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June 2021

e-NEWS CFK progress June 2021

Dear friend of CFK,

With 7 projects on the go… Caring for Kiriwina (CFK) has been helping the women and children on Kiriwina for many years. Please give generously this end of financial year to help support this ongoing work.

Kiriwina VBA’s receiving their lanterns, batteries, facemasks, gloves, pens and other PPE’s.

Birth Supplies/Birthing Training: Supporting our 275 Village Birth Attendants and the only medical centre on the Island, Losuia Health centre, supplying Birthing Kits, Training, lights, Birth registration booklets, Mobiles phones and many other essential items.

Kiriwina Secondary School (KSS) female students receiving their dignity kits.

Dignity Kits: UNICEF says that adolescent girls in school suffer the most when they are menstruating. Many schools report absenteeism among adolescent girls due to a lack of clean, private changing rooms and without access to soap, water and sanitary pads. Some stay away from school for a few days. CFK provides the women and girls on Kiriwina with dignity kits that contain two reusable menstrual pads, two underpants, two soaps and a bag to store them in. CFK’s constant supply of Dignity Kits has increased female participation rates.

CFK sponsored students with the teacher, Mr Arnold Kalu (in green color T-shirt and long blue pants) who is coordinating CFK assistance at KSS. Only 12 out of 19 students were available when this photo was taken.

School Education: Initiative 1: Educational materials. The support from CFK has allowed all the schools on Kiriwina to sit their yearly exams. Due to continual government absence of supply, CFK has donated and continues to supply thousands of pens and pencils to all the schools on Kiriwina.
Initiative 2: CFK School Fee Scholarship Program. CFK administers the CFK School Fee Scholarship program which pays for the mandatory High school fees for extremely vulnerable students.
Initiative 3: Translation of readers into Kiriwinan. CFK is also working on producing a primer (first textbook) for teaching of reading in the Kiriwinan language, an alphabet book and a basal reader. It is incredibly important for the children to be literate in their own language.

Kavataria pump in operation. Koega advised that we need to replace the pipe as soon as possible as the current pipe is rotting away to avoid rust mixing with water.

Clean Drinking Water: We have supplied and maintained four water pumps on Kiriwina with an aim of distributing many more Island wide. These pumps currently supply the main village, 2 remote villages and the Kiriwina Secondary School with clean drinking water. Kiriwina Island is flat, with no rivers and no naturally-occurring fresh drinking water. While the underground water table is easily accessed as it is shallow, it is of brackish quality and frequently not potable, although suitable for bathing (and is so used for the 55,000 Kiriwina inhabitants). The village toilets and household rubbish from about 80 villages contaminate it further. Our pumps allow access to deeper, cleaner water suitable for drinking. Mr Koega, a Kiriwinan plumber, installs and maintains the pumps for CFK.

Koega and team fixing the Kiriwina Secondary School girls and boys water pumps.

All of the pumps has been fixed and are currently working, however they require constant maintenance.

Health and Hygiene/COVID-19 supplies: The pandemic continues to negatively impact the people of Kiriwina. CFK sends a constant supply of masks, gloves, sanitisers, and soaps to the medical centre.