Earl Hartwig brought his family to Papua New Guinea more
than a year ago to help us reestablish our hydroelectric power. He and his guys have been very busy in this
past year. They dug a big canal and then
cemented it, they filled up baskets with stones to prevent erosion, and now are
working on constructing the dam (waterholderbacker) itself. 
A few weeks ago, some of us walked down to the dam to see the
progress after quiz practice and were pretty impressed with what we saw. About a week later, Earl and his men,
diverted the river so that they could continue the construction of the dam on
the other side of the river. A follow-up
visit to the dam was quite impressive now seeing the water flowing through the
dam.
There is still a lot of work to be done with gates,
something called penstock, a generator house to be built, generators to be
installed and more. I don't understand
any of it, I just know where there was once a river before, there is now a lot of
cement that has formed part of a dam and eventually we will be able to get
electricity as a result of it all. 
For those in the US, electricity may not seem like that big
of a deal, as the times you are without it are probably few and far between. But to us here in Papua New Guinea, power outages are all too common. Everyday we use our electricity to do surgery on patients, to illuminate lacerations that need suturing, to see the vein in an arm to place an IV, to run refrigerators to keep medicines at the proper temperature and more. Our hospital needs reliable electricity to provide good quality care to our patients and we look forward to the completion of the hydro project so that we will have reliable electricity again. 
