Volunteer uses trip to donate to tribes

When Hannah Assink took a trip to a remote island last summer, she wasn’t looking for a vacation.

The Hamilton senior, along with her father Mel Assink, traveled to West New Britain, a province of Papua New Guinea.

During their trip in July and August, the Assinks took many goods, including large bags of clothes and 140 pairs of eyeglasses from the Saugatuck-Douglas Lions Club, and donated the items to the native people of the Loko and Kaul tribes.

“It was the experience of a lifetime,” Hannah said.

Hannah said the journey was arduous and included stops in Sydney, Australia, and Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea.

Port Moresby has been named the most dangerous city in the world four times, she said, and has a high rate of robbery, sexual assault and disease in the country.

“Malaria is very prominent,” she said. “We had to sleep in mosquito nets.”

Mel Assink said he and his daughter took several precautions to prepare tor being in a country covered primarily with tropical rainforest and wetlands.

The pair got malaria medication and evacuation insurance, said Mel, who said he took a similar expedition to West New Britain before.

Hannah also began learning “Pidgin English,” a trade language consisting of about 1,000 words that is meant to help unify the people of New Guinea who have 700 to 800 separate languages.

“I’m not fluent, but I’m conversant,” Hannah said. “It definitely opened up a lot of communication lines.”

Mel said without Hannah, he would have been doing “a lot of smiling and pointing.”

He said he was amazed how genuinely happy the natives were despite having hardly any possessions.

“They were so gracious to us and always wanted to talk,” he said. “People that do have work do it at the church of the tribe.”

Mel said he befriended a man who previously left his family for months to hike for long distances to find work. The man, who was treasurer of a church, planned to use his wages to personally pay back a sum of money that had been stolen from the village’s place of worship.

“He felt it was the right thing to do,” Mel said. “It touched me.”

Hannah said she also enjoyed the tribal people and had experiences with them she found very fulfilling.

Hannah’s work caught the attention of university officials. The Volunteer Center named her a Volunteers are Central honor for the month of January.

Jennifer Bush, who oversees the selection process said the award promotes awareness of the individual and their cause on campus and in the community.

“Many of these volunteers go unnoticed,” Bush said. “It’s a way to get people the recognition they deserve.”

Hannah said the award is an honor and her volunteer work is far more satisfying than any paid work she has ever done.

“I’ll never have an experience like that again,” she said.

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