When Aloysius Monfort saw the MAF plane touch down on Nissan Island for the first time, he found hope that the treacherous sea journey would be a thing of the past.
Story by Tajs Jespersen
“I am here with my wife,” said Aloysius Monfort from Balil village. “She’s got a sickness in her stomach, it’s very painful.”
He is waiting at the Nissan Health Centre as his wife, Marianne, receives treatment from the local health workers. They are not sure how long they might have to wait, or where they have to go next.
“The health worker will let us know when we are done and that’s it,” he said. “We must wait. She might tell us to go home or to go to the big hospital in Buka.”
But these are two very different outcomes for Aloysius, his wife and their eight children. Going home to Balil is a short trip across the relatively calm lagoon but going to the town of Buka is a three-to-four-hour journey in an open boat across a churning sea.
Nissan Island, actually part of the Green Islands group, lies about 100 km from Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.
“It depends on the wind. If the wind goes down, we can go by boat,” Aloysius said. “If the wind stays… I don’t know. The way to the hospital will be very hard then.”
But now that MAF is regularly flying between Nissan Island and Buka, the journey for such patients becomes a safe and smooth half-hour flight.
For Rosemary Romanus, Community Health Worker at Nissan Health Centre, the unexpected windy months have been creating impossible dilemmas for her patients.
“We’ve been facing this situation with strong winds for months now,” she said. “When emergency cases happen, we are struggling.”
Recent spikes of malaria and yaws have kept the experienced health worker busy, as she and her coworkers treat various conditions in the local population of more than 7,000 spread across 21 villages. Rosemary has delivered between 50 and 60 babies, but when complications arise, there’s no option on the island for a caesarean section.
“We tried with everything we had, to find a way to get patients to Buka General Hospital. Even when the weather was bad, we sent them by boat,” she said.
There are real consequences when venturing out on the rough seas, with 44 lives lost in just the last six years.
But for Aloysius, hope was kindled when he saw the MAF plane land at Nissan airstrip.
“The plane showed that there is life with us.”
