I got up early and, once the rain stopped and the thunder died away, I embarked on a mission up the river beside town to find the much-talked-about waterfall. At the bottom of the canyon I came to the village of the local customary land-holders. After paying a custom fee of SI$60 (about NZ$12), one of the local boys, Kaspa, led me off up the hill.
T’was a treacherous climb. The path wove between old fox-holes left from the Japanese in WWII and was dotted with the occasional snake. Once over the ridge we descended through dense, slippery rainforest into a limestone canyon and were greeted at the bottom by the thundering of a series of waterfalls. It was a pretty remarkable scene. The water tumbled in a series of drops, off a high mound and down into a deep canyon full of tree trunks, much like any tight river gorge on the NZ’s West Coast.
Kaspa and I climbed and swam up around the waterfalls and checked out the caves at the top, during which time I had a bit of a chance to yarn to him about his life and work. It was my first real encounter with the type of community-run tourism that I am to work with for the rest of the year. He said that he thought he was about thirty years old and he had just finished schooling and mechanical apprenticeship last year. While looking for work since November, he had spent his time looking after his parents, nephews and nieces, and taking tourists to the waterfall. It was his only source of income as his family couldn’t farm their land since it had been sprayed by the Allied Forces to remove the forest cover in WWII and for the most part, nothing but a tough, persistent grass had been able to grow there since. He hoped that his brother would come back from Brisbane when he finished his engineering degree so that he could help to support the family. This however, seemed unlikely as work for any local professional is hard to come by in the Solomons.
It seemed odd to me that work was so hard to come by, especially given that there was sufficient money floating about to entice swarms of Aussies working in the mining industry and dozens of Korean fishing boats into the country as well as extensive logging operations in the provinces. As it turns out though, those people are mostly working for foreign companies on contracts that aren’t particularly accessible to the locals. So for Kaspa, tourism was the only lifeline for himself and his family.
This reminded me of my upcoming work in Kia and gave me a fresh perspective on why this kind of work is so important. The people with whom I’m working aren’t looking for an extra dollar for some nice shoes or a new car, they’re happy to settle for rice. Kaspa was worried though (and I share his uncertainty), that the kind of economic growth that he could see in the Solomons wasn’t actually worthwhile for him and his people. The kind of economic growth that the Solomons has at the moment does nothing of the sort for the vast majority of its people (though perhaps the Malaysian logging crews, Korean tuna fishers and Australian gold miners are a bit better off).
What Kaspa hoped for was the chance for his people to make their own development so that they could begin to see some of the benefits of the developed world – they could go to a doctor when they were sick and his nephews and nieces could go to school. I can see ways to pursue this kind of development which leaves local communities in a better position to cope with future challenges. With a bit of luck this might be possible for some of the people who I’m over here to help. For most people here though, economic development only means more sucking dry of the country's resources and more corruption by its politicians.
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