There’s a word in Papua New Guinea to describe the enduring bonds between family and community members. A ‘wantok’ is someone who shares the same language or ‘one talk’ in the country’s lingua franca, Tok Pisin, but it goes a little deeper than that. Wantoks are also good friends, mates.
“If you run into a wantok, you have a moral obligation to look after them,” says UNE alumnus Jim Levy.
Jim grew up in PNG’s Western Highlands. When he returned in 2006 after a 33-year absence, he saw how poor a state the nation’s hospitals and schools were in. He couldn’t turn a blind eye.
By then he was deputy principal of Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School. He had enjoyed a fulfilling teaching career at Baradine, Davidson, Redfern and Avalon, all courtesy of his UNE studies.
What he saw in PNG caused him to reflect on the affluence and waste in Australia.
“Our education and health systems have a significant amount of resources that are regularly thrown away and here was this dire need in PNG, our closest neighbour,” Jim says. “In the schools I visited, there were virtually no textbooks, teaching resources, readers or writing materials.”
Jim (an Albies lad) and his wife Lyn (also a UNE graduate and former Duval College resident) and Jim’s family swung into action. Jim joined Rotary International, to seek logistical support, and put the word out for donations to send to PNG.
“It all started in 2006 with 100 boxes of school books,” Jim says. “The response was overwhelming. The next year we filled two forty-foot containers with 76 hospital beds, 30 wheelchairs, a humidicrib and other hospital supplies, as well as another 1,000 boxes of books.”
Donations from Australia arrive in PNG
Generous donations from local schools, Rotary clubs, Lions clubs, hospitals, nursing homes, community groups and individuals, most of them from the New England and North West and Newcastle, have filled an impressive 35 containers in the years since.
“In PNG, we started with books and school desks and classroom equipment. By 2014 things had got serious, and we filled 10 20-foot containers with 300 hospital beds,” Jim recalls. “Seven containers were dispatched last year alone, one of them containing 400 cartons of personal protective equipment to assist the COVID-ravaged country.”
In 2016, in the wake of a devastating cyclone, Wantoks International (as the team became known) shipped a twenty-foot container to Fiji filled with medical and educational supplies to support reconstruction.
Jim says: “The model we developed was that the people of PNG had to contribute in some way, to give them some ownership of the program. Often they paid for shipping the containers”.
All manner of things have been delivered during the past 16 years, from computers to commodes and hospital and school uniforms to football boots and knitted baby vests. But the logistics have become increasingly complicated and expensive and, in his 70th year, Jim is winding things back.
“Our idea now is to use what funds we have to support the training of health and education professionals in PNG through scholarships,” he says. “I am trying to evolve the project from physical support to a program that helps PNG people develop personally and gain skills.”
Jim retired from teaching a decade ago and has been back to PNG five times, where students, teachers and hospital staff have been eager to partner in the Wantoks project.
“They are amazingly grateful, even to the point of suggesting I return and stand for Parliament,” he says with a deep laugh. “But I am just the front man. We have had an incredible number of supporters financially and physically, including the students at Farrer, who regularly helped me to pack the containers.”
Reflecting on his own education, Jim realises how lucky he was.
“Our mother home-schooled me and my five siblings on the remote coffee plantation our father established before we moved into Mt Hagen and enjoyed a good primary education,” he says. “Then I had to come Australia for high school and boarded in Sydney at Joeys for six years.”
Although he originally enrolled in Agricultural Economics at UNE, Jim soon switched to Education and forged a rewarding career, always maintaining his friendships with fellow Albies residents and their partners.
“We still get together regularly with UNE people. They have become lifelong friends,” he says. “I guess they are now wantoks, too.”
You can support the ongoing work of Wantoks International through a tax-deductible donation to the ‘RAWCS Project 28 2015-16: A Grand Plan for PNG Health’ via Rotary.
