Optometrists Elianne Westerveld and Stephanie Wallen in their ‘clinic’ under the trees

At the age of 15, I visited a medical ship and from that day on I knew I was going to serve on one. So, when then the opportunity came, I jumped at the chance, which is how I found myself onboard the YWAM (Youth with a Mission) PNG ship in late 2019.

The YWAM PNG is a small, ex-cruise ship managed by YWAM Townsville, which runs medical missions to Papua New Guinea 11 months of the year. The ship can carry around 150 people and has a full ophthalmology theatre on board, as well as a dental clinic and various living spaces. Everyone involved is a volunteer and has personally paid, or been sponsored, for all their travel and accommodation costs. Some volunteers, like me, stay for one “outreach”, which is two weeks’ worth of clinics plus the weekends either side, while others spend months or even years on board. YWAM sees its role as to ‘care, connect, serve and build’ for the people and the healthcare system of Papua New Guinea, so have operated there since 2010. The charity organisation works with government, and local healthcare, so it goes where it’s needed most and supports whatever services are already present.

I was one of two optometrists on the October/November outreach. Our day would start by loading our equipment into a small Zodiac boat and travelling to a village. There, we would set up and our patients would arrive, some pre-identified by local health workers and some having walked for hours to see us. After registration, the patients would have their VA’s tested and be triaged. If they had vision better than 6/18 but wanted reading glasses, they were seen by volunteers who helped them find the right power from the organised pile of donated spectacles. Any children, those with distance vision of 6/18 or worse, or with obvious ocular abnormalities, were sent to see either myself or the other optometrist volunteer, Elianne Westerveld from the Netherlands. We were normally allocated the darkest corner of a room, or shadiest part under a tree, to set up our ‘clinic’ with retinoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, trial frames and lenses. Anyone with vision worse than 6/36 (in the good eye!) would be considered for cataract surgery and referred back to the ship. We also lugged in more than 1,100 pairs of donated glasses in various prescriptions to give out where we could.

For me, the whole process was definitely a test of my resourcefulness. One day, the equipment I had died, so I was diagnosing and triaging patients with a pen torch and a magnifying glass, and refracting using only trial lenses! Also, there were many, many patients with conditions I had only read about in textbooks. I sorely missed my slit lamp and OCT.

It’s said, it’s better to give than receive, and I’m pretty sure I gained more in hugs and joyful smiles than I lost to bouncing around in a Zodiac for hours, or bruised knees from kneeling on the floor all day as the few chairs that existed were given up to patients with the greatest need.

We couldn’t help everyone, and there were times it was really hard not to compare health care in New Zealand to what was available in Papua New Guinea, but it was a privilege to serve the patients we could. To give you a few numbers, our whole team saw around 845 patients in 10 clinic days and provided 864 pairs of free spectacles.

Did I love it? Yes! Was it easy? No! Would I go back? Absolutely!

For more information about YWAM and volunteering see: https://ywamships.org/medical-ship/volunteer/

Stephanie Wallen is a therapeutically qualified optometrist working in private practice in sunny Northland, New Zealand.