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In September 2001, the two of us travelled to the Pacific nation of
Papua New Guinea to spend 5 months volunteering in a community hospital,
as well as complete some medical research concerning domestic violence.
We had both taken a year off from our medical education at NYU for this endeavor,
looking to expand our view of medicine and the greater world, as
well as to find a bit of excitement and adventure.
It was somewhat ironic that as we left New York on September 8th, true excitement
(although not of the pleasant kind) lay just around the corner in our own backyard.
We found PNG to be a rather unique country. Home to over 700 different languages
(1/3 to 1/4 of the world's total),
and about as many ethnic groups, the diversity of cultures within this cluster of
islands was enormous. Add to this the fact that the Western world did not discover
some of these
cultures until as late as the mid 20th century, and a very interesting collage of old
traditions and new ideas emerge. We encountered people on our travels who had
been born into a world without written language, calenders, and metal tools, and
had who had subsequently been introduced to electricity, telephones, airplanes, and now
the internet.
This scenerio creates startling contrasts. We visited villages where kids ran
around in second-hand Rambo T-shirts, despite them never having laid eyes on a
television set, let alone seen a movie. People might own a "ghetto-blaster" radio,
but still live in a straw hut without running water. For the most part however,
people live with the knowledge of the outside world, but without the comforts
and luxuries it can provide. We recently came across the uncited, but believable,
statistics that in PNG there is 1 telephone for every 150 people, 1 car for every 300
people, and 1 television for every 400 people. Although these items are not
necessary for a comfortable and healthy life, they serve as markers of
how little Western technology has penetrated the nation's shores and affected
the lives of the common people.
While in PNG, we stayed mostly in the town of Goroka, located in the country's
central Highlands region, where we completed our medical work. We quickly learned that
there is not much romance in being a doctor in the developing world.
After enduring for five months, we returned to New York City glad to have had the
experience of observing medical care in Papua New
Guinea, but even more glad to have a relatively rational and efficient (although it doesn't
always seem that way) medical establishment to come home to.
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