GE Volunteers and the super smiley Saturday
The children’s outpatient clinic at Port Moresby General Hospital—widely known as POM Gen—has an undercover waiting area, outside the rooms of the clinic. Kids doing the waiting here often have serious, long-term illnesses, such as TB and cancer. This was the part of the hospital that Tui’s team wanted to brighten up. She met with the hospital management who gave the OK without hesitation: yes, she could arrange to have characters painted on the blank walls that face the waiting-room seats. They had one request: Disney. No problem.
With a tiny team—GE only opened its dedicated PNG office in July 2014—Alu knew she’d have to call in some reinforcements. That wasn’t a problem either. “We got family and friends together and ended up with 25 of us on the day,” says Alu. They did their painting on a single Saturday in late June, working solidly from 9am to 3pm. “Everyone was excited. They couldn’t wait to get started. We ran out of stencils because everyone wanted to draw! Lots of them were good artists, too.”
To get GE Volunteers as part of the foundation for GE’s approach in Papua New Guinea is a really important step.
Their task was made easier because POM Gen had arranged to have the soon-to-be-Disneyfied walls painted white in preparation for the colour work. The hospital also put on a bus to collect the GE Volunteers.
The painting party was the first project in what will be an ongoing commitment in PNG, which is the 61st group in the company’s global network of GE Volunteers, who now contribute one million hours a year and have clocked up more than 11 million hours across some 42,000 projects since 2005.
“The opportunity for our employees with GE Volunteers is to not just work out of a community, but to work in a community,” says Kirby Anderson who, in addition to his day job as GE’s vice president of government affairs and policy, mining, is the co-ordinator of GE Volunteers in Australia, New Zealand and PNG. “Tui looked at areas of Papua New Guinea where our businesses were working, and where our employees could assist—the Port Moresby General Hospital was a good first volunteering exercise because GE is providing the first MRI machine into that hospital later this year.”
