by KEVIN PAMBA
Graduations – events that could benefit whole communities
THE hotels and guest houses in Madang
town were virtually booked out at the weekend. Was there an
avalanche of overseas tourists converging on the tourist town? No.
They were largely booked out by guests and visitors of the annual
graduation of Divine Word University. It was the university’s
largest graduation ever.
I checked on the hostelries on behalf of the family members of a
graduating student on Friday evening and I was told on all
occasions that there were no rooms.
One major hotel had only a few of its executive rooms left, which
of course were beyond the reach of this family.
The family then had no choice but to split into two groups. One
group settled for a very cheap and rundown guest house with
inflated rates that night due to the demand. The other group
crammed into the already crowded home of a wantok.
Many private homes in Madang were also brimming with students,
parents and relatives.
The streets of the usually quiet Madang town were teeming with
visitors or “ol nupla pes”, as they say in the Tok Pisin of this
part of PNG, throughout the weekend.
The volume of traffic on the streets increased with visiting
trucks, cars and buses of different makes and models.
The only nightclub in town may have made a fortunate as its much-publicised
concert by a visiting national musician coincided with the
avalanche of visitors for the graduation.
The retail businesses may have made more than the usual money as
so many of the visitors were seen involved in a shopping frenzy.
Apart from the hostelries and shops, there were others who
benefited from this movement of people into Madang.
Among them were the public transport operators (PMVs, boats and
airlines), fuel service station owners, telecommunication service
providers and roadside market vendors selling buai, bilums and the
like. Even the hair salons had their share of the pie as there was
a good number of graduands, parents and guardians spotting more
than the usual hairstyles.
Now you may ask: Why is this columnist raving on about the
subtleties of a mundane event as a graduation ceremony of a
university?
My quest to assist the family mentioned above find accommodation
last Friday night made me think about the spin-off benefits that
come out of a mundane event as a graduation.
There are towns like Madang that benefit from the spin-offs of
events such another so-called mundane graduation ceremony.
Apart from the graduations, there are other ongoing spin-offs that
communities that host institutions of higher education can benefit
from.
As I was contemplating the benefits to Madang from an event
associated with an institution of higher education it hosts, I
sympathised with towns in other provinces and regions that are not
as fortunate.
I was particularly thinking about the Highlands region. That
region had some wonderful campuses of higher education not so long
ago. Some of them are no longer there. Others faced constant
threats of lawlessness from host communities.
Some obvious examples of higher education institutions that were
shut down due to the lawless behaviour of host communities include
the Sopas Adventist School of Nursing near Wabag, Mendi School of
Nursing in Mendi and the Kainantu campus of DWU’s Faculty of
Health Sciences.
There are others that continue to face attacks or threats of one
form of lawless or another. Institutions such as the University of
Goroka and Holy Trinity Teachers College near Mount Hagen have
land compensation demands hovering above them.
Why have communities in the Highlands continue to disadvantage
institutions of higher education in their midst?
Why should they do so when the region does not have that many?
Madang alone hosts perhaps the same number of institutions of
higher education as the entire Highlands region. Madang is only a
small town and it beats the most-populous and resource-rich region
of the country!
The communities that host higher educational institutions in the
Highlands either have no concept of the spin-off benefits or they
choose to ignore them and opt to be self-centred.
In any case, their attitude towards educational institutions would
continue to make them miss out on the collective benefits of
hosting them.
They would continue to see their young men and women migrate en
masse to other parts of the country in pursuit of education and
training as they are doing now.
