Just days prior to setting sail on their good will mission on 18 June 2009, Captain Andrew Cully, USN, the Commodore and Mission Commander for Pacific Partnership, participated in a DOD Bloggers Roundtable.
According to Pacific Partnership’s blog, “Pacific Partnership 2009 will deliver humanitarian civic action (hca) missions from USNS Richard E. Byrd, an underway replenishment ship, to the Oceanic nations of Kiribati, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tonga.” What a great opportunity to win even more hearts and minds around the globe.
Like Continuing Promise and the past three Pacific Partnership Missions, the Navy has wisely partnered with many non-governmental organizations. In response to my question about which NGO’s were participating on this important mission, Captain Cully had this to say:
We have Project Hope, they’re sending, roughly, four people. University of California, San Diego, Free Dental Society is sending several people. We have the World Vets organization. We have International Aid, which is a brand-new organization — (inaudible) — partnership. What they do is they partner with Dow Chemical, and they provide us the ability to provide water filters, we call them biosand filters. And we’re going to bring those in small numbers to the countries. This is a pilot project, part of future Pacific Partnerships. We have Rotary International who is primarily helping us on the ground.
And one other thing we’re doing differently from previous years — I won’t say too differently — but we added on a few other people to our list, the Loloma Foundation, Interplast, as well as the Shriners. And what they’re going to provide us the ability to do is we decided to take out a lot of the surgery capability on the mission because of the reduced scope of people. Now I have a venue in which to go back and get referral capability to them so when they roll in — for example, Loloma Foundation will roll in shortly after we leave the Solomons — they’ll be able to take our recommendations as far as people that need surgical procedures performed on them — (inaudible) — and be able to provide that information so those people will be seen as soon as they arrive. We did have a couple of people drop out, mainly due to huge commitments of USNS Comfort, as well as last-minute changes in platforms. But I’m very pleased that most of these organizations stayed with us and are intimately involved in the planning as well as the execution of this mission.
Oh, there’s one other one I forgot to mention. I don’t want to leave them out. There’s a brand-new one also to this Pacific Partnership. They come from the University of Virginia’s Center for Water, Health, Environment, and Development (WHEAD). And they’re going to send a couple of people out there to assist us as well.
And what is a good problem to have is so many NGOs that you can’t remember them all when asked on the spot. Captain Cully added one more in his closing remarks:
Before I end with a closing statement, I want to readdress the NGO because there’s one NGO, a very important one, I failed to mention that’s actually going to help us out in the Solomon Islands, and that’s the International Relief Teams. And they’ve been involved in all the planning conferences. And we really appreciate their support. So I’d hope that you wouldn’t leave them off.
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