Hulekama Village Looks for a Breakthrough

Hulekama is just a small and simple village in the Wamena sub-district in the Jayawijaya highlands in Papua province. This village rarely receives any outside exposure although massive development activities have been taking place in other bigger towns and cities across Papua.

Larius Kogoya, 37, has strived to find breakthroughs to improve the welfare of the community in this village, especially the children. He has collected the data of the Hulekama children. In the process, he closely involved the church and village leaders for support. Finally, Larius managed to recruit 137 children to be registered as the sponsored children of World Vision through its partner Wahana Visi Indonesia La'uk Nayak office in Wamena. 

Larius did not come across any difficulty to communicate with the local community because he mastered both the Lani and Dani languages, which were commonly used by the people living in the villages in Jayawijaya area. Through the interaction, he discovered that one of the major problems in Hulekama is the lack of access to the health services, including through the village health post. About 90 percent of the families who have under-five children have inadequate information and never access such health services.

He also organized village health services to be conducted right after the Sunday service so that many parents who have under-five children could easily bring their children for measuring, weighing, diagnosing, and to receive nutritious food supplements. The effort has been very effective although still could not cover all the children in Hulekama.

Wahana Visi La'uk Nayak office conducted a data gathering exercise in the five existing villages. The data gathering was aimed at finding better data about children nutrition status, sanitation issues, access to clean water, and monitoring child growth.

During the data gathering, the team discovered that eight under-fives recently died due to diarrhea, upper-respiratory infection, and other illness.

To prevent similar incidents, Wahana Visi La'uk Nayak office has conducted training programs for village health cadres to be able to better identify diseases symptoms so that they can help facilitate earlier action for the infected local children to get medical assistance from the health centers or hospital. 

Wahana Visi La'uk Nayak programs received financial support from donors through World Vision Taiwan and Wahana Visi, special partner of World Vision in Indonesia.

The project, which started supporting the local community in October 2011, is providing support for 2000 under-six-year-old children, 800 families, 10 village health posts, tens of health cadres and health officers at sub-district health centers and health offices, and also provided support for church leaders and 10 villages to help improve community health and welfare.

Through all the interventions, Wahana Visi is expecting the child mortality rate to significantly decline while the nutrition, basic health and survival of the local children to improve in the years to come.