While Fiji and the Kingdom of Tonga were the first two mission stops for Pacific Partnership 2025, they were completed by a smaller fly-in-only contingent before the main mission body set sail, of which I was not a part of, so I will forego discussing those two stops and start with the first country that the ship docked.
Papua New Guinea was honestly never on my bucket list of travel destinations. There is constant civil unrest, armed car jackings, and tribal warfare, which makes for a very challenging security environment. Our Navy security staff as well as our contracted local security services worked very diligently to keep us all safe, and even pulled our teams out of engagement locations when rioting came too close to where we were working. We were all on special medications to prevent getting sick from diseases present there that are not a problem in the USA. We could not drink the tap water due to contamination, and we had to be very careful what local food we ate to avoid getting sick.
While one may ask why we even bothered going, citing all that mentioned above, I can also say that we met some of the most kind, outgoing, and caring people during our time in PNG. They truly appreciated us and the work we were trying to do there, and welcomed us with open arms. They worked side-by-side with us doing patient care and ensured our events were successful. On their day off from work, 3 staff members from the local hospital came out to our community health engagement to serve as interpreters, translating English into the local pidgin dialect for the more rural attendees who didn’t speak English but were interested in our educational booths. Their selfless volunteerism made a major difference in comprehension at our booths.
During my time in PNG I was heavily involved in the Basic Emergency Care (BEC) course, a course designed for resource-limited locations by the World Health Organization and certified by the Australian College of Emergency Medicine. The first week of class we from the US Navy were students in the class learning about providing emergency medical care without all the diagnostic and treatment equipment we are used to having in the states. We then completed a Train-the-Trainer class and became certified instructors ourselves. The second week we were there we taught a BEC class to 23 local first responders to broaden the pool of trained personnel in PNG. Our class even made the local newspaper, which I thought was pretty cool. Now that we are certified instructors, we can also now teach the BEC course in other countries that we stop in over the rest of the mission, which is awesome.
During one of the breaks during our class the first week, one of the local instructors mentioned that she was so happy to be teaching the class to us, but that the hospital also still needed her to work, so after class she was going to take a nap and then work evening shift at the Emergency Department before returning to teach us the next day. It is local people like that who made an impact on us even before we had the opportunity to make an impact on the 23 students we were slated to teach. Examples like this are a perfect representation of how the Pacific Partnership mission is truly a bilateral mission. They teach us, and we teach them.
On our last night in PNG the local city council hosted a going away party and gave each person in attendance a small gift of gratitude. Tears were shed by some, dancing to the tunes of local musicians commenced, glasses were raised, and many who were apprehensive about coming to PNG were glad they came and could see the difference we had made in the lives of the local people. Promises to keep in touch were made, and I hope they are upheld, but the time had come to sail on to our next stop, the island of Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia. As a last parting gesture as our ship was being pulled away from the pier by two tug boats, the local contracted security group we had hired to keep us safe while in country lined up their 30 vehicles along the pier and started honking in unison as they waved farewell to us.
The Ready Rovers 