Global Opportunties: Where is God Sending you?

NZCMS has rela­tion­ships all over the world and we are con­stantly looking for those who feel a call from God into global mis­sions. However, we have recently been made aware of the fol­low­ing urgent requests for skilled people to fill the fol­low­ing oppor­tun­it­ies. If neither of these fits in with where and what God is calling you too, please get in touch with us. We would love to shout you a coffee and begin those conversations. 

Opportunities in Papua New Guinea 

Anglican Church of PNG

The Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea is bring­ing together exist­ing and new edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions to form a new Insti­tute of Higher Edu­ca­tion in Oro Province (Popondetta). Expres­sions of interest are invited for the Pos­i­tion of Prin­cipal.  The suc­cess­ful applic­ant will have at least Masters Degree level qual­i­fic­a­tions in one of the dis­cip­lines of the Institute:

• Teach­ing
• Nursing
• Theo­logy

The Prin­cipal shall be a member of the Anglican Church of PNG or a church in com­mu­nion with the Anglican Church of PNG. The suc­cess­ful applic­ant will be exper­i­enced working in the high edu­ca­tion sector, prefer­ably in lead­er­ship and administration.

The Prin­cipal shall be the Chief Exec­ut­ive Officer of the Insti­tute and head of staff, giving effect to Council decisions and ensur­ing its effi­cient in accord­ance with policies, pro­ced­ures and budget para­met­ers estab­lished by the Council and guidelines or dir­ect­ives from the Depart­ment of Higher Edu­ca­tion, Research, Science and Tech­no­logy. He or she shall work to build the profile of the insti­tute within the com­munity and estab­lish­ing strength­en­ing rela­tion­ships with busi­ness and industry rep­res­ent­at­ives, as well as national and over­seas partners.

Salary and con­di­tions of employ­ment are subject to negotiation.
Expres­sions of interest should be dir­ec­ted to:
The Rt Revd Dr Jeffrey Driver (jeffrey.william.driver@gmail.com).

Gulf Christian Services 

Loc­a­tion of job:  Kapuna Life School, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Timing of the job: January 2024 — Decem­ber 2024 and hope­fully extend for a longer term
Dur­a­tion of the job: At least one school year

Intro­duc­tion:

The Kapuna Life School has grown in the last 20 years from a group of twenty kids to a school with five classrooms and teach­ers, teach­ing almost 100 stu­dents. Many more fam­il­ies would like to send their chil­dren to the Kapuna Life school, espe­cially to high­school, since there are not many altern­at­ives for our teen­agers to go to. We need trained teach­ers, to teach our kids.

Respons­ib­il­it­ies

As a teacher in the Kapuna Life School you will be respons­ible for:
Teach­ing one Grade for one year
Super­vising teacher interns
Optional: Take part in setting up Early Child­hood Teacher Train­ing School

Who we are looking for

We are looking for a primary school teacher. For this job we need a Chris­tian, pro­fi­cient in English and willing to adapt to the PNG culture. In order to live and enjoy life in this remote place, it would be good if you are flex­ible and able to cope with dif­fer­ent living con­di­tions. Other than that we are hoping that you are a com­mit­ted Chris­tian who is open to have fel­low­ship with our community.

What we can offer

If you want to take this unique oppor­tun­ity to be a teacher in a remote and very needy place of the world, you will not regret it. You will make a great dif­fer­ence to the lives of Kapuna’s chil­dren and their future. Kapuna is a beau­ti­ful village in the dense bush of PNG with only water­ways and air­strips in the vicin­ity to make travel arrange­ments. We will make sure you enjoy your stay and can offer the following:

- Visa arrangements
— Accommodation
— Travel Port Moresby — Kapuna
— Volun­teer allow­ance of 700 kina per fort­night for those with Teach­ing certificate

Applic­a­tion is a joint process with NZCMS and GCS. Email: admin@nzcms.org.nz

Volunteer Job description: Grow Space

Word of Life (WOL) and SEAN have used GrowSpace to publish TEE* courses Come Follow Me and Abund­ant Life in a digital, secure, mul­ti­lin­gual, inter­act­ive format for group and 1–2‑1 dis­ciple­ship. It is the only online courses plat­form designed spe­cific­ally for TEE courses, and works on all device-types through the browser and as a web-app.
• GrowSpace rein­forces the prin­ciples of TEE learning
• Works on phones, com­puters, and tablets of all types
• Designed for secur­ity: includ­ing an optional ‘game front’ to hide the learn­ing platform
• Invitation-only
• Works for all scripts and lan­guages includ­ing right-to-left, char­ac­ters etc.
• Fully trans­lat­able User Interface
• Requires stu­dents to engage and answer ques­tions before moving on
• Offline func­tion­al­ity for com­plet­ing lessons with limited/patchy internet
• Replaces printed books, so reduces running cost of TEE courses
• In-app mes­saging feature
• Can embed video and audio

This app is being used world­wide, in tra­di­tional TEE pro­grams, by mission workers, as well as in the dia­spora and among refugees, espe­cially where access to printed books is limited. It is stra­tegic­ally and flex­ibly designed for context, includ­ing lan­guage, offline and secur­ity fea­tures needed for use in high secur­ity Muslim world settings.
*For further intro­duc­tion to TEE see: https://www.increaseassociation.org/what-is-tee

How can volun­teers help?
GrowSpace is cur­rently hosted and run by Word of Life, a registered UK charity. Because of the nature of our users who are often based in low-income coun­tries, the plat­form is not cur­rently self-suf­fi­cient and we often give sub­sid­ised or free access to the courses.

Volun­teers can join our GrowSpace team and will help improve the sus­tain­ab­il­ity and longev­ity of the GrowSpace project. It will also help provide a wider base of people with a working know­ledge of the code, giving us greater tech­nical secur­ity. Volun­teer pro­gram­mers giving small amounts of time, reg­u­larly will help us to improve the user’s exper­i­ence on the plat­form, create new fea­tures and enable us to reach more people world­wide with these great course materials.

GrowSpace Tech­nical Description:
• Growspace is a custom-built Learn­ing Man­age­ment System (LMS) created for TEE* courses to be made more access­ible in secur­ity con­scious locations.
• The front end of the app is built using React and Mater­ial UI components.
• Some Redux is used for state man­age­ment, but mostly Context com­pon­ents are used through­out the site.
• Fire­base is used for author­iz­a­tion, data­base, file storage and API end­points (via cloud functions)
• The 2 systems coupled together allow the app to run as a Pro­gress­ive Web App (PWA) com­pletely offline once the user has synced their data with the app.
IT skills necessary
• Must haves: JS, CSS, HTML, ReactJS, ability to work with an exist­ing, large code base
• Good to haves: Firebase
• Nice to haves: Redux, Redux Sagas, PWA

Require­ment for Volunteers:

Volun­teers should be con­fid­ent users of the neces­sary must have tech­no­lo­gies as listed above. The role is largely ticket based with little hands-on super­vi­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, we are not able to train new or inex­per­i­enced developers.

Volun­teers will use their own com­puters and are required to com­mu­nic­ate via Zoom and Slack with the GrowSpace Manager and Developer Lead.
Volun­teers should commit to a minimum of 8 hours a month over a period of at least a year, to allow time for them to under­stand the code base and be able to make a useful con­tri­bu­tion, and to make worth­while the set-up time and invest­ment from our side. Those with more time than this would be welcome!

To enquire about this vol­un­tary role please contact Jenni: Jenni@word.org.uk with your CV and a short descrip­tion of why you are inter­ested to volun­teer with WOL.