I value literacy and education, and believe that if you want to make a big difference in this world, you should start small. So when I heard about Yanaba Island while binging on reality TV for lack of anything better to do during COVID lockdown, I could not get its people out of my head.
Imagine living on a reef that is less than 3 square miles in size and is a 24-hour boat ride from the mainland of your country. That reef has no electricity, no cell phone signal, and no internet.
That perfectly describes Yanaba Island, which sits on the edge of Egum Atoll in Papua New Guinea. Its 200 inhabitants live there much like their ancestors have for centuries. They have limited contact with the outside world, but they know that it is changing. (They have already seen their beautiful, wide sandy beaches disappear due to climate change.) It is therefore very important for their children to have an education. Because of this, they have built a one-room primary school for their 80 school-aged students.
I thought, “Wouldn’t it be lovely to provide them with books about the outside world, its many cultures, and even the universe?” I got very excited about this. I really wanted to flood them with books.
Having never been to Yanaba myself, and due to its extreme isolation, it has taken me from early 2019 to the present to find reliable contacts in the area who could help me by delivering things to these students. The path to this point has had many twists and turns, including dozens of dead ends, but then I stumbled upon an organization called the Papua New Guinea Association of Australia, and they were quite helpful and gave me plenty of excellent ideas.
One member in particular kept in touch and never gave up on my idea. (I’ll call him J.E. as I’m posting this so quickly that I didn’t get permission to sing his praises. If that changes, I’ll edit this.) It was quite interesting to correspond with an editor on the other side of the world.
Out of the blue, 6 months ago, he sent me an email that had a newspaper article attached. Upon reading it, I discovered that the first young man from Yanaba Island to go off island to be educated beyond the 8th grade was now living and working in Port Moresby, the nation’s capital. J. E had been in touch with him, and gave me his contact information. I immediately reached out to him.
I was crushed when I heard nothing back. I told J.E. just that when he next contacted me. I told him I had pretty much given up hope. He immediately got in touch with G.B., who said that he had, in fact, contacted me back in July and never heard from me again. To my horror, it turned out that he was absolutely right. I had overlooked his email.
From there, things moved pretty quickly. He was able find out from the school’s headmaster that there were 80 students, and he provided me with their age ranges. That would allow me to find age appropriate books. (And yes, before you ask, they are taught in English.)
But then I reached another roadblock. Books are heavy. Shipping the books from America would be prohibitively expensive. Unsurprisingly, Amazon Prime doesn’t deliver on Yanaba Island. But there doesn’t seem to be a bookstore in all of New Guinea that has a decent variety of books to choose from.
Then I got a brilliant idea. I bet it would be cheaper to ship books from Australia. But before I could even contact a bookstore there, G.B. told me that the headmaster only travels to the capital 2 or 3 times a year, stays for only a few days, and there’s no way he can give advanced notice. And I’m sure a package from Australia would take quite some time to arrive. I couldn’t very well expect G.B. to store a huge crate of books at his home or his office. And would it even be possible to transport such a heavy crate for 24 hours on a small vessel?
Needless to say, the book idea was placed on the back burner. But then G.B. suggested school supplies. I could purchase them from an office supply store in Port Moresby the minute he told me the headmaster was in town. G.B. could then pick them up and make sure the headmaster got them before he returned to Yanaba.
So what supplies should I get? He inquired and it turns out that the island’s 3 teachers only asked for paper, pencils, biros, and rulers. (Yeah, I didn’t know what a biro was, either. It turns out it’s a pen.) When I checked online for the best Port Moresby office supply store and saw the prices of things, I realized that, based on my predictions about what I could raise on a crowdfunding site, I could easily raise enough money to keep them in biros for a decade!
That’s when I got the fever. I stayed up until 3 a.m. one night, looking at the office supply catalog and dreaming of setting this school up! Like, oooh, it would be nice to provide construction paper and colored paper and a pencil sharpener and blackboard chalk and erasers and scissors and paste and crayons and colored markers and colored pencils and a globe and maps and… well, you get the idea. I could totally set up this school. By the end of the night I was looking at telescopes and shed kits, for heaven’s sake.
I hope that rasing funds for such a good cause will not be a problem. But I got increasingly uneasy. It was starting to smack of colonialism. Who am I to impose my values on these people? Who am I to create needs and desires for stuff that, once used, may never again be within their reach? Do I want to cause discontent? Do I want to send the message that their lifestyle is somehow inferior to ours, or that I am trying to force them into the 21st century for their own good? And who am I to decide what’s good for them, or what they need?
It’s terrifying how easy it is to slide into colonialism mode when you have an unearned advantage. Is that how it begins, historically? By being overzealous? Or, as I’ve always suspected, does it just come from pure arrogance and a desire for power and exploitation? I can’t exactly ask the British. After all, their monarch is still Papua New Guinea’s monarch. (Ugh.)
So rather than load them down with my own capitalistic concept of the importance of stuff, now I’m thinking that I’ll provide them with quite a lot of the items that they’ve asked for, and plastic bins to keep them in, and maybe a globe because I can’t resist, but after that, perhaps I should just give them some gift cards for that office supply place, and let the headmaster decide what he thinks they need/should have.
And then the question becomes, how much money should I throw at them at once? I don’t want to overwhelm them. I suspect that sending about a thousand dollars in one go to an island where entire families make, at most, 400 dollars a year might do just that.
So the gift cards will be modest, for now. If all goes well, I may do this annually. If I can ever figure out how to jump over the book hurdle, I still would like to do that someday.
So what you see below, in addition to some extra photographs, is a link to my GoFundMe campaign. Check it out. It will provide you with some additional information. If you are unwilling or unable to participate, you could still help me a great deal by sharing the link far and wide on social media.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Find my GoFundMe fundraiser here.
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