US Ambassador to PNG Ann Marie Yastishock (left) with PNG fine artist Gazellah Bruder at the unveiling of a new metal sculpture of the Lockheed plane flown by American aviator Amelia Earhart (below) on her last flight from PNG in 1937
headed to Hawaii in September to train for her commercial chopper pilot’s licence. “But this woman, she must have been having a difficult pregnancy, and how she got in touch with us (from her remote Morobe village) must have been “I don’t think there are many black women in general in the world in the aviation industry, and then even less are flying helicopters”
D eborah Bidang knows exactly why she wants to fly helicopters. It’s to help women like the one in crippling pain she loaded on to a stretcher some months back at Lae airport where she works for medevac company
a challenge… but she reached out to hold my hands to thank me. She said, ‘Papa God bai blesim wok blo yupela (Papa God will bless the work you do)’. “For someone really in pain and in the midst of all that to be thanking
me, it meant a lot to me. That’s from her heart.” Deborah, 29, said she realised early how fortunate her own life in Lae was while spending Christmases at her home village on Bagabag Island
Manolos Aviation. “I don’t normally interact with the
patients because I’m ground crew,” says the first recipient of the US Embassy’s new Amelia Earhart Trust scholarship, who
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