as a table for the larger case PC, which will have to be modified to make it into a server. The UPS goes in there, too.
Wednesday 16th
National Independence Day in PNG. The three Australians went into the office to work in the morning. Brown and Yoba also showed up, so Jaynee showed them the install of Server 2003. Its a good thing she brought her own copy, as there wasn't one supplied. Even more impressive, a server wasn't supplied either, just another workstation in a larger case. So the process started with sorting out how to get the extra IDE CD writer and one of the extra IDE HDDs she brought from Australia working in the same case with the existing SATA DVD reader and 230GB HDD. A good learning opportunity, that's what it was. We then did a boot to the supplied SATA HDD and activated the copy of XP Pro that was on there, not only to prove that this machine was only supplied as a workstation, but to have an extra activated copy of XPPro "just in case". Then we booted to one of the donated IDE HDDs and installed Server 2003 onto that. That took all morning, and we decided to have the afternoon off (it *is* a public holiday, after all). Tomorrow Brown will start the cabling, which he thinks will take about a day. Jaynee very much doubts it, but doesn't let on, as she doesn't want to discourage him.
Thursday 17th
Brown and one of his lads, called Ghost, turned up promptly this morning, and Jaynee went up a marvellously rickety ladder into the roof space with Brown. It quickly became obvious that neither Brown or Ghost (when he also came up) were used to working in a roof space over a suspended ceiling, so Jaynee stayed up there for most of the rest of the day, demonstrating how she wanted the cables laid, and where (ie how to read the plans). A dirty and uncomfortable job, contorting yourself around rafters whilst balancing on ceiling joists and the tops of block walls threading cable through conduit to try and protect it from the rats, with seldom enough space to stand upright, and very VERY hot. Jaynee is glad that no-one thought to take a photo of her when she finally came down from the roof space, although just about everybody commented cheerfully on the impressively red face she was displaying for some time afterwards, as well as the quantity and quality of the dust and cobwebs she was modelling. Still, we got all bar one cable in Section 1 done, which was beter that Jaynee had expected.
Friday 18th
Brown and Ghost continue with Section 2 cabling, and Jaynee shows Yoba how to terminate the cable ends into either plugs or sockets. Jaynee has brought Mt Alexander's cable crimping pliers for the plugs, and her trusty screwdriver is the right size for connecting the sockets. She also has the standard cat5e coloured wiring diagram and her network tester with her. This is a small transistor battery-powered 2-part electronic switch arrangement, which confirms that each pin and wire run between the 2 ends of a cable has continuity. Bloody handy thing to have. By the end of today, all cables are in and tested OK (only 5 ends had to be re-done, and thank heaven no cables had to be re-run in their entirety), and all routers are connected. This is very good progress indeed, and Jaynee lets Yoba, Brown and Ghost know it.
Weekend
The Thrifty Three go shopping at the local market again.
They also walk (a long way) down the hill (aka modest-sized mountain) to visit Graeme's friends Bea & Bonnie and their children, at their shop on the roadside at by the river. Graeme and Kathy get wet, and Jaynee takes photos.
Monday 21st
Back to work, and Jaynee starts configuring Server2003 on the donated HDD in the converted workstation to run her network design. She is still pretty worried about only having one server on the network, as she only has one licensed copy of Server2003, and the hardware has no RAID array or internal tape drive for backup either (hell, it didn't even have a CD writer until she put the IDE one in), but she has thought of a plan for using the 2nd IDE HDD. New network users and groups are set up in Active Directory, the data drive is given its first set of shared folders, and permissions are assigned to them for the specified users who will be using them. All configuration changes are documented with screen shots.
Tuesday to Thursday
The weather has turned wet - every day is overcast, and starts off with huge swathes of mist reluctantly rising up off the mountains. There are some cracking thunderstorms, too; you can see the wall of rain coming up the valley. This is the view from the balcony at the rear of the house, with the river running in the bottom of the valley below.
There are 10 users whose workstations are being joined to the network, and all these require a cleanout of local data before being migrated to a network shared drive. My Documents. What a fun folder that is. As well as that, one workstation is buggered, and when fixed reveals itself to be an old Win98 machine, which will never be able to keep up, so it is left off. Another is running XP Home instead od Pro, so needs upgrading. A third has a dud onboard NIC, and needs a reinstall of networking components. Jaynee tries to get them all up to Service Pack 3, but knows she's missed a couple. The one with a dud NIC was going to be running the shared printer, but as it is network-ready, Jaynee installs it as a TCPIP printer via the server instead. The pace is really frantic now, as the last day is looming. There is no way that Jaynee will have time to sort out the requirement for a cash drawer connected via POS software.
In addition, all workstations are infected with viruses, and Jaynee fits in a meeting with a local lad called John who (for a nominal charge) is supplying anti-virus software. This is a real concern, because the only internet connection is via an unreliable dialup, so getting updates is not going to be possible until wireless broadband is available - possibly early in 2010. Not only is dialup too slow, but various tribesmen situated anywhere between Kundiawa and Port Moresby may take it into their heads to dig up the copper telecoms cabling to sell it (its happened a few times). So although Jaynee had brought the last free version of AVG to install, it will never be updated, so she doesn't use it. Jaynee thought that John must be downloading the updates for his anti-virus software elsewhere, and then distributing them to his clients, but in fact, he's un- then re-installing a continuously re-downloaded trial version of ESET. What the hell, its better than nothing. However, it doesn't cover the server, so Jaynee will be recommending an alternative scheme in her final report.
On Thursday night, the hospital staff throw a thank you party in the mess room, with loads of home-cooked food and speeches, and we are inundated with presents.
Friday
Jaynee decides to go with Sharepoint as an intranet, as Yoba is going to have enough to do without having to learn HTML as well. Sharepoint is installed and given a rapid makeover in Kundiawa General Hospital livery, users are assigned to it and Yoba gets a rapid course on adding content.
Here's the server. Not much to look at, is it? Its running the Kundiawa General Hospital network, so if you're the praying type, please include it in your schedule.
Saturday
Up at sparrowfart again, and back in to action the only redundancy plan Jaynee can think of for the server. She installs a demo copy of Acronis TrueImage Server, plugs in the remaining blank IDE HDD and clones the fully configured Server2003 HDD onto it. Out it comes again, and is given to Yoba to keep in a safe place in the event of a catastrophic failure of the server itself. She also shows Yoba how the backup of the data drive will work using her own USB external HDD; he will order one first thing Monday morning. That's all there is time for, before packing to catch the morning flight back to Port Moresby. The Kundiawa Film Fest gets its final screening, and all our remaining ballons, lollies and anything else gets given out, as well as three huge platesful of pancakes that Graeme and Kathy cooked up while Jaynee was finishing off over in the server room, I mean, corner of the Medical Records office.
There's a good turnout at the aiport to see us off.
In Port Moresby, its bloody hot and muggy again (still), and Graeme personfully squires Jaynee and Kathy on a shopping expedition, even tho' the Grand Final is playing. We buy some souvenirs, stuff ourselves on pizza then book our wakeup call for 4:30am to get to the airport, and call it a day.
Sunday is spent travelling home, with delays getting away from Port Moresby, which is just the start of a bad day getting worse for Jaynee - at one stage it looks like she's lost her passport in between getting off one flight in Brisbane and getting on the next, but it is found with minutes to spare and the tired trio eventually make it home. Jaynee spends the next 2 days in bed with a fevererish head cold. Figures. Having successfully avoided cholera for 2 weeks only to get laid low by a common cold.
Meanwhile back in Green Gully, the native orchids are back.