Martyrs Memorial (High) School

One part of the trip to Oro was heading out with Bishop Tevita to go and see one of the largest (and previously most prestigious in the country) Anglican high school – Martyrs (MMS).

This was the first of the large Anglican Church agency high schools I’ve managed to get to – as they’re all in the bush to a certain extent. Overall, including primary/community schools, there are over 200 Anglican agency schools… So I spent some time with the Principal chatting, spent some time with the Bursar checking out the accounts being run in Excel, and got an excellent walk around a section of the (huge) campus space with the Deputy principal.

The Breakdown – MMS Popondetta
Location -: about an hour drive towards Kokoda from Popondetta town*
Years 9 to 12
600+ Kids
Class sizes – average 40+
% of females – 40%
Boarding - 90% of all school children
Beds – not enough for everyone.
Computers – about 8 in total. I think 5 work properly, but not sure.
Electricity – no probs, generator runs OK
Gardens – plenty for the kids to work on to grow food.

* The road to Kokoda from Pop is sealed as far as the queen went on her last visit here…

I also spent 10 minutes or so with x3 Gap year students (just out of highschool – 18y.o. or so) from the UK who came over to teach for 8 weeks. Excellent program – they (the 3 UK’ers) learnt a lot whilst being supervised by teachers from MMS, and taught a lot. Try and get more programs like this up and running in the future methinks.

As usual – I snapped pics away here and there. Also as usual in PNG, there were whole bits I didn’t want to be waving a camera around.