Friends of Kikori hospital- PNG

Iris De Ridder is organizing this fundraiser.

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Stop violence against women in Kikori!

Help us built a female resource centre!

After the successful crowd funding for the building of the primary school in Kikori hospital, we are now starting our new fundraising! This time we want to build a female resource centre in Kikori hospital to give Kikori women a place to empower themselves. It would be great to have your help again, be it in ideas, networks, money, positive thoughts or advice.

Most of the time I love my job as a doctor. Especially in beautiful PNG. But some days I prefer to forget. It’s the days when I get called into the emergency room to see a lady with a broken, severely dislocated arm impossible to repair, forever handicapped. Inflicted on her by her own husband. The food was not prepared in time… Or when the little girl came in, brutally raped. In shock. Will she ever be able to heal again? The violence against women is too high in every country, but unfortunately PNG has one of the highest rates in the world. When I was in Kikori last year I did a large house-to-house literacy and domestic violence survey among Kikori women. I found that 55% of all the women had been or still were being abused.

At the moment there is no social service in place in Kikori to properly address this issue, so we just continue to stitch up the cuts and wait for the next victim. But we want to do more! And fortunately there is hope. Lots of it! Because local women are rising up! And our nurses in the hospital are rising up with them. Male and female. Side by side. Trying to break the cycle of violence.

We are already organizing awareness campaigns and women’s empowerment nights. We want to start to provide counseling for the victims and couples. And we have attracted a wonderful literacy teacher: Rose. She used to be Kapuna’s elementary school teacher and we are very lucky to have her with us now, to start a literacy program for Kikori women. The above mentioned survey also showed that only 23%of Kikori women could read and write and 70% of the women told us they would very much want to do a literacy course to increase their self esteem and independence.

So we are already doing some good things, but we want to do more, much more. We have big dreams and high hopes. But we need your help. Your donations or your network.

We want to build a female resource center, with more specialized staff to organize literacy classes, workshops on how to save money, start a business and how to get a private bank ac

count and be more independent, empowerment events, couple and victim counseling and to develop youth programs for school awareness. With little steps we hope to make a big difference eventually!

Other great new is that three weeks ago the dutch/german couple Sebastiaan and Lina moved to Kikori to work there for a year! Sebastiaan is a doctor and Lina a gender violence specialist and will help coordinate the women’s project. She will regularly update us on the progress of the project!

On top of that our deputy matron, ladi Kalama made a song about stopping the violence against women. (Recorded in our operation theatre:)
Have a look at the video of the Kikori community in action against violence:
https://youtu.be/X_lOqi5fHwo

The fundraising will be in three steps: 10.000 euro each time.

· The first 10.000 Euro will be spend on teaching material and to build the biggest part of the center,

so that there is already a space to start literacy courses for the women.

· The second 10.000 Euro will be spent on finishing the building and its interior design.

· The last 10.000 Euro will be for workshop and event material (awareness campaigns) and the year salary of the social worker and teacher.

We hope to start building in March or April, depending on the funds.

Donations can be done through gofundme, or through our sister hospital Kapuna’s website: http://www.kapuna-in-ontwikkeling.nl/campaigns/bouw-vrouwencentrum-kikori/

In case you are not familiar with Kikori yet, here a short introduction:

KIKORI HOSPITAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6XTTgbtjQU&t=8s

Hi, I am Iris, a Dutch doctor in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. I work in a small bush hospital in Kikori; Gulf province. The hospital is run by GSC (Gulf Christian Services) a very small local NGO.

I started working here in 2015. And now I am hooked to this wonderful little hospital with all its dedicated staff, serving more than 30.000 people. People sometimes walk for 7 days and then peddle in their canoe for another 2 days to reach us. So we try our very best to serve these people, to make them better.

Our hospital has about 80 beds, 1-2 doctors, a 24 hour emergency department, a pediatric and an adult wing, and obstetric ward with 40 deliveries a month, an operation theatre and a very busy outpatient department.

I would like you all to get to know us in Kikori a little better. We are so far from the rest of the world; we have no connection to the electricity network, unreliable (and incredibly slow;) internet, no roads to the capital Port Moresby and we lack a lot of material and are always short of staff due to little funding.

But we make the best of our place; the hospital is like a family; we all come from different villages; working and living together in Kikori hospital to provide services and create a special place where we do more than just making people better with our medicine.

With a crowdfunding campaign last year we managed to build a school for our staff children so that we can keep our experienced working staff in our hospital when their kids turn school going age. To keep senior staff with us for a long time greatly increases the quality of care we can give to our patients.
The school is being build now and will be openend in Januari!