Former Warrnambool nurse is changing lives in PNG

Helping a blind man see and delivering a baby in the river while visiting some of the world's most remote places are memories Rachel Bakker says she'll never forget.

The former Warrnambool nurse and midwife is currently quarantining aboard a hospital ship just off the coast of Papua New Guinea while she awaits clearance to enter the country for the seventh time.

Her first trip to PNG was in March 2017. The two-and-a-half weeks she spent putting her medical skills to good use helping people in remote areas was life-changing.

"My heart was just so drawn to the nation after that. I thought 'how could I continue my life as it was without continuing to come back and serve and make a difference'," she said.

So she left her job at a major Melbourne hospital and headed to the Youth With A Mission base in Townsville from where she headed to PNG another six times, staying for up to 10 weeks at a time. "I never thought I'd be here this long at all if you'd have asked me four years ago," she said.

"When I signed on to be a full-time voluntary staff member I made a two-year commitment, which has now finished, but I'm just not ready to leave."

The COVID-19 pandemic put a hold on the ship's mission trips for most of last year and, while this trip may look a little different, the desire to help the people of PNG is the same.

"We live onboard the ship and take small boats into villages each day and set up health clinics, doing everything from child immunisation to antenatal checks, family planning and general outpatients," Rachel said.

"It's incredible what we get to do. Some days I just pinch myself and think 'is this really my life'?. We go to some of the most remote places that people from the city here in Port Moresby have never been or even heard of before. Places that don't have much in the way of education or health care. They don't even have electricity or running water."

More than 80 per cent of people in PNG live in remote areas and most of the villages Rachel visits have a high rate of waterborne and tropical diseases, Malaria and Tuberculosis are very prevalent.

"We often will see women who are eight or nine months pregnant who have never had an antenatal check up before," she said.

"Many of the women give birth in the bush or by the river with no help at all."

The teams distribute birthing kits that include plastic drape to provide a clean surface and a sterile blade to cut the baby's cord with.

"Incredibly simple but it's really life-changing for these women because there is an incredibly high rate of maternal death due to infection and hemorrhage," she said.

"I have sat in the edge of a river helping a lady give birth. It's certainly something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

"I've seen babies in severe respiratory distress that local healthcare workers haven't known what to do with, or haven't had the resources such as oxygen or medication to intervene with. We've seen children with severe malaria experiencing convulsions.

"We get to do all sorts of amazing things and we don't always get to see the immediate influence of what we do. When we go back to villages, time after time we get to hear the stories of how we've made a difference."

On one trip they educated a village about postpartum hemorrhage, and when they returned a year or two later were told how many lives that knowledge had saved.

"That just brings a tear to my eye to think that the education we are providing is saving lives," she said. But working in such remote areas is not without its challenges.

"We see a lot of heartbreaking things and we have to trek through mud and climb over logs into huts," she said. "It's physically very challenging and emotionally very challenging but incredibly rewarding as well."

She recalled the story of a little boy with a nasty leg wound whose parents had carried him for 12 hours through the night to get help, but when they arrived at the health centre there were no stitches or anesthetic.

"He needed a lot of stitches and a lot of deep cleaning to clean out the wound. They were going to just wrap it up in a bandage and kind of see what happened," she said.

But the next day, Rachel just happened to arrive with a team of nurses and doctors who were able to help this frightened boy who didn't speak much English.

"I just went and sat with him and held his hand and he just started to smile at me for the whole time," she said.

"His grandmother had explained to me that he'd always dreamed of meeting a white girl, and so even though he was scared and in a lot of pain, just the simple act of holding this boy's hand and telling him he was going to be OK and he was brave and strong really made a big difference for him."

The vessel, a concerted cruise ship, is equipped with an onboard day surgery clinic which provides cataract and dental surgery.

One day when Rachel was setting up a primary healthcare clinic in a village she saw a man sitting under a tree. The man spoke virtually no English but he kept pointing to his eyes and saying: "No see, no see."

"I radioed through to the ship and said 'we've got this man who appears to be blind. He can't see movement, he can't see light'. We sent him on a small boat back to the ship and yes he had dense cataract in both of his eyes.

"He actually underwent cataract surgery that day on one of his eyes and the next day I got to be the one to take the eye patch off. He just lit up with this incredible smile and pointed at each of his eyes and said 'no see, see'.

"It was just incredibly beautiful to remove his eye patch and him being able to see again. It's more than just sight, it's being able to move around his village again and be able to see his family and to be able to take himself to the toilet.

"It's worth any trekking through the mud and sleepless nights, when you see the impact." All of Rachel's work is voluntary and she is supported by churches, friends and family.

"It's so worth it. It's certainly not easy. You don't live an extravagant life. When you come to a place like PNG and you see how they live you realise you don't need to live an extravagant life," she said.

"You have food on the table, clothes on your body and a roof over your head, you are very fortunate."

The COVID-19 pandemic hampered efforts to take the ship, which is based out of Townsville, back to PNG last year.

"The ship returned in quite a hurry in the first week of April. We had to suspend our outreaches we had planned for last year," she said. "We've basically been waiting for doors to open for us to get back to PNG.

"The ship, right from the start, had the intention of being a ship to serve the nation of PNG, not to sit at the wharf in Townsville."

During her seven-to-10-month stay, she will be helping the Christian organisation set up a discipleship training school just out of Port Moresby - a satellite campus of YWAM's Townsville operations - as well as running a rural health and advanced first aid course.

"They're not going to be nurses and doctors at the end of it but they are going to have a basic level of health care knowledge and skills, and advanced first aid certificate, that might enable them to work at mining sites, St John Ambulance or other health services," she said.

"Being able to finally come back to PNG I feel like I've come home. A lot of my heart is here now."

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