Collecting Gravel

Ladies digging gravel from the river bed

As there’s no Hardware Store in Telefomin, when the MAF maintenance team comes to visit, they need to bring all their tools and materials with them from the HQ in Mt Hagen, a hour and 15 minute flight away. They are here right now for 2 weeks and their very LONG works list includes fixing the cement floor in the passenger waiting area, it has some big holes in it.

So, to make cement, you need gravel, and bringing gravel all the way from Mt Hagen is very expensive and a waste of weight and space on the plane. This means they need gravel locally. As the maintenance team are all skilled workers, we’d rather not have them waste their limited time here collecting gravel, so we‘ve done it for them a couple of times. We asked a group of our local friends to come and get the gravel and stones from the river. They start work at 8am and fill up bags and bring them to the road. Ryan had an office day, so he took the first shift to drive the gravel up a very steep road and bring a couple of ladies to help him off load it all, whilst the team back at the river kept working. Shiv had an online meeting first thing, so later she took over the driving. We managed about 9 truck loads of gravel & stones throughout the day, which should keep the maintenance team busy for the rest of this trip.

The water was high, so the team had to walk along the river to find enough shallow patches to dig the gravel and pick up stones.

PNG women are extremely strong, they carried the heavy bags of gravel by hand and loaded them into the MAF truck.

The stones and gravel were taken to the MAF land next to House 4, near the base. Only a 10 minute drive, but too far to sensibly carry.