Callan Services National Unit is the major provider of education in and provision of health & community based rehabilitation services for people with disabilities in PNG. For video clips and accompanying classroom materials click on the Resources tab above or on the link HERE.
A Volunteer’s Story
My wife and I had been working with disabled children in Vanimo, a town in the far north of Papua New Guinea. On the way back from Vanimo to Australia, we happened to stay over in Wewak. We had heard of the work of the Callan Institute and were interested to see how it functioned.
I should say that my wife, Dr Merrilyn Murnane, has a long history as a paediatrician caring for children and it was this that had brought her to PNG in the first place. In Wewak, she found herself presented with a situation where children were living in the worst possible conditions. Our host in Wewak was Brother Graeme Leach, a Christian Brother who has been working in PNG for forty years. Graeme has built the Callan Institute into an extraordinary service – especially for adults and children who suffer from hearing and sight impairment. Callan is now a major health service facility in the country.
During the course of our stay in Wewak, Brother Graeme took my wife to visit a community living in conditions that appalled her. The Wa-lu settlement, as it is called, was established in the mid-1960s on a tidal swamp close to the centre of Wewak. The swamp had been filled by its prior use as a rubbish dump.
Over the past 40 years, as more and more people moved to the settlement from rural villages, houses have been erected across the land fill – with many houses standing on stilts in permanent brackish water and all houses subject to flooding at high tide. Villagers have largely built their houses from material recycled from the dump – corrugated iron sheets, strips of wood, old car tyres, pieces of plastic and cloth. Currently, three to five families share a water tap and there is no sewerage system in the settlement. Villagers use the adjacent lagoon as a toilet, with raw sewerage flowing back into the village at high tide.
My wife, decided that she would build a new village for these people. Bishop Anthony Burgess of the Wewak Diocese has kindly agreed to provide the land for the new settlement. Habitat for Humanity, an international body building low cost houses for third world countries will build the houses, Dr Murnane will provide the finance and the Callan Institute will act on behalf of us and the Catholic Diocese.
You might say that this is a joint venture using a combination of resources that will achieve the best possible outcome. Seventy families will begin a new life with new housing and new ways to live. It is also a venture in faith in that it is undergirded by the fundamentals of Christianity and the belief that it is inspired and empowered by the Spirit of God.
