‘Hello, can you hear me?’
Radios are a vital form of communication for remote places; helping them feel connected to the rest of the world. Last year, Lukas Schadegg installed a radio for the village of Biadi in PNG.
Pastor Jinga and his family live and work in the remote village of Biadi. They are helping to start a new church in the village.
For the first two years, they were more or less without phone, radio or internet access. The only place they could connect with the outside world was a town a long way away. Sometimes the family tried to get a mobile phone signal by walking for half a day up a mountainside, but this hardly ever worked.
Lukas Schadegg and his wife Mahela serve with MAF Technology Services (known as CRMF in PNG), so Lukas went to Biadi to install a radio so Pastor Jinga could talk to friends outside Biadi.
‘When I arrived at the village to install the high frequency (HF) radio,’ Lukas says, ‘Pastor Jinga’s wife started to cry. Finally, the much-needed means of communication had arrived in their community.’
Thanks to the HF radio installation, the family can ask for prayer from other Christians, and get the support they need from their mission headquarters. ‘Because we weren’t able to communicate with our head office for two years, we thought they’d forgotten about us,’ Pastor Jinga explains.
The radio can also be used to call for a medical emergency flight, like a flying ambulance, to take the family to hospital, should they need it, instead of walking across mountains for nearly two days!