Last week the Redeemer Baptist School Principal, Jonathan Cannon, and seven past students from Redeemer Baptist School accompanied a team of volunteer doctors and nurses – led by associate professor Alice Lee of Macquarie University Hospital – to the remote Barai tribe in the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea, just north of the Owen Stanley Range.

Their purpose was to deliver vaccinations to the whole Barai tribe, in accordance with World Health Organisation and PNG government protocols.

Redeemer Baptist School has supported education initiatives in the villages of the Barai tribe for more than 30 years. Each year the school community sends boxes of clothing which are sold by the Barai Non-Formal Education Association to fund their literacy programs including Bible translation and health education.

Twelve years ago, members of Redeemer Baptist Church funded enrolment positions for Barai children at Redeemer Baptist School in North Parramatta. Four of these students have completed their secondary education at Redeemer.

Two of these students have also completed education degrees in Port Moresby and are now teaching at the remote Barai primary school in their Itokama village.

Last year, Redeemer students organised fundraisers which enabled the installation of solar lighting and power to benefit fellow students being taught by Redeemer alumni at the Itokama School – there is no electricity or running water in the Barai villages.

The other two Barai Redeemer students have completed vocational training as paramedics and have begun to contribute to health needs in the Barai villages. There are no doctors or nurses in the Barai villages. Medical help is about four days walk away through tropical jungles.

A few years ago, Professor Alice Lee was asked to treat one of Redeemer’s Barai students. This student’s mother had died at a young age in the village, just before the start of the school year, without any medical diagnosis or treatment.

The boy was heart-broken. But as Professor Lee began to treat the boy, she began to envision how she could help the boy’s tribe. “Everything has a purpose,” she said to volunteers helping to organise the mission, “and I believe that vaccination against Hepatitis B and other diseases may help to prevent such tragic circumstances”.

Professor Lee requested Redeemer’s involvement because of the long-standing relationship of Redeemer staff and students with the Barai tribe.

So the Redeemer team joined two doctors, three nurses and a paramedic on July 19 on a couple of flights into the Barai villages using missionary aviation. During the next week they slept in Barai huts, ate yams and walked up to 25 kilometres each day to key locations so that all the Barai villages could access the vaccination and general health clinics.

And the Barai helped them to take their solar powered fridge and solar generators with them, to maintain the cold chain for the vaccines and provide power for their portable computer medical records system. They delivered more than 3,000 vaccines in the week and provided treatment for numerous ulcers and infections.

On her return to Australia, Professor Lee said that she was already organising the next visit from the medical team to the Barai next January, and she was hoping that Redeemer would be involved again.

“The Redeemer young people were amazing,” she said, ‘”nothing fazed them, they were always on task, we couldn’t have done it without them.” In addition to assisting with general medical health needs for this remote tribe, Professor Lee’s specific aim is to help the Barai become Hepatitis B free.

by Russell Bailey*

*Russell Bailey is the headmaster at the Redeemer Baptist School, Parramatta.