Papua New Guinea…

….the country of delays within delays within delays!

The container the Hospital has been waiting for since March has finally made
it to Lae. The container is packed full of donations from various
organisations back in Australia. It is now one week since the ship berthed
at Lae port after leaving Adelaide about a week before.

Folks back in Australia had an expectation that the container would spend a
couple of days in Lae, get inspected and be whizzed up to Goroka a day or
two after that. That's what they thought!

I just come back from the airport to pickup two volunteers whom will be in
Goroka and working at the Hospital for three weeks to setup a bunch of PC's
currently sitting in the container down at Lae. The conversation I had this
morning with the customs agent in Lae suggests that the container has been
held up indefinitely. Apparently customs want the container contents
fumigated before they will inspect it.

It turns out that the place of fumigation is at another location and the
container will have to be moved. Once the fumigation has been done the
container will be moved back to its original location for inspection. Easy
you might think? Not so! A forklift needs to be arranged to move the
container and this of course comes at a cost. It is not yet clear who will
be paying for the forklift. Basically another delay until this gets sorted
out.

So you see… I now have two volunteers turning up to work tomorrow morning
and no computers! I don't like to say: “I told you so” but I'm going to say
it on this occasion. I warned the folks in Adelaide to hold off booking
flights for the two “vollies” until the container was on our doorstep. They
never listened. I told you so!!

It's frustrating enough as it is without having to deal with folks from
downunder who don't seem to have any idea about how things work here in PNG.