Episode 10 - Kompiam

Kompiam. Home to weird looking spiders, stunning countryside and really poor internet. Well okay, that’s pretty much anywhere in PNG. But for the last three nights, it’s also been home to me. Kompiam is a remote village to the north of Mount Hagen in the middle of a bunch of even more remote villages. As well as being home to poor internet, it’s also home to a Hospital that serves the villages in the area, and those are the two reasons that Michael and I went there.

One of the aforementioned views

Wired internet is just simply not possible for a remote village in the middle of the mountains, so the hospital at Kompiam gets its internet via satellite. Unfortunately the connection that the hospital has at the moment is not good enough to meet its needs (and no, we’re not talking about streaming movies, just accessing normal web pages is a struggle). That’s where Michael and I come in. The hospital has bought a new second-hand system (if that’s not an oxymoron) and all we needed to do was to install it (and bring it with us).

Our mighty steed

We flew from Goroka to Mount Hagen with the equipment (the dish itself was already waiting in Hagen for us), and then loaded all of the equipment into a van. We were all set to join it before finding out that there was space for us on the next flight to Kompiam leaving in a couple of hours. We were in a small single propeller plane which flew low enough to give us great views of the stunning mountain scenery. Once we landed the eye candy certainly got no worse as we stepped into the stunning scenery we had seen from above full beautiful landscapes, gorgeous flowers and curious creatures. There is no doubt, I was privileged to be there.

More stunning views

So on to the job in hand. We began first thing the next day. On paper it was relatively simple, if all went well, we might even be finished by the end of the first day we thought. Things did not go to plan. We planned to remove the old dish from its post and install the new dish onto the post. The new dish however, faces a different satellite in the opposite direction, where there is a fence in the way. So much for the plan. So first off we would have set up a new post. A post, which we did not have. So with the aid of David; the doctor who runs the hospital, we had a look around to see if we could find anything suitable. Eventually we settled on a piece metalwork that looked like we could get to work. Unfortunately it was smaller than the stand we were going to fit it to, so the two needed to be welded together. Fortunately however, the hospital happens to have its own metal worker. We explained what we needed and he set to work.

The metalworker... working metal

We got a couple of the maintenance staff who were helping us to dig a hole for the post, leaving us with only one problem. To keep the post in the ground we figured that we would need at the very least five bags of cement, but on the whole hospital grounds, we could only find two. There was a member of staff who happened to be in “town” a few hours away, so we gave him a call and asked him to bring some back with him. The hole was finished incredibly quickly, the post, not so much. It wasn’t quite taking the shape we had expected, but after a little discussion and quite a bit more time, we got something that would work well, if it did look suspiciously like a space rocket, complete with windows! The windows would let water in so we would have to be careful to leave a gap when cementing the post in to allow for drainage, but this wasn’t a problem.

Our very own space rocket!

With the day getting towards its end, we now had a post and a hole, but no sign of our cement. We decided to start with the cement we had so that we would have less to do in the dark if it came to that. We chucked in some extra bits of old broken up cement to help spread out the mixture and to our amazement after using every scrap of cement we had, the mixture completely filled the hole and left just a tiny gap for drainage. Perfect! We could couldn’t have measured it any better! God is good! With most of the day gone, we found ourselves where we thought we were going to start it, but still, we had a bit of time left to fit the dish together ready to put on the post in the morning once the cement had set, and most importantly of all, we had the cement in by the end of the day so that we could carry on in the morning! Incidentally, I still have no idea what happened to that extra cement we ordered.

Trust me, that's what it's supposed to look like

So the next day began, and if the first day didn’t go to plan, then the second day was well and truly off script. Michael was heard to say that in the twenty or so Vsat installs that he had done, never had so many things not gone according to plan. I bet he’s really looking forward to working with me in the future. The day started well, but didn’t have the ending we imagined. We got the dish onto the post (I make it sound easier than it is), did the maths, pointed the dish where we thought the satellite was, and hey presto! We got a signal. We used some software on the laptop and tweaked the dish to get maximum signal. All good. And then we tried to get internet. Not so good. For some reason the modem wasn’t happy, it was quite hot so we thought that it may have started to get too hot (I was). Happily, this coincided with lunch time, so we decided to give it a break to cool down whilst we gave ourselves a break to cool down.

Golly gosh! It actually looks like a satellite dish!

Unfortunately, when we got back things were no better and it was soon apparent that something wasn’t quite right and so we needed contact the manufacturer. Easier said than done. The mobile phone network was down (which is not uncommon as the mobile tower runs off a generator and people steal the fuel), so we would have to use the internet. Except we didn’t have it working yet did we? And we had to take the old dish off because it was in the way of the new one. There was only one thing for it, we’d have to swing the new dish out of the way and set the old one up again. And so we did. And we got hold of the manufacturer and through the very bad connection got some suggestions of what we could try (and some reassurance that with what we had done it should have worked). Inevitably moments after struggling through a conversation with very bad internet, the mobile network came back. So with this new advice, we took down the old dish and set up the new dish once more. And we tried some things. And then when that didn’t work we tried some more things. And then some more things. And then some more things, until eventually we ran out of things to try and time in which to try them. It was clear that something was broken and so we will have to send the suspect parts down to Port Moresby for testing and come back another day to finish the job.

Views like these make bad news easier to take

It’s hard to accept, and on days like these it’s easy to mark it all down as a defeat and a big waste of time, but on these days more than ever, it’s important to remember what our hard work has achieved; we have most of the install ready for next time, complete with rocket like post, and we now know what we face when we come back. I’ve also had the incredible privilege of spending time in God’s wonderful creation and I’ve had one heck of an introduction into the kind of things we face in our work! But it wasn’t all quite over just yet.

Not quite as glamorous as a plane

Six o’clock the next morning we got a lift in a truck to Mount Hagen and I got to bathe my eyes in yet more of God’s amazing creation. The road had recently been redone and apart from the occasional half-missing bridge, was in good condition. It felt like we were making good time, but even so, this journey that took twenty minutes in a plane took us over five hours by road. It’s a good reminder of the journeys Papua New Guineans need to take to get services we consider normal, even when they are connected by relatively good roads! It may have been five hours, but it certainly didn’t drag, it was a pleasure to be there and I feel very well blessed to be in here in PNG.