Transcript
EBEN KIRKSEY: I was there in April and was present with a meeting where family members of children who had died last year from measles... reportedly 85 children died in the first half of 2017 from measles and other infectious diseases. So during my visit I was part of this meeting: All these people came together to make sense of this mass death that had happened the previous year, this involved again parents of the dead children, their extended family, church leaders, local government officials. They all told me their stories about their frustration in getting the government health service to do their job. There were two government clinics in this area, but the government officials simply weren't showing up. As of 2017, and I'm talking about the area of Mee Pago here, and the villages where I was working are around the lake of Tigi, one of three Highlands lakes. Basically they said in this particular region, Mee Pago, there hadn't been an immunisation campaign in the last three years. Since their children had died, they'd been doing a very concerted lobbying campaign at the local level and even at the provincial level, trying to get the immunisation campaign started. So at the point of my visit in April, it still hadn't happened. So that was four years without this immunisation campaign going on. Measles is a very cheap vaccine, and the parents knew this. They'd started to do their homework after this epidemic and this outbreak. So they were basically just demanding that government roll out this programme.
JOHNNY BLADES: What had been the government's response to that? Why hadn't they reached into that particular area - which is quite remote I guess - for years with a vaccine programme?
EK: When I was in the province, I met with Aloysius Giyai, who is the head of the Department of Health for the whole province of Papua. He actually happens to come from Deiyai, the region that experienced this outbreak. And he talked to me about his frustrations with the local officials. So as head of health for the whole province, he can disburse funds, but he's not in a position to micro-manage people who don't do their job. When Alo Giyai visited the Highlands, when he visited Mee Pago, he said that the local officials, people who were supposed to be working in the local health clinic, basically ran away and refused to meet with him. So in absense of these lower level officials, who were not implementing this province-wide programme, he has developed his own programme. It's called the Barefoot Doctor Programme. He's got a small team of medics that basically fly in to remote areas to deliver vaccines to respond to outbreaks. So since my visit in April, at this provincial level, there's been this special team that's gone in to basically clean up and do the job that local officials were not doing. So finally, after four years of not having a vaccination programme, shortly after my visit in April, they were able to get vaccines in the Deiyai area of Mee Pago.
JB: So that measles outbreak preceded the measles outbreak in Asmat (where 72 children died between last September and February this year) or was maybe at around the same time?
EK: That's right. his is before the outbreak that happened in Asmat. And I also talked to another local community leader there named Selphius Bobi who said these recent disease outbreaks that have been reported in the media have taken place after disease outbreaks in more remote areas that were never picked up by the media. So he told me about two intense disease outbreaks. One that started in 2015 in the village of Wagomani where one child was dying just about every day. He also told me about a much older epidemic in 1989 children between five and ten years of age started dying en masse. Never investigated. Again in 2005 in the area of Dee Mago (spelling may be incorrect) there was another mass mortality of infants.
JB: Would you put it down to similar problems with a lack of government getting on the ground and getting the vaccination programme rolling out in these areas?
EK: I think in the earlier days you didn't have the government clinics yet. So these government clinics are quite new. But there's this widespread culture of not showing up for work. And in part it's a bureaucratic problem. In order to get their wages, they have to report to their higher-ups which are in metropolitan centres. So in order to get paid, they have to not be there. So it's a systematic problem, a problem that higher level officials are having a hard time addressing. nd to be fair, there's not a very good transportation infrastructure to support them.
JB: Some of the recent reports in Indonesian media, state media and so forth, are saying the Papuans in some of these affected areas are refusing to let their children be immunised. Do you think that's not accurate?
EK: It's hard to say. There is a million point five people who live there. Probably there are some parents who are sceptical of government health workers. People have a widespread distrust of the Indonesian government. And this isn't just because of deaths that are happening in the realm of health. So in just this one area that I've been talking about, Mee Pago, there have been twenty-nine extra-judicial killings by Indonesian security forces since the year 2000 - that's more than a couple every year. So people have a widespread distrust. But I think in general, the people I've met in the past couple of years are really keen to get their kids protected from these diseases. There's this widespread awareness that basic things like vaccines are so important to protect their children's lives. So I've seen quite the opposite of what's being reported in the media, that parents are very keen to get their kids vaccinated, and engaged in this long campaign of advocacy and activism, just trying to get government to do their job.
