Brief History of United Church Madang Congregation

Brief History of United Church Madang Congregation.
(Excerpts taken from a documented brief account compiled by 2016-2018 Congregation Chairman Mr. Albert Ralai)

The Madang Methodist/LMS Church (now United Church Madang) was first established in 1966 and was fully completed in 1969. The formation of the church in Madang took place even before the United Church was formally established with the coming together of the Methodist Church and the London Missionary Society (LMS) known as Papua Ekalesia on 19th January 1968.

It took a while however, before land was secured to build a proper place of worship. It was the children of the first converts of Rev. William E Bromilow mainly the Dobuan speaking people who were recruited by the then Burns Philip (NG) Ltd from Samarai in 1952 and brought to Madang to work who made a formal request to their retiring missionary Minister Rev. Robinson who visited them in 1966 on his way back to Australia. Rev. Robinson approached the then District Administrator of Madang (they were known that time as M.H.A Member of House of Assembly, Jason GARRETT an Australian) who took him and the Dobuans to the current location of Madang United Church now United Church Madang and allocated the portion of land now Section 42, Allotment 10 & 11 to build their Church.

World War II left a lot of war wrecks and bomb craters in the area however the men put their minds and hearts to work and cut down, dug up all the coconut trees, burned and buried them together with the wrecks in the craters created by the dropped bombs of WWII.

The Dobuans, although had their hearts in the right place were not carpenters by trade. They made a lot of errors and on more than one occasion they had to remove complete walls to adjust the wall linings to square up. In the midst of their frustrations they asked the LMS brothers from Kerema Compound who were carpenters by trade to help them erect their Church building. The group also brought in a Suau man from the Kwato Mission, nicknamed “Saina” who was a qualified carpenter with the Madang Contractors to work. Saina was able to put his expertise to good use and together with the Kerema’s, they helped their Dobuan brothers to erect the Church building which was completed and dedicated in 1969.

There were also a few brethrens from Rabaul and Kavieng who joined them shortly after. The pulpit was designed and built by a man from Abau District. Those who were married had their wives cook for the men as they stood together to see the completion of the Church building. There were also expatriates at that time who lived and worked in Madang who have immensely contributed towards the completion of the Church building.

Pic: Dobuans who started the initial church building in 1966, and the completed church in 1970.
PC: Tweedy Malagian.

Dobuans who started the initial church building in 1966, standing with the bike is Late Petuel Malagian.

MUC-1970. Late Papa Joseph Zale standing facing camera

https://photos.app.goo.gl/69tegvAxBoYa1mp37

Provisioning of Educational Content to Rural Schools in PNG using RACHEL

Provisioning of Educational Content to Rural Schools in PNG using RACHEL

By Picky Airi

A key statement under access to education in the Papua New Guinea Vision 2050 is that more improvement is required in terms of quality, efficiency and equity (Government of Papua New Guinea, 2009). The government made a commitment towards achieving the Global 2030 goals of education whereby it should provide relevant and quality education to every child (National Department of Education, 2016). This was in accordance with the Medium-Term Development Plan III 2018-2022, which identifies education as a priority for development and further to that, ICT was identified as an enabler to underpin many improvements in education.

This paper discusses the use of offline open educational resources as an alternative for provisioning of educational content in particular to rural schools in PNG. The Remote Area Hotspot for Education and Learning service is presented as a case study for such provisioning. The paper describes the opportunities and challenges of adopting RACHEL using a recent project as an example. The paper then proposes a follow-up survey on this project to establish empirical data to support the adoption of this technology for PNG schools. 

Read the paper here...

 

Honoring the Biblical Call of Motherhood

Sunday 12^th April, 2019

United Church Madang Sunday Service

Mother’s Day Service

Theme: Honoring the Biblical Call of Motherhood

A message adapted from John Piper’s “A Tribute to Ruth Piper”.  

Bible Reading: Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:10–17

I want to begin off by sharing with you 7 examples of women in the Bible who exceeded expectations.

Immediately we can think of women like Mary, Eve, Sarah, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, Naomi, Deborah, and Mary Magdalene. But there are others that have only a small appearance in the Bible, some as few as one verse. 

Room rates for various accomodations for those travelling to Madang

Here is a list of accommodation rates for those traveling to Madang (town vicinity) for leisure, attending a school event like graduation or any other business. This list is not exhaustive and is a work in progress meaning updated information will be put up as soon as they become available. This information is correct as of 28/08/2018.



You may also click here to view the entire file in Google sheet. 

Either click on the link above or copy and paste the text below into a browser.
(https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YWT2maxBKYl2qI-miNHJVFDUbGPCNsT8H0YLLmtMovs/edit?usp=sharing)

Disclaimer: I put this info here with no obligation whatsoever to the respective business. Infor is put here for public benefit, however prices are subject to change.

Drop me a comment if you have noticed a change in prices for any of this accommodation.

RACHEL-Pi custom build project

In draft | Still working on it.

Central Students Community Awareness to Kupiano Secondary School:  RACHEL trial

From the 14 to 15 November, the Central Students Association of DWU conducted a community awareness project at Kupiano Secondary School. Approximately 180km away from Port Moresby taking around 4-5 hours’ drive, the school is just within the vicinity of the Kupiano station in the Rigo-Abau district of Central Province.

The objective was to disseminate information about DWU and other tertiary institutions in Madang Province. Give talks on social issues our communities face and how these issues could be addressed. Furthermore, they planned as part of this community awareness to give something to the school. The idea was to begin with Kupiano this year 2018, and then do the same for other secondary schools around Central province.

The main problem however was funding to carry out this project. Despite a proposal and letter seeking funding from the Central provincial government, no funding was forthcoming. The students organized themselves and started to raise funds with the support from staff, students and families within DWU and the Madang community. This presented an opportunity for RACHEL to be trialed. In fact, RACHEL came about as an option because there wasn’t enough donated books received. The students than planned to introduce RACHEL and then give the few donated reading books to add to their existing library.

The next challenge was choosing the RACHEL server. For this project, we decided to trial the RACHEL-Pi. Funding was our biggest drawback so we had to choose between two options; purchasing the pre-built device from the WorldPossible online store or purchase the raspberry pi device online with accessories and do a custom-build. We chose the latter as it was an inexpensive option. This was going to be a pilot project.

 

What equipment/software is contained in this custom-built Rachel Pi server?

We decided to custom build the RACHEL-Pi (as it was an inexpensive option) using the following components.

Item	Qty	Cost
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Rev 1.1 5v power adapter included.	1	K120.00 (A$48.99) Bought here on Ebay
Wi-Pi USB Wireless adapter	1	K40.00 (A$19.95)
64GB Micro-SD Card	1	K155.00 Bought at the local shop (Papindo)
Raspberry Pi clear case	1	K20.00 ($7.99)
58GB of educational resources[1]	N/A	Free

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[1] Downloaded from here (http://rachelfriends.org/downloads/public_ftp/rachelpi_64EN/) with the help of DWU ICT. (Staff and students have download limits thus we asked ICT to help us).

Figure 4. The custom-built RACHEL-Pi components: Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with the Wi-Pi, 5v power adapter and 64GB microSD card.

Raspberry Pi hardware specifications: Raspberry Pi 3 B+: 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band w/LAN, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE, FastEthernet, PoE support (with separate PoE HAT)

The cost of purchasing the pre-built RACHEL-Pi is $169.00 (USD) which when converted to PGK amounts to K550.77 plus shipping totaled to around K800.

With our custom build RACHEL-Pi, it only cost less than K500 for this device with the accessories. The opportunity cost to this option is that given the limited processing power of the raspberry pi (to act as a server) used it has the capacity to allow at least between ten (10) to fifteen users to connect to it at any single time with either their own smartphone, tablet or laptop so. More users than this would result in slower response time from the device. Steps showing how to write the RACHEL-Pi image to the microSD card are in Appendix 1.

This is an inexpensive option if compared to the cost of purchasing at least ten secondhand desktop computers with monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is energy efficient and cost effective. An alternative and future plan is to purchase the RACHEL-Plus for the next school project.