IF ever there was “a man on a mission” that description would most certainly fit Harry Graepel.
Harry, a teacher at St Mary’s Catholic College, Woree, in Cairns, was one of the seven 2011 Spirit of Catholic Education award recipients.
The annual awards are presented by the Queensland Catholic Education Commission (QCEC) in recognition of outstanding contributions by individuals within the Catholic education community.
The 2011 awards attracted 83 nominations and, hearing of Harry’s “mission”, it’s easy to see he was a more than worthy recipient.
In 2007, Harry identified a need for libraries in schools on some of the most remote islands of Papua New Guinea.
Since then he has worked tirelessly to gather and deliver tens of thousands of books and educational resources to those schools.
Although born in Hungary, Harry grew up in London after his parents were “kicked out” of the country when he was four months old “because of the politics of the place”.
After completing university Harry spent two years working with Catholic missions in Africa – in Malawi and Zambia.
Once back in London he saw an advertisement for teachers in Papua New Guinea.
“I was lucky enough to get the job and flew out there in January ’78 then came to Australia in ’86 after marrying a Papuan,” Harry said.
He joked that Australia was the obvious choice as he doubted his wife would have stood a move back to London.
“It would have been the end of the marriage; she’d have never seen the sun,” he said.
It was during a trip back to Papua New Guinea in the mid-2000s for a family funeral that Harry discovered the dire needs of the remote schools.
“When my wife’s father died we went up for the funeral which was on an isolated island called Fergusson Island in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea and after the funeral I wandered down to the primary school that he had started many years ago and saw that the kids had absolutely nothing and they had no chance of realising their potential,” he said.
After asking the villagers of Galubwa how he could help them, Harry and his wife returned to Australia where they were contacted a year later, with the villagers requesting he send some library books.
That request resulted in Harry’s first book drive in 2007 and since then he has set-up dozens of libraries in remote PNG schools and supported them with many other resources.
Those resources have included computer equipment, stationery, sporting gear, furniture and uniforms.
His latest effort, a 25-cubic-metre container arriving at Watuluma Primary School on the north end of Goodenough Island at the end of June, has taken the number of schools helped to more than 70.
Harry said the project just grew.
He said anything that would be found in a primary school library in Australia would be excellent for the PNG schools.
“The medium of instruction is English,” he said.
“I now get donations from all over the country – from Bunbury, Western Australia, (to) Sale in Victoria.
“In Cairns itself we have 26 Catholic schools, most of whom have contributed to this and continue to contribute but then we have members of the general public and the state schools also help, so it just gets bigger.”
Harry said most of the book donations were secondhand and included fiction, non-fiction and sets of encyclopaedias.
He said most of the schools helped originally had no books and little resources.
“To give you an idea of just how disadvantaged these kids are, on the first day of the school year a teacher will come in with a pencil and break it three ways,” he said.
“Each kid gets a third of a pencil and they share one exercise book between three kids.
“So you only write in the exercise book every third day.”
This brings us to another one of Harry’s dreams.
He said Galubwa primary school had about 140 students from Years 1-8.
“I might add that many kids would like to go to school but in Papua New Guinea there is no such thing as a free education and many people can’t afford the school fees,” Harry said.
“So as an aside I raffle off $90 worth of meat trays amongst the staff every Friday (and) I raise $4000 a year, and this pays several hundred kids’ school fees.
“So in the case of Galubwa the student population has gone up to about 190 now, and we help other schools as well.”
Harry is fully aware the schools he is supporting also lack the physical amenities to house the libraries donated which brings us to yet another of his dreams.
“Most classrooms are bush material, ones that have to be rebuilt every eight years, so that’s (housing the libraries) a big problem,” he said.
“Because they (the books) become so valuable how do you ensure that they don’t then get stolen from these classrooms that can’t be locked up.
“We use patrol boxes and lock the books up in there and I’m also investigating kit sheds – buying a kit shed in Papua New Guinea that is lockable and putting it on a cement slab.”
Harry said he would love to see a deeper bond between Cairns diocesan Catholic schools and the Milne Bay Province schools that could be used to support such a project.
“I’d love the 26 schools from the Cairns diocese to adopt the schools in the Milne Bay Province and then we could actually go up there with small groups of kids, give them a village experience and put up a kit shed and then put the library books on shelves.
“I think our kids as well as those kids (in PNG) would profit from this.”
