This blog post is a little different for Lux Building: it isn’t about us, our team (although, we can’t rave about them enough), or even our clients (who are pretty awesome too); this is a blog post about an unofficial representative of Lux Building and his experiences volunteering with amazing people in PNG.

This is a little taste of Rodney Hespe’s (the father of Lux Building co-founder Dan Hespe) experience with the Kokoda Track Foundation (KTF) in a place that is significant and dear to so many Australians.

There’s more to all of us than meets the eye.

When we begin our working day, we often leave a part of ourselves behind, preferring to separate our private lives from our working lives.

This is understandable: work can be tough, a drag sometimes even. The last thing that most of us wish to do is to continue doing ‘work’ at home or on holidays.

But must we leave our work skills at the door or boarding gate?

What would it be like to take your skills with you on a journey abroad or to the next-door neighbour’s house on the weekend?

Waiting at the international departures lounge in Sydney Airport on the 1st of April, Rodney Hespe thought about the previous day’s events: it was his last day at work (a senior role with a heavy machinery manufacturer who was struggling with declining equipment sales as a result of the mining industry slowdown) and now that he was waiting, bags checked-in, passport in hand, he reminded himself why he was waiting for a plane and now being newly unemployed.

“This was something that I wanted to do for a long time”, Rodney recounts, “my wife and I wanted to do some kind of volunteer work some years ago after I finished my job at QANTAS, but I fell into another job too quickly. So our plans were put on hold”.

Wanting to share his knowledge and skills for something other than making money had been a desire of Rodney’s for a long time, and it was through his wife’s social network (an actual physical one), where he found his opportunity.

“My wife is in a business group, and one of the members is married to Dr Genevieve Nelson (the CEO of KTF), and they heard that I had some time spare after leaving my job, so introductions were made and discussions about what I could do regarding skills were had, and then, about a month later, I was flying out to help in the construction of some college buildings in PNG”.

Destination Kokoda.

The KTF focuses its work on communities in rural areas who often have little or no access to basic services that most of us in Australia take for granted: education, healthcare, energy and safe drinking water. They provide communities with access to education and health services as well as livelihood opportunities, and they aim to build the next generation of Papua New Guinean leaders via their regular leadership programs.

A great mission that no one can argue with, but none of these aspirations happen without generous donors providing the capital investment for certain pieces of infrastructure such as buildings to house students and teachers; clinics for health workers to care for patients and train the next generation of health practitioners; shelter so that workers have somewhere to stay due to being in a remote location.

After his flight from Sydney to Port Moresby and then onto Popendetta Charles, who oversees the college construction activities, greeted Rodney at the airport. After a three hour road trip on the ‘bumpiest dirt road in history’ Rodney arrived at Kou Kou village (near Kokoda Station) where he was introduced to Cecil and Bibra, his hosts during his time in PNG.

Rodney’s skills were ready for the task, but his body was definitely in an environment that was completely foreign to it, and his time in PNG was no holiday; he was there to work hard and help the local team get the job done.

“It was hard work, and it is demanding because it is hot and really, really humid”

“You are just dripping with sweat all day”

And the weekends didn’t really provide much of a break from the rigours of work in the humid, tropical climate:

“Down time was actually hard to find… it was quite funny because the two most common religious groups up there are Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists: One group refuses to work on Saturdays, and others don’t work Sundays. So I was working every weekend!”

The following is a breakdown of a usual day working with KTF in PNG from Rodney’s diary.

It shows pretty clearly that when you volunteer your skills for a charity, you really are there to work hard and transfer skills and knowledge:

4:45 am

Woken up by the rooster (wish I could catch it!), have a wash at the water tank.

Breakfast is boiled water from a thermos with powdered milk and corn flakes (but you had to wait for the water to cool or your corn flakes would be too soggy) and a cup of tea.

7:30 am

Get to work!

“To get there, you had to walk through the village, down to a lower lying area (because of the high rainfall, the site was usually soaked every morning)”

“There were two shipping containers with the prefabricated walls and fittings to be fastened and erected”

12:30 pm

Back to the village for lunch (and to try and dry out a bit)

“Lunch is a few Saos and a packet of noodles”

13:00 pm

Back to work!

“We would cook more water at lunch to take with us to the job site (boiling water was necessary in order to avoid illness)”

“Because of the humidity you usually go through 9 L of water every day”

16:30–17:00 pm

Finish work.

“By the end of the day you were ragged, dead. It wasn’t a working holiday by any stretch of the imagination”

“Before dinner I would go to the creek for a ‘wash wash’, as the locals called it”

“I would jump into the river fully clothed and just lay there, gradually taking clothes off and washing them by hand”

18:00 pm

Dinner.

“Dinner was either a can of bully beef (or spam), some rice or pasta, and some green vegetables from their vege patch: choko leaves, pumpkin tips (the feelers that grow from actual pumpkins) and tulip leaves (which was like bok choy) were all regular additions to the evening meal”

“No refrigeration meant that things had to be preserved or otherwise they simply wouldn’t last in the heat”

“I managed to lose about 6.5 kilos by the end of the month I spent there”

During his first stint in PNG (he has since returned a second time) Rodney was busy working on the construction of a First Aid building with the KTF carpenter Theo.

“The idea is to educate locals on first aid, and provide an education to create teachers who can train more people in it”

“Theo is the KTF carpenter, he knows what to do; I was basically there to support him and offer other perspectives from my experience”

“Rather than telling these guys what to do or how to do it, the approach was really: let’s ask them how they want to do it, and work together to find a solution. Pretty simple stuff”

In this sense, the approach was more about knowledge transfer. In Rodney’s own words: “You actually help them to get to where they want to be really”.

Like many Australians with family who served in World War 2, ANZAC Day and the Kokoda Track goes hand-in-hand fro Rodney.

“My grandfather was in New Guinea during WW2, and my mum used to tell me about his experience with the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzys’ you know”

“My Grandfather never talked about it. Never marched on ANZAC Day. Never told us stories: he had the medals in his drawer, but never got them out”

“He was in the Air Force, flying things in and out I believe. The airstrip itself is still there. Really interesting to see it after all those years”

“I don’t get into the hype about it too much, but I do go to dawn ceremonies and think about those who have served each year. That’s all”

Given that his first stint in PNG coincided with the ANZAC Centenary, and despite knowing that most of the ANZAC action would be had a day and a half’s trek away at the battlefield memorial, Rod decided to stage his own memorial along the Kokoda Track early on the 25th of April.

He was up early, before 5am, and made the journey with his host’s son accompanying him (“they wouldn’t have it any other way”).

“I was talking to Cecil the night before and he insisted if I was to go that early in the morning when it was still dark his son would escort me to ensure my safety. I got up at 0500 and walked to Kokoda with Cecil’s son which takes about 45 minutes. It was raining, roads were muddy, visibility was poor and a mist hung over the airstrip. It was quite surreal”

Walking up the track in his work boots now covered in mud, Rod made it to a point on the track where there was a plaque that was more informational than ceremonial. He decided to have his own ANZAC moment here, but as the clock neared 6am a 4WD forced its way up the hill, mud splattering in its wake. The car stopped next to him with an Australian couple inside.

They asked why there were so few people at the memorial? The couple worked in Port Moresby and had decided to fly out to the area in order to participate in the centenary of ANZAC service, but they didn’t know, much as Rodney hadn’t known only a few days earlier, that the ceremony took place quite a distance away.

“The guy drove up and stopped next to me… he opened his window and asks me: ‘Is this it?!’ I told him it was, so he jumped out, laid a wreath on the ground, said a few words and then drove back down the track!”