Thursday May 5th

Thursday May 5^th

This morning I headed back to Zaguto to dig a hole for a composting pit toilet. We got to work fairly quickly, about ten of us, digging a six foot deep hole for a two roomed compost toilet. Unfortunately (from my perspective) however, the chiefs decided, when the hole was nearly complete, that it would be for a septic tank for a flush toilet. They were going to wait for funding from the provincial government to buy a toilet bowl, pipe and cement to seal the pit.

It was totally up to them what they decided to do but I couldn’t help feel that it wasn’t sanitation that they were after but all along they had just wanted to be like us white folk with nice looking stuff. A flush toilet looks nice but it is unachievable for most people in the community and it would provide no opportunity for people to get used to the idea of a compost toilet, to discover that it doesn’t smell, doesn’t make them sick and can be fairly easily built near any of their houses with the bare minimum of imported materials. In fact, given that it was built to accompany a guest-house fir tourists that was yet to be constructed, it probably wouldn’t contribute to sanitation in the village much at all. It therefore, seemed to me, to be a rather large waste of energy.

I get the feeling that these kinds of values underlie lots of community decisions in the area. Schooling for example, is there to educate children in the ways of the white world, not to provide skills and knowledge that will be beneficial to their future. Healthcare too, provides a means to distribute antibiotics to cure chest infections that result from pneumonia though doesn’t address the reasons why they so often get pneumonia – perhaps for example, because they burn all their plastic rubbish on cooking fires and their immune systems are weakened by lead poisoning from all the batteries that lie around the villages.

I don’t know what to do about this; I don’t even know if anything needs to be done. I just think that, with increasing fuel prices and rising sea-level, it can’t last and it won’t be beneficial for the community in the future. There aren’t however, the incentives to encourage them to put measures in place that will actually have future benefits (a safe and effective sanitation system for example). The threat of what is happening in Bougainville at present with an outbreak of cholera provides somewhat of an incentive, but that is distant in the minds of the people, despite only being a few islands away.

While sitting by the hole thinking of all this, I was however, struck by the strong community vibe. The age-range of our little group of workers was from about 14 to about 70 and they all talked, laughed and made jokes about the sizes of each other’s ***** . It was not like they were a big family (which many of them actually were) but like they were all friends. None of them ever took offence to anyone’s jokes and there were no arguments.

Surely, with this extraordinarily tight knit community, there is potential for more forward thinking about their community’s future. Perhaps what is needed is a little more information to provide more truthful incentives. Perhaps the focus of my work has been wrong all along. Or, on the other hand, perhaps they are totally contented – no one seems unhappy and there is very little arguing. Perhaps there are no incentives because things are actually great for their community. And perhaps it is me, coming from a community with plenty of problems of its own, who should be learning from them.

Even so, while I’m here I would really like to do something that will actually be helpful for the community that I’m living in. It was after all, the reason I came here. My prospects for doing so are however, looking as bleak as ever. At the end of today I was told that they didn’t need my help any further. This was not, I suspect, because they are all capable and keen to build their own toilets, otherwise they would have done so long ago. It seems that enthusiasm for sanitation simply fizzled out when I revealed that I wasn’t going to spend millions of dollars on installing an integrated sewage network for them. So with my services no longer required at Zaguto and my boss showing no sign of helping me to arrange a meeting with the chiefs as is his job, I am once again unemployed.