Bibira villagers send plane load of supplies

By CLIFFORD FAIPARIK
Bibira villagers living in Port Moresby and Lae contributed over K20,000 and chartered a plane loaded with relief supplies to send to their own villagers in Oro province.
The plane loaded with mostly cooking utensils, clothes, knives, axes with other gardening tools and food was chartered yesterday to fly direct to the remote Safia airstrip where over 200 displaced Bibira villagers have been living in a care centre with other flood-affected villagers in the Musa valley.
The villagers lost everything including their houses, food gardens and over K50,000 worth of cattle and horses when the Moni and Fasi Rivers flooded and destroyed there homes last month. Luckily no one died.
The Port Moresby-based Bibira villagers’ spokesman Jimmy Abani said that they want to thank the public and fellow villagers for responding to their appeal to contribute both cash and kind.
“We would like to thank those who had come forward and donated cash during our two- day wheel barrow push. The support was so overwhelming that a member of the public just dropped K200 cash in the wheel barrow. Unfortunately, we did not get his name.
“Such support was too much that we had to off load about 300kg of supplies from the plane as it had gone past its excess requirement. And we will send the leftover supplies in a similar charter later on.”
Mr Abani also urged his fellow villagers living in the care centre to move back to their village.
“We have sent cooking utensils, knives, gardening tools for them to use and rebuilt their houses and gardens.
“Three weeks in the care centre was enough and is putting pressure on the National Government, non-governmental organisations and international communities to look after them.”
Mr Abani said that they had sent their contributions to the authorities in the Oro province but due to the village’s remoteness, it took about three weeks to reach.
“Also the supplies that we had sent were further redistributed to other care centres and our villagers ended up with a lesser amount of the original supplies.”