On East Texas stop, pilot tells of passion for helping people of Papua New Guinea

By Jimmy Daniell Isaac
 jisaac@news-journal.com

Oct 2, 2019

Before Samaritan Aviation brought its mission to Papua New Guinea, it took several days for thousands of residents to reach the island’s only hospital.

Mark Palm talks Wednesday, Oct 2, 2019, about how Samaritan Aviation's  float plan will be serving in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea. (Les Hassell/News-Journal Photo)

Tail section of Samaritan Aviation's float plane that will be serving people in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea.

Tail section of Samaritan Aviation's float plane that will be serving people in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea.

Over the past decade, the ministry has saved and impacted the lives of people who live along the 700-mile East Sepik River and have depended on canoeing or two riverside trails to get to critical medical services, according to Mark Palm, a pilot for Samaritan Aviation, which is based in Arizona.

Palm flew his transport plane into the East Texas Regional Airport on Wednesday.

He returned to the U.S. in June for a year in which he’s touring with his plane to raise funds for the charity and spreading the ministry’s message.

“There’s 8 million people over there, and they need help,” Palm said. “People need help. We all should be doing something to change our world where we’re at.”

He came to Gladewater for a public fundraising event Wednesday night at the home of Jeff Peterson, a businessman for Transworld Business Advisors of East Texas and a Samaritan Aviation board member.

“It’s amazing the need over there,” Peterson said, “and my favorite thing is how much the people of Papua New Guinea respect (Palm) and his team and what they do. They’re truly grateful.”

Palm’s mission began about 20 years ago when he said he felt called to put his skills to use saving lives.

 After raising money for 10 years to buy his first used float plane that he transformed into a flying ambulance, he transported it to Papua New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island with a land mass similar to California, he said.

An estimated 220,000 people live along the East Sepik River.

Along the river, there are few nurses and no doctors. Expectant mothers in labor have their babies in the bushes, and there is no hospital except on the coast.

Samaritan Aviation began as one man’s cause, but Palm is no longer the only pilot.

He also has a trauma nurse to answer the phone and make decisions on whether some calls are life-and-death issues that need an emergency response.

Midwives are available on many plane rides, as is anti-venom for snake bites.

This year alone, Samaritan Aviation has flown almost 70 missions to bring in vaccines and transport nurses to vaccinate children against polio in remote communities while also fighting malaria, tuberculosis and outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and polio, he said.

The organization also is working with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea visited the island earlier this year, and Palm took her out to the river to visit a particular community, he said.

While there, a crowd of people formed.

The first person brought from the crowd was a woman named Antonia, who was the first patient flown out by Samaritan Aviation 10 years ago. She was joined by her son, who was the baby saved through that flight, Palm said.

“And for the next 40 minutes, they just kept bringing out people from the community,” Palm remembered, “and ‘you remember this lady? You saved her twin babies.’ Then they bring a guy out who was a kid with cerebral malaria, then another kid comes out. It just went on and on.”

It was but one community served by Samaritan Aviation, which flies to 65 locations and impacts more than 120 community, he said.

“And so to have that impact over one community in that moment was so powerful for me because a lot of times you know you work hard at things, and we all are passionate about things, but when you see the result of your labor, for me it’s just a feeling of gratefulness that I have a chance to go be — we call it — the hands or feet of Jesus or to share God’s love in action to people who have no access if we’re not there and didn’t before we got there,” Palm said.

Peterson has served on the ministry’s board for about three years. The ministry was renting office space in a building Peterson owned, and as he got to know one of Samaritan Aviation’s “higher-ups in the organization,” he soon found himself becoming part of the work.

“I mean, this saves lives and changes lives,” Peterson said. “It’s awesome.”

Before Palm leaves East Texas, he is set to speak today to aviation students at LeTourneau University.

“We don’t charge for our flights, and so we’re 100% funded by donations,” he added. “Sixty percent comes from the USA, and then 40% comes from the Papua New Guinea government, so the great thing is that it’s a partnership. It’s not the USA doing everything over there. It’s us working together as partners and saving the lives of folks in these remote communities.”

US WWII bomber co-pilot to be buried at Arlington 76 years after PNG crash

Donn Young sits in a cockpit in this undated photo from World War II.
DONN ALEXANDER

By WYATT OLSON | STARS AND STRIPES
Published: October 7, 2019

A World War II aviator who in 1943 crashed into a Papua New Guinea mountain where his remains lay for a half-century will be buried with full military honors Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

Maj. Donn C. Young was co-piloting a crippled U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber on Jan. 18, 1943, when it rammed into a mountainside during a thunderstorm. 

Young’s remains were recovered in 1998, but only recently did DNA testing positively confirm them as his.

His burial will include an Air Force flyover.

Young’s remains might have never been found if not for the efforts of Alfred Hagen, a 61-year-old construction business owner in Philadelphia.

Hagen’s great-uncle, Maj. Bill Benn, was the pilot that day on the ill-fated B-25, dubbed the Algernon IV. 

In the 1990s, Hagen set out to find the crash site, filming the excursions to make a documentary.

Hagen made his first trip to Papua New Guinea – a vast island just north of Australia – in 1995, the beginning of a series of expeditions.

Benn is credited with developing a technique called “skip bombing,” by which an aircraft released a bomb over water in a way that caused it to skip across the surface and hit the side of targeted ships.

“It was highly unusual to have two majors flying in the cockpit,” Hagen said of Benn and Young.

Benn was on the crest of being promoted to lieutenant colonel and taking command of the 43rd Bomb Group, Hagen said. 

Meanwhile, Young, the co-pilot, was a newly promoted major who would step into Benn’s position.

It is not entirely clear why the pair flew together that day, but their mission was to scout the north side of the Owen Stanley Mountain Range, whose jagged peaks jut out from tropical rain forest as high as 13,000 feet in some spots, Hagen said.

Army Air Corps aviator Donn Young poses with local men in this undated photo taken during World War II in Papua New Guinea, where he flew a B-25 bomber.
DONN ALEXANDER

The only Allied forces airfield on the island was in Port Moresby, south of the mountain range, while the battles against Japanese forces were taking place on the south side.

“So, if a plane got shot up and couldn’t get over the mountains then they were in trouble,” Hagen said.

The day of the crash, Benn, Young and the crew of five were scouting for clearings in the jungle that could be marked on charts so that pilots could more easily find a place to ditch badly damaged planes, Hagen said.

No one knows for certain the exact cause and circumstances of the plane crash that day.

“Maybe they got battle damage,” Hagen said. “They lost their left engine. There were violent thunderstorms that afternoon. The mountains were uncharted at that time, and they were trying to find a pass where they could sneak through.”

The plane never made it back to Port Moresby.

The crash site was discovered by a local man in 1956, and the following year a Royal Australian Air Force team hiked in, found the crash site and brought out human remains.

Those remains were subsequently interred in a mass grave in Kentucky, Hagen said.

By the time Hagen began his search in the 1990s, the exact location of his uncle’s crash site had been lost with time. He only knew that it was near Mount Strong.

Hagen made numerous trips to Papua New Guinea.

“While we were searching for his plane, we started finding other planes,” he said. “Each time I went back for four or five weeks, I’d find an airplane. I wouldn’t find what I was looking for, but I kept finding airplanes.”

He found eight World War II warplanes, which held the remains of 18 American and British airmen, he said.

After almost four years, he found his uncle’s crash site in 1998.

He found remains, and Donn Young’s dog tags, and brought them to the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby.

Another two decades passed before the remains were positively identified as Young’s.

Donn Alexander, Young’s grandson, recalled being contacted by the Defense Department around 2005 saying that the remains from the B-25 crash were being examined. He submitted a sample.

“I didn’t hear anything for years,” he said.

Then, last year, he was notified that new advances in DNA technology had been used to retest the remains, and Donn Young had been positively identified.

Alexander said the news shocked him, but he was “very happy that there would be some closure on that.”

He expects about 20 family members will be at Tuesday’s funeral.

Hagen expressed awe at the scope of WWII, a cataclysm that delivered a scale of human suffering now almost “beyond your powers of comprehension.”

“When you find one man, however, the sacrifices of his generation are made quite clear in microcosm,” he said. “You find that a family was left behind with a lifetime of unanswered questions. There is a special pain when you don’t know or don’t understand the fate of a loved one. It was a pain that my own family knew all too well.”

He will attend Young’s funeral, he said, mindful of all who have borne such loss.

olson.wyatt@stripes.com
Twitter: @WyattWOlson

PM Marape: Agriculture can unlock wealth of PNG

Prime Minister James Marape has stressed the importance of agriculture to Papua New Guinea.

 He said this when addressing students, staff and the community at University of Technology in Lae last Thursday (Oct 3, 2019).

Please click below to watch video:

PM Marape on PNG becoming the "richest, black, Christian country"

Prime Minister James Marape explains to University of Technology students his vision of  PNG becoming the "richest black Christian country" on Thursday, Oct  3, 2019:

Please click video below to watch:

PM Marape: Law-and-order remains a challenge

Prime Minister James Marape says law-and-order remains a challenge to Government.
 He said this when addressing students, staff and the community at University of Technology in Lae last Thursday (Oct 3, 2019).

Please click below to watch video:

PM Marape announces major tertiary loan scheme

Prime Minister James Marape has announced a major loan scheme for tertiary students.

He made the announcement in front of hundreds of students, staff and the community of University of Technology in Lae on Thursday (Oct 3, 2019).

Prime Minister James Marape addressing students at University of Technology.

Prime Minister Marape meeting hundreds of students at University of Technology after an inspiring speech.

There is, however, one catch: Parents of students must be involved in agriculture.

Marape said the loan scheme was a “signature policy” of the 2020 Budget to be handed down next month.

“I know many of you, just like me, come from family backgrounds where parents are struggling to ensure you have school fees to support you through your tertiary education,” he said.

Marape said 99 per cent of parents in the country were struggling to pay tertiary school fees for their children.

“We want to embark on a loan scheme that is that is interest-free and will take your lifetime to be paid,” he said.

“You don’t need to burden your parents.

“From existing resource envelope, we will rearrange.

“Help me to lobby parents nationwide.

“The burden that is most felt is not really school fee of elementary school kids, it’s not really school fee of primary school, I’m sure parents can afford K100.

“When I was going through school, my parents put me through the Seventh Day Adventist system, they paid a lot to send me to school as simple villager, it came out of mother selling her buns and working her gardens.

“Mother selling in the market put me through grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12.

“Fortunately, at university, I received a K13 allowance from Government.

“It’s not so burdensome at elementary school, primary school and high school.”

Marape said the Government would shift some of the resources allocated to free education to tertiary level.

“Those of you formally engaged in universities and colleges, those who are doing external programmes to earn meaningful engagement in life, those who want to go for further education overseas, will have a loan programme to ensure that students can come to Government, go to school,” he said.

“In the course of your life, if you are living for 100 years you pay off over 100 years, if you live for 20 years you pay off over 20 years, if you live for 30-40 years you can repay the money the Government lent you through the endowment fund programme we will set up to assist Papua New Guinea kids carry on in education.”

There is, however, an agriculture catch.

“The catch is this: In the context of growing the economy, Government will work with the commodity boards and the districts and provinces, to ensure seedlings are accessible to parents right across our country,” Marape said.

“Coffee seedlings, cocoa seedlings, copra seedlings, cabbage seedlings.

“Last time I went to the Sogeri mountains, they grow a lot of good produce, and I’m telling all Koiaris up there in the Sogeri mountains: For goodness’ sake, don’t only sell buai to Port Moresby City.

“Port Moresby City is a city of a million people, a million people eat every day, grow the cabbages and everything else and supply to Port Moresby City.

“Next year, we will engage in a partnership: You want to come to the loan centre and pick up a loan for your school fee, your parents or guardians must go to a district somewhere and pick up seedlings of coffee, cocoa, copra and go and work their land in the agriculture space.

“That is the partnership we want: Everyone must contribute to the economy.

“That parent who is picking up a coffee seedling somewhere is not to repay the money you’re getting for your school fee: It’s their money, we’re just telling them to contribute to the economy.”

Marape said as the policy unfolded leading up to the 2020 Budget, students would know more about it, “and I look forward to a better 2020 that will start or cement the direction in which our country will travel in the 2020s”.

He urged students to register themselves with the National Identification programme to benefit from the loan scheme.

FIFA bans PNG Soccer official for cash conflicts at youth World Cup

The Washington Post 

5th October 2019

ZURICH — FIFA banned an ally of disgraced former vice president David Chung for financial wrongdoing linked to Papua New Guinea hosting the Under-20 Women’s World Cup in 2016.

John Wesley Gonjuan was banned for two years, eight months on Friday and fined 50,000 Swiss francs ($50,250).

John Wesley Gonjuan

Gonjuan was investigated after an audit “revealed a conflict of interest with a company owned by Mr. Gonjuan and the receipt of an unjustified amount” linked to the 2016 FIFA tournament. The amount of money was not specified.

The FIFA executive committee, including Chung and chaired by Sepp Blatter, awarded the women’s tournament to Papua New Guinea in March 2015.

FIFA said Gonjuan was charged with conflict of interest and accepting gifts _ the same charges which last year removed Chung from his FIFA role and as Oceania Football Confederation president.

Chung, who lead Oceania from 2010-18, was banned by FIFA for 6½ years for financial wrongdoing linked to a $20 million project to build its new headquarters in New Zealand.

After Chung left his soccer positions in 2018, Gonjuan stepped up as interim president of Papua New Guinea’s soccer federation.

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