Inspired by her little brother

COVER STORY

By LULU MAGINDE
DORIS Anboman from Kiunga in Western has given 32 years of her life in service to education and community service in a province that has long been overlooked.
A trained teacher, Anboman is the pioneer of the Callan Inclusive Education Resource Centre (Callan) in Kiunga, for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs). She got into the field of community service because she was inspired by her little brother who was born with an impairment.
Always wondering how she could help educate children with disabilities, she left mainstream classroom teaching, as she calls it, and joined inclusive education teaching back home.
“My brother died young with a disability and did not go to school so he was my inspiration. When I went to school and became a teacher, I left my teaching post in a primary school after 10 years, to train in Rabaul to become a special-needs teacher, starting with Callan in Kiunga,” she says.
She completed a one-year course in Rabaul at the Callan resource centre there, then did her practical in Wewak and from there started up the resource centre in Kiunga in 2001.
“I started offering special education in Kiunga, in 2001 and then the following year, registered the centre with the Department of Education under the national inclusive education unit and received tuition-fee free (TFF) funding.”
To this day, Callan Kiunga’s education programmes continue to be funded by TFF. As the programme coordinator, the 52-year-old mother of four is proud of the fact that she initially started with one teacher and now has six.
“In the province there are many children with special needs that are unaccounted for but there are 515 registered under Callan. We help children and adults from the funding that we receive, trying to support them in any way we can,” she says
Early childhood education has also been offered at the centre for the past three years now, with the centre having received K60,000 from Ok Tedi Mining to build a classroom and a teacher’s house last year.
“I’ve heard stories from other service providers about them not reaching out to the community much because there is no money. I told them: you can make money in your own centres by training the PWDs to start up their own projects.”
She believes that if you support PWDs with the training and skills they need, they will support you back in return.
Through the self-help project offered at the centre, teen and adult PWDs are encouraged to make a living for themselves/sustain their own livelihoods by being supported to start their own little projects.
“The PWDs in the self-help programme print banners and type letters for people in the community; since the beginning up until now the project has been our source of income to meet the needs of the two programmes running at the centre that TFF cannot meet.
“We offer three components; teacher training, special education classes and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) classes. We have two CPR assistants as there is space in the resource centre for them because of the self-help project,” Doris adds.
She observes that she is happy the self-help project is running because it not only supports CPR classes but makes it possible for foot patrols, outreach programmes and the delivery of PWD aids to the most rural parts of the province.
The centre’s services extend to Tabubil and Fly River communities, both upstream and downstream, with a network of partners to help with funding and logistics.
She lists the National Department of Health, Childfund PNG, Save the Children and World Vision (providing drums of diesel) as main sponsors in her network because the funding received from TFF can only support the education programmes.
“Through our health programmes, we get the services out to the people in the most rural parts of the province. Our networking helps us deliver services.
“Ok Tedi is a major help for those visually impaired with corrective eye surgery; we do all the screening and go through Ok Tedi for all the logistics,” she adds.
Ok Tedi Mining has been helping out Callan Kiunga since operations began 22 years ago. The mine had already been operating and assisting Callan Kiunga was part of their corporate social responsibility.
After so long, arrangements were made in 2018 for staff from the National Orthotic and Prosthetic Services (NOPS), to travel to Kiunga and work day and night for two weeks making artificial limbs for the PWDs.
“Ok Tedi made took care of all the logistics, allowances, accommodation and transportation. They donated a vehicle and a dinghy; this was before the other partners started coming in. They were the original helpers,” she proudly explains.

The physiotherapist in the province is in the provincial hospital in Daru, far from Kiunga and their patients are referred to Callan because they don’t have appropriate materials to cater for them.
They have hospital patients from Daru being referred to them after being discharged for prosthetic fittings and to an extent physiotherapy.
“We foster sustainable livelihoods for those at Callan, catering to their education, health, advocacy and empowerment and even sports (we sit down and play volleyball),” she says
“In our simple way of doing things, we’ve managed to cover all the components that are crucial to support a PWD or child with special needs,” she adds.
“The (national disability) policy gives me the strength that I need to be able to support parents for justice for child abuse or threats or to communicate with the community and I’ve used the policy in the past to bring perpetrators of those crimes to the police station and they have been locked away.”
Doris has had a lot of successful cases in Western, defending the rights of PWDs because of the policy and referring to it whenever she is approached with a situation.
“Those clients who want to seek employment – there are about 17 adult PWDs as well as young teenage clients who cannot further their education – are doing small projects, supported by the centre through the self-help project or training programmes.”
There are roughly 21 young adults who cannot go to school but are on the streets, encouraged to raise funds for themselves through their informal markets, selling betel nut or crafts they make.
The proud grandmother of three, is of mixed parentage with her father hailing from West Papua and mother from Tabubil. She has four children of her own, the oldest two followed in her footsteps to serve the community, one as a nurse and the other a teacher.
Doris recently attended a five-day workshop hosted by the National Capital District Diffabilities Advocacy Agency and hosted by UN Women, as a service provider and shared how unique the situation was for her province but also advocated for more acknowledgement of the national policy by the main implementing agencies.