Saturday 22nd October: Home Time

Last week, I spoke to my supervisor from the volunteer organisation. He had had his ear to the ground and knew my situation well. Having pushed through the past 8 months, trying to work with several disorganised “organisations” and some of their most incompetent and self-serving staff, there was little more that I could do for the Kia community. “I think it’s about time you pack it in and go home,” he said. It was entirely up to me but I knew he was about right. Even so, I’ve spent the past few days since trying to figure out how to react to this turn of events.

Yesterday, after scrubbing the algae off the bottom of our boat, my fellow volunteer, Gary and I spent half an hour sitting in the sun on the boat and cruising around the coral heads. We then headed in and indulged in some of the fruit we had been given by friends who had called around to chat. Gary said, “you’d have to get your head checked to give up a life like this.”

On the one hand, the diving is so good and the people so friendly that I’m inclined to think he was quite right. On the other hand, my girlfriend is waiting at home for me and there’s no more work for me to do here so there’s really no great reason for me to stay.

It seems I’ll have to get my head checked either way. Next week, on October 27^th, I’m going home.


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Myself and the local gansters.

 

We dug a hole.




Successful spear-fishing.




Village clean-up.




From the dinner table.




Gymnastics.




Gary and I on my last morning in Kia.




The Airport from where I departed.



Saturday October 15th: Change

The last six weeks have been busy as I’ve been ignoring my partner organisation and following my own work plan. They’ve also been rather productive. I’ve coordinated a series of seven community meetings to raise awareness about waste management in different areas of the village, organised two village cleanup sessions, and taught touch rugby to some of the youth group who had never even seen a game of rugby before – the forward pass rule took a lot of getting used to. Over the past week or two, I’ve even heard a few comments about how tidy the village has been looking.

Whether any of this was worthwhile is impossible to say from here. It depends entirely on what happens from here on out. It would take less than a week to return the village to its pre-Thomas state if the locals were to revert to their previous methods of waste non-management. And even now, there’s a lot to be done to make the village tidy enough to attract tourists.

The hope of continued change rests with the locals themselves, particularly a small group of grandmothers from the mothers union and a few active members of the youth group who have been campaigning with me to tidy up the village. What they do when I’m gone will determine our collective success.

One activity in which we are yet to succeed is in getting any useful action out of the Kia House of Chiefs, and this point could be crucial. With a few words of encouragement from the chairman, effective waste management would be very achievable. However, he is renowned for not being active in anything that doesn’t involve consumption of food and beverages.

Whether or not the idea of waste-management sticks, working with the youth group and the mothers union was a success in itself as we have all learned a lot from the experience. And it has been a satisfying few months for me in any case. After having had my previous efforts largely stifled by my corrupted partner organisation, any change in the Kia community is a welcome change for me. Whatever the outcome, this past few months will be one small piece in the puzzle of development in Kia and I’ve enjoyed being part of it.

Friday September 23rd: Feast Up

In Kia there is a feast for everything. In fact, when I went to the House of Chiefs earlier in the month, my work was one of only two non-feast-related topics on the lengthy agenda. Admittedly, I was unthinkingly impressed by the level of organisation that they had achieved in this place where otherwise, government barely exists. It wasn’t until a few weeks later though, that I realised the less-inspiring objectives of Kia’s governance.

When Victoria Bako died, her life was honoured with two feasts in as many weeks. Twice, the chiefs gathered their young men and sent them out to gather fish and turtles and vegetables to offer as a shared token of appreciation for Mrs Bako’s achievements. Much was said, during the speeches at these feasts, of her role in establishing the Mothers Union in Isabel Province. And at the most recent feast, she was also thanked for her contribution to Conservation in the province. In fact, my superior made a speech to give thanks to the late Mrs Bako for initiating the project that eventually became the Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area. To Mrs Bako, we were told, we could be grateful for “twenty years conservation around Kia”.

This made me pause while chewing my turtle meat. It wasn’t that the turtle didn’t taste nice that made me pause; it was quiet delicious. It wasn’t either, that I didn’t appreciate Mrs Bako’s contribution to conservation; the community had surely come a long way since she had been borne. It wasn’t even the irony of talking about “successful conservation” while myself and several hundred others were tucking into the meat of a critically endangered species, though it did seem slightly humorous.

What really made me shudder was that I couldn’t believe that this fat little man, along with the fat little chiefs who had spoken before him, were really grateful to Mrs Bako at all. All she had done was complicate matters for them; this feast was a testament to their deceit, their stubborn resistance. The fifty year-old, endangered parrot fish, the numerous turtles, big and small, the hundreds of huge milk fish that had been netted during a spawning aggregation, all of this cooked and served up by a troop of hard-working women who would be grateful to have what was left when the men had been served – these were not tokens of appreciation, they were monuments of our collective defeat of Mrs Bako and her ideals of sustainability and female empowerment. The shells and scales of these creatures that were strewn about the dead reef out from the village were, in essence, tiny and not-so-tiny statues giving the fingers to Mrs Bako in her grave.

In reality, the purpose of these feasts was not to celebrate how great Mrs Bako was but to reinforce how good this family is. This feast would have to be bigger and better than the Eta’s family’s feast to celebrate the life of the late Chief Clement Eta next month. And this is the solemn truth of governance in Kia. There may be hundreds of unhealthy children, rampant alcoholism and domestic violence, and the whole village may be facing starvation within the next decade, but that is not the point. No solution to these issues would do anything to address the interests of those few men with power, and so, until we can change this, there is little to do but eat up.

Tuesday September 20th: What's wrong with MFAT in the Pacific?

A few weeks ago, WikiLeaks published a leaked email from a US diplomat in the Solomon Islands. It said that if RAMSI (the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands) pulled out of the Solomons, the country would erupt into chaos within a week. Given that stability and security are primary concerns for New Zealand in the Pacific region, this would suggest that something’s a bit off in our foreign affairs program. It might even suggest that the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent in the Solomons over the last decade have been largely wasted. So what the heck is going on with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and why are they failing so miserably?

The New Zealand government struggles to fulfil its foreign affairs objectives in the Pacific because they tend to focus too intently on their narrow objectives, so intently that they fail to fully appreciate the extent to which their concerns are dependent on wider social development; their enlightened self-interest just isn’t enlightened enough. Our government’s main foreign affairs objectives in the Pacific are, generally speaking, a) to facilitate economic opportunities for New Zealand companies, and b) to ensure regional stability so as to not threaten New Zealand investments in the Pacific and investor confidence in the home economy. They do recognise that there is a link between social development in the Pacific and these economic and security concerns, but social development is very much seen to be peripheral.  And I believe there are several reasons for this.

In one sense, this represents an unintelligent reaction on the part of the New Zealand government to the assumption that well developed civil societies in the Pacific don’t benefit, or might even threaten New Zealand’s interests in the Pacific. To put this another way, our senior foreign diplomats, MFAT officials, NZAid bureaucrats and so-on, either don’t see any benefit in Pacific countries having well organised village communities with small-scale commerce and informal but effective and autonomous local governance. Indeed they may even see this as a threat – well-organised and long-sited communities might not agree to host New Zealand mining companies on their land for example, preferring to maintain food security or do the mining themselves. In this sense, it is also a symptom of short-sighted orientation of MFAT whereby the long-term trade and security benefits are subordinated to immediate trade opportunities. This brings us to us to my second explanation of MFAT’s failure, a narrow interpretation of what exactly New Zealand’s interests in the Pacific are.

According to the MFAT position on New Zealand’s objectives in the Pacific – and I’m referring to their position as implied by their actions, not what is voiced by their public relations officials – our interests are: a) current and near-future trade opportunities for New Zealand firms, and b) current and near-future threats to regional stability that might impact on investments by NZ firms in the Pacific or even investments from foreign firms in New Zealand. What is not considered valuable in this schema is social stability and effectively functioning village communities. Development in these fields would undeniably yield sustainable social and economic development from within the developing nations of the Pacific, but not enough and not soon enough to be deemed worthwhile. This is so because New Zealand’s boarders are assumed to be selectively permeable to an unrealistic extent; we cannot expect to keep Pacific migrants out of New Zealand when we decide that it suits us, nor can we expect to prevent social problems in the Pacific from penetrating New Zealand society via already established Pacific migrant communities.

Part of the reason for this is lack of realism, I believe, is a cynical assumption on the part of New Zealand’s upper-middle-class, that they will be able to shield themselves and their children from this social instability that they have effectively perpetuated. And this may well be true, in part, if they/we are able to pursue privatised social services such as private education and healthcare, and avoid contributing to state funded social services by deconstructing the remnants of the welfare state. The points at which they fail to erect barriers to social responsibility, will however, always be areas of conflict. The worrying statistics for violent crime are merely one representation of this. This is where our short-sited, unintelligently self-interested policies in the Pacific turn around and bite us in the back-side. Should we enlighten our self-interest further, or should we privatise security services, construct gated communities and aim to turn Pacific asylum seekers around at the boarder?

Wednesday August 17th: The White Species

It was just after dark in Honiara and some of the men loitering about the road-side were getting their drunken stagger on. A few of them yelled my way and then smiled when I waved and said hello. “It’s dangerous in Honiara after dark,” so I had been told by an ex-pat friend when I arrived, “take a taxi”.

I said hi to some young, dangerous looking guys at the bus stop who smiled shyly and gave me the only seat on the next bus that turned up. I sat up front, next to the driver as he weaved in an out of cars, flooring it on the straights and often taking the centre lane on the two lane road.

“Hey man, iu savve wea nao Heritage?” I asked (do you know where the Heritage is?).

He laughed at this skinny white dude who spoke pijin, “Bae mi tellem iu taim iumi kasem” (I’ll tell you when we’re there). We spent the rest of the journey chatting about Honiara and when we got to the Heritage, the driver pulled up onto the foot path to let me out rather than making me walk back from the nearest bus stop.

For a multi-million dollar hotel resort, it was a rather uninviting spectacle – three guards patrolled the gate and the steel-beam perimeter fence was rimmed with razor wire – but once past the intimidating security and walking across the car-park I was welcomed by a grand marble entrance-way and big “traditional” carvings. It occurred to me, all of a sudden, that when they arrive here in their nice, new, NGO-stamped Land Rovers, the guests of this pretentious fort would find the security comforting, not confronting – a barrier to the common folk – and they wouldn’t enter on foot, certainly not at night.

I wandered inside and navigated my way to the poolside bar where I met my mate Peter, an AusAid worker and class-act. He introduced me to his friends, a collection of Save the Children and UNHCR workers wearing suspiciously expensive-looking clothing. They said hello and quickly got back to their banter.

“I think about two weeks is the maximum time I could spend in a village, out in the provinces.”

“I can do ten days but that’s about my limit”

Are they for real? I thought.

“Lets have a look at the barbeque menu!”

“Na, I don’t like eating meat that resembles any kind of animal.”

Oh, this is going to be a fun evening.

“I wanted to experience the middle-class culture in India because I wanted to see how normal Indians live.”

No, apparently she doesn’t realise that about half of India lives in dire poverty.

I’m no taxonomist, but I’m fairly certain that these wet fish were an entirely different species from the bus driver who I had chatted with on the way into town. There were no rips in there singlets they were carefully groomed and articulate but entirely self-absorbed; the complete antithesis of the man driving the bus.

“I didn’t enjoy that much,” Peter said to me on the way home, “they just take themselves a bit seriously.”

He was right, but it wasn’t simply that which bugged me. These people lived in a psychological apartheid where they considered themselves entirely distinct from the locals. To be among the local population – not simply to have to interact with them as house maids or subservient colleagues, but to actually live on their terms – was unfathomable unless escape was imminent; escape back to their nice gated houses with nice, white flat-mates and nice western things; escape to a place where they would not be challenged.

It wouldn’t be fair to summarise here, that ex-patriot aid workers are self-interested, patronising racists or even naive do-gooders. Certainly there are large proportions of each of the above among the ex-pat community here in Honiara. But my point is simply this: the aid fraternity spend too much of their time teaching and writing reports to their bosses in western capital cities. If this aid is to be at all worth-while, they might first take a little more time to learn from the people they purport to serve. That the people of the Solomon Islands are among the happiest in the world and that the major aid donor countries – Australia, New Zealand and Japan – have frighteningly high suicide rates, speaks volumes about the importance of this mutual exchange. And just maybe, if we understood them a little better, we would stop wasting so much money.

Greetings

Again, it has been a while since I last blogged. I've been a little busy in the village which has been nice for a change but has meant that I havn't been anywhere near internet access for a while. I'm now back in Honiara now though, making use of contact with the outside world for the week and running a few errands. I've also been doing a bit of observing while I've been here, of the expatriot community and aid industry so my next few blogs will be some opinion pieces from some of my observations. Unfortunately my camera has succumbed to the sea so these next few posts will be visually lacking but I hope they're interesting nonetheless.

Vehamo,
Thomas

Tuesday July 19th: Big Mamas Update 2

While I was lighting the fire to cook lunch today, two ladies turned up in a canoe. I recognised them as two from the Mothers Union group who had come to the Arnavons last month. They had apparently just come round to see how I was and have a chat, but when I mentioned my frustration with the Arnavons conservation area their eyes lit up and I could see that this was what they had really come for; this visit was politics, and I liked it.

The Mothers’ Union visit to the Arnavons had sparked a fire. At the time, I had suggested that they go home and talk sternly to their men about what they wanted to happen in the village. Not only had they done that, they had gone to the house of chiefs and laid out their intentions.

It seems that with the little presentations that Gary and I delivered to the Mothers' Union, we had stoked their maternal instincts and had lit a flame of passion for sustainability. They recognised the importance of the Arnavons project for food security and the future of their children, and they were keen to see the community benefit more directly from it. What’s more, they were as concerned as me about their representatives on the board of (mis)management; “the snakes”; “the octopus men”.

Kia Mothers' Union on tour at the Arnavons.

What they wanted firstly, was to know what was going on within the board of management so they could keep an eye on their representatives. Their second objective was more to the point – they wanted the existing board members replaced. They wanted to see females in positions of power throughout the community, and a position on the Arnavons board was within their sights.

These ladies were planning to do everything that I thought needed doing. They wanted money taken out of the equation of village politics; replaced with morals and family values. And best of all, they wanted to be the ones to do it, they weren’t asking anyone to do it for them. They had already attained the support of the House of Chiefs, they had written a request for education assistance to The World Fish Centre, and once this request had been granted, they had conducted their own campaign to spread this information around the community and raise awareness about sustainability issues; they were threatening to make me redundant, and I was quite fond of the idea.

For a visiting tourist’s take on all of this and some great photos, check out: http://unstucktravel.com/2011/07/18/the-nature-conservancy-arnavon-island-project-and-the-women-of-kia/

Saturday July 2nd: Big Mamas Update

Today I embarked on a walkabout on the logging track that leads away from Kia village. It was a great walk that took me up to one of the highest peaks around Kia. On the way back to the village I caught up with a pair of old ladies doddering along at an island pace, carrying kumera back from their garden. I walked alongside them and had a chat.

Logging: as environmentally friendly as Fonterra.

They were great company and really quite funny even though most of their jokes were directed at me and the general weirdness of white people. But what really struck me (with grim delight) was how forceful they were in their assertion that the local chiefs and politicians were generally corrupt, self-interested slobs.

View of the Pacific from the top.

They effectively reassured me that, although they may be rather suppressed, the complexities of traditional culture are still hanging about; wise elders are still alive and kicking. But this wisdom is of course, not to be found in chiefs’ meeting houses or provincial government departments or on conservation management boards; it is not resident in the institutions of high Solomon society; it is hauling bags of kumera along the road to the Kia village.

Friday July 1st (part 2): Culture

This afternoon at the wedding service, I sketched out the features of the cultural landscape in a bit more detail. It was fun by all accounts. My friend’s daughter had married a Polynesian man from one of the Solomons’ outer islands, and the blend of cultures provided an interesting display of cultural plumage.

The groom's family bearing gifts including a live pig.

Yes, there is still uniqueness to the cultural landscapes of the Solomons; it’s not a cultural wasteland. It’s more of a melting pot though, than the fruit salad that we profess to have served up in New Zealand. Some of the traditional beliefs have managed to hang in here while others have been outcompeted by the seeds of Christianity and Westernisation that have been sown here.

 I guess that this is, to some degree, the best that can be hoped for in terms of cultural evolution, that one culture would take the positive attributes of another, and incorporate them into its own. At least the Polynesian people had maintained some uniqueness and not been overwhelmed by their proximity to ‘Melanesia,’ and at least both cultures have not been bull-dozed by the machinery of globalisation.

The bride's family showing off their heritage.



On the other hand though, it became disgustingly clear to me as I watched a drunken man staggering around the ladies doing their traditional dancing, that this culture has not taken the best aspects from its neighbouring cultures. It has received the West’s vanity, and what is left of traditional culture is largely the arbitrary accessories.



The newly-weds.



I watched as people with cameras walked up to the front of the crowd as if the technology made them transparent, or perhaps just superior, and I thought how only the most basic of the traditional concepts have persisted – those of family and gender and hierarchy. The more complex concepts – conservation to strengthen family heritage, the leadership of elders and chiefs to ensure that wise decisions are made in the interests of the family, and so on – these have been swept away by the deluge from the West.

Now that even family unity and self-respect are under threat, sustainability and enlightened leadership don’t stand a chance. Culture has, to some extent, become an act for the sake of entertainment; no longer a lens through which to view the world.

Friday July 1st (part 1): Development

This morning I came back from the Arnavons to attend a wedding service of a friend’s daughter. When we arrived, the ceremony was just about to begin and I was asked to shuttle the groom and the groomsmen to the church in my boat.

It was amazing seeing all the boys dressed up in their black-and-whites, fake silk flowers pinned to their chest pockets, the reek of cologne overwhelming the smell of two-stoke oil. There was no electricity to power an iron so their clothes were wrinkled, and shoes obviously hadn’t been included in the suit hire so their scruffy work boots added some truth to the facade, but other than that they looked pretty impressive. The bride and bride’s maids looked spectacular too, though the brides maids all looked about twelve years old and they were all nervously smoking cigarettes.

It was, in context, an utterly absurd demonstration – the boys in their smart suits picking there way over the slippery coral rocks, up to the decaying church; the only building on flat land amongst the leaf houses and toilet huts built on sticks in the mud.



Kia's academic hub.



In its utter absurdity, this spectacle effectively summed up development in Kia for me – so many of the vain and arbitrary attributes of Western society implanted onto an entirely unrelated social landscape. So many good values could have been seeded here to help these people, instead the traditional values and practises had been cleared from the region to make room for others, none better or worse than the previous ones but all of them totally irrelevant to the local culture. Out with the traditional; in with the new and different and fascinating and destructive.

Ceremonies and dress are only the beginning; even traditional conservation values have been replaced with foreign ones that, being incompatible with the local culture, are failing miserably (as has been painfully evident in my work at the Arnavons). Governance too, where it was once at a local scale, has subordinated all of the meaningful social ties of kin-ship, to a new system, built in accordance with a line that a white man in London once drew on a map.



Kia school: there's no books, not enough class-rooms,
the whole area is eroding into the sea and that shed on
the left is the toilet.



All of this change, and in a decade or two when petrol prices climb out of reach of most Melanesians, they will have nothing meaningful to show for it – no effective sanitation, no sustainable healthcare systems, no better ideas of how to maintain food security, no fairer systems of governance, nothing.

It looks new and exciting to this generation, but from their grandchildren’s perspectives, what an incredible waste.



Thursday June 23rd: Uber-Keen Youth

Last weekend a boat turned up at the Arnavons, packed full with 15 people, three hours boat ride over open ocean from their destination, Kia, and with a broken-down outboard motor and not enough fuel for the rest of the journey.

It transpired that the SDA church had organised a youth health conference in Kia and that’s where they were heading. People from as far away as northern Choiseul Province (a two day boat ride away) were soon to follow. It was to be a four day affair led by a doctor who lectured on the most pressing health issues for young people in the Solomons.

I had a chance to say a few words too which was cool. I spoke to a crowd of about 100 people about water pollution, water borne diseases, toilets and rubbish disposal. It all went down pretty well and either everyone was interested or they were good at acting it.

It was cool to see positive things actually happening here for a change, notably not with the help of the Kia village chiefs and only on a small scale, but positive nonetheless.

Thursday June 2nd - Saturday June 4th: Big Mama Comes to the Party

Thursday 2^nd

Today two boat-fulls of mothers from the Kia Mothers’ Union arrived at the Arnavons along with their two supervising priests. When I say ‘boat-fulls’ I don’t mean that they filled the bench seats, they filled every inch of the boats and left the gunnels barely showing. They were keen alright; keen, excited and ruthlessly efficient in their preparation of a spectacular dinner on the night of their arrival.

‘Ruthlessly efficient’, now there’s a characteristic that I never thought I would ascribe to a Solomon Islander. But when I think about it, it’s not often that I see women sitting about chewing betel nut with the men in the village. Though I hadn’t realised it at the time, this was my first clue as to where the real action potential of the Solomon Islander’s lay.

Roaming.

Friday 3^rd

This morning we all walked around to the turtle nesting beach where we listened to Dickson, a conservation officer from Kia, talk to the ladies about the turtles and the work of the conservation area. As he explained how many eggs were in each nest, how many hatchlings would make it out to sea, and how many would live long enough to return and nest themselves, I chatted to the chairperson of the Mothers Union, Christina. She estimated that ten turtles were eaten in Kia each week, and commented that if each of the three adjoining communities did the same, that makes thirty dead turtles per week. Dickson explained that nest numbers were going down each year and it was obvious to the ladies that this reserve couldn’t sustain the turtle population with such intense harvesting – they were frustrated and inspired; worried and determined. This was successful conservation work in action, no poacher patrol needed.

Awaiting the hatchling run.

This evening, after stuffing our faces with crab and megapod eggs (a megapod is like a cross between a pukeko and a weka), we had a tok-tok on the beach and Gary and I delivered a presentation each. Gary spoke about the handover of the management of the project to the communities, an interesting prospect which got them excited but also fired up at how useless their current board of management representatives were. 

I delivered a little slide-show on my lap-top and spoke about issues with sickness, food availability and income in the village, and offered my thoughts on some possible solution. They were quietly reserved during my talk but afterwards we had a chat about their ideas and it all came out.



The issue of income was another interesting one. They didn’t seem to care much for increased wealth, what got them going was their men wasting money on beer. They also enjoyed hearing me say (the older ones especially) that I thought traditional foods were way better that those from the store – they had benefits for health, sustainability and savings. There wasn’t much that I could promise to do about these issues through the conservation but I told them to “talk-strong” to their men and then crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t incite a riot in the village.



Tree climbing isn't just for kids.



Saturday 4^th



The ladies went home this morning after releasing another nest of turtle hatchlings on the beach. It was great to have gotten some reassurance of energy and ambition from within the community. If we could get some of these ladies into positions of power in the community or even on the ACMCA board we could make some real progress. I couldn’t help thinking though, how impossible it all seemed given how low they stand on the village ladder. There was some hope though in their collective actions through the Mothers Union. Time will tell I guess.



Ready for the 2 hour trip on the open ocean - safe as houses.



May 31st: Smell Trouble?

Today I resolved to oust my bosses in an attempt to alter the power balance in the communities with whom I’m working. Bear with me and I’ll come back to this later.

Yesterday I arrived in the village of Cookson on the island of Wagina. The Wagina community is one of three partner communities in the Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area (ACMCA) for whom I’ve been working. It’s a relatively new community – the inhabitants arrived in the 1960s as refugees from the French and British nuclear testing on the Christmas Islands in Kiribati. Interestingly, the Wagina community is the main source of poachers at the Arnavons, and that’s where I come in.



Turtle soup.



No, I didn’t come here to crush skulls and threaten prospective poachers, though I am pretty tough. My job is to figure out how the conservation area might benefit the communities and then to make that happen so that they will hopefully value the conservation area and stop poaching. One might have thought that having a source population for fish and turtles – the main protein foods here – might count for some sort of benefit, but apparently that’s not the way it works. I’ll come back to this later too.

Today was to be one big day of story telling. I started with the nurse who told me about the health issues in the area, I then spoke to the police officer who made excuses for not attempting to stop poaching, then I chatted with one of the ACMCA management board representatives for Wagina who described his plans to implant a secret police post in the conservation area and use radar to detect approaching boats of potential poachers, and finally I went around to the houses of all the elders and social group representatives – those who were awake, anyway – and spoke to them about what they thought I might do to help the community.



Its not child labour, its just helping out.



While few of them actually knew what the ACMCA was, they were keen see the odd change in the community. The only idea that really took hold though, was the possibility of selling some local crafts to tourists at the Arnavons and the vague idea of getting tourists to visit Wagina itself. Armed with this understanding of local priorities, I put together some notes for a little talk that I was to give at the Big House this evening.

The meeting was scheduled for 7pm, though naturally, everyone else (only about 30 people) turned up late and we didn’t start the meeting until after dinner at about 9. Even then, it wasn’t until after I had finished speaking and we were chatting casually that people actually started asking questions about the issues at hand. What they were most concerned with was that they hadn’t heard much – if anything – about what the project was doing; there was simply no feedback from their representatives on the board of management. While this was disappointing to me, I was stoked that they too were outwardly disappointed – it takes a lot for a Solomon Islander to actually complain publicly about something. The overwhelming feeling was that they had had their fishing grounds confiscated, not to ensure food security as I’ve suggested that it might, but for a fun little project for some of their leaders who were on the board of management, hence the problem with poaching.



Schools out... at 11am.



By the end of the meeting I had a long list of things to do before I come back to Wagina next time. Although it’s not on the list, my most important task for the next few weeks will be to talk to various community leaders about the importance of having ACMCA board representatives (who are often appointed by the chiefs) be accountable to their communities.

Here I should note that (a) the communities aren’t altogether ecstatic about the performance of their board representatives and are unlikely to want them kept in the job, and (b) these representatives are essentially my bosses over here. Returning to my original point then: what this means, if I succeed is that I will, in effect be putting several of my bosses out of a job and paving the way for changes to the power balance in local community governance.

Wish me luck... And don’t tell my boss.



Sunset over the Cookson sea-shore.



May 27th: Changing Plans

My work here is starting to take a more defined shape so I thought I ought to give a little explanation of what I’m getting up to.

My Assignment

Prior to departure my assignment description said that I would be working firstly, in the Kia community doing waste management work on behalf of the nearby Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area (ACMCA), and secondly, assisting with the Sasakolo Conservation Area. Since then all of that has gone out the window; I’m still working with the ACMCA but my objective now is to work with all three of their partner communities to try to bring some benefits from the conservation area to the people.

Rodeo/data collection.

The ACMCA

The conservation area is managed by a board of management made up of:

• two representatives from each of the three partner communities (Kia, Wagina and Katupika),
• one representative from each of the two provinces that boarder the area (Isabel and Choisel),
• one from each of the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry of Fisheries,
• and one from a non-governmental organisation that I shall neglect to name here.

It sounds like an ideal system but there’s a lot to be done before the board starts working effectively. In essence, it is currently run by the conservation officers from the three communities. They man the conservation centre, collect data on turtle nesting daily and patrol for poachers. The major problems at present are poaching inside the conservation area, overharvesting outside the area and lack of funds due, in part to misspending.

Conservation officers, Lesley and Philip, and my fellow volunteer,
Gary measuring and tagging a young hawksbill turtle.

Poaching

One of the major contributing factors to poaching is the lack of feedback to or from the communities regarding the activities and management of the conservation area – no matter that it is supposedly a “community managed” project. Consequently there is very little respect for the conservation area and not much more for the idea of sustainable resource use. It’s not however, simply a problem of good governance structures; if community management is to succeed there needs to be an understanding within the board of management, of the idea of deliberative leadership. This is an unfamiliar concept in a culture where leadership has traditionally been a one-way, chiefs-to-communities process.

With a bit of luck, I’ll be chatting to people in the communities and in the conservation area and trying to resolve some of these issues. It looks like I have my work cut out for me. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

May 20th: Spearing update

Its been a busy few weeks in the islands and I’ve been getting into some actual work... No, really, I have. Needless to say though, I’ve been making use of my time off all-the-same. We’ve been having trouble with the solar power here at the Arnavons but have just received a new generator so I’ll get some more blogs up soon.

Time off...
A Spanish mackeral that I speared near the house at Kia.

Sunday May 8th: Professional spear-fisher

My lack of progress with anything that might be considered useful has been demoralising to say the least. Nonetheless I have been making the most of the experience with a bit of recreation. My shoulders aren’t up to anything too stern as I only had my right one operated on last December, and there’s no public land on which I might be able to go tramping, so what better recreation than lulling about in the water for an hour or so each day. It gives me a good excuse to go exploring and keeps Gary and I fed.

At first I was diving right off the deck of the house and spearing what-ever swam my way; mostly travelly and sweet-lips (a relative of NZ’s moki). I was also spending a bit of time hunting mangrove fish out the back out the house but I’ve decided that I might be a little too tempting a treat for the resident crocodiles. More recently though, I’ve been embarking on expeditions in the dug-out canoe to other reefs inside the lagoon and have had some great success.

To add to the experience, I’ve treated myself to a new spear-gun which Gary brought back from New Zealand when he returned from his holiday last week. Its a 1.3m murdering machine with two rubbers and a super sharp tip. I’m now limited only be my lung capacity (I’m staying down for over two minutes) and how well I can hold on if I shoot a monster.

I’m yet to haul in anything monstrous but I’ve shot a few fish that have been too big for myself and Gary to eat. On such occasions I pass them on to appreciative locals with big families to feed. With a little luck, it’s only a matter of time before I shoot something worthy of a village feast. Hopefully by then I’ll have actually got myself into some real work. If not, I’d say my shoulders should be strong enough to put my surfboard to good use, so either way I won’t be complaining.

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.

Monday April 25th: Going Native

At the moment I have been living alone for a few weeks while Gary is back in NZ on holiday. I didn’t think much of it at first but it has occurred to me that it’s a rather unique situation. As an Auzzie tourists who I met remarked, “mate, that’s pretty full-on”.

It is pretty full-on. I am literally the only inhabitant of a very small island in a super poor developing country; I am living in a leaf-roofed and bamboo-walled house that sits about 20cm above a high tide; I live off the fish that I catch, the crackers, peanut butter and rice I buy from the little store in the nearby village, and the Kumera that the store owner sometime gives me for free; I have no access to any market to buy vegetables and very little space to grow my own; and if I get sick I know that there are more medical supplies in my little first-aid kit than in the local health clinic. In fact, I got a distinct impression of my adverse situation when, while talking to the nurse about public health, I was shown where the health clinic’s septic tank leaks and the spillage flows around the front in the open drain over which I had jumped on my way inside.

What makes it even more dire here is the social situation. Kia is a rapidly growing little village that is spreading around the coast and is congested and disorganised throughout. The centre of the village is cramped and there is a severe shortage of land around the village that might be suitable for gardening. This places some formidable stresses on families: there is continual conflict within and between families over logging rights, binge drinking is the norm for many men, and young adults (guys my age) seem to have such a low position in the social hierarchy that they scarcely bother talking in public. This has made it quite a challenge for me. As a white guy who lives alone on a small island, it requires quite an effort to meet people. It’s not like I can wander round to my neighbour’s place for a chat. To make this worse, the stalling with work has meant that I have spent day upon day, waiting to get started or for the next meeting, hanging about the house or diving in the lagoon. It’s not just me too. It seems to be common for people from one end of the village to have never heard of people from the other end. There’s no reason for one to go to the other end of the village and, with no central communal area to hang out and meet people, even in this village of about 1000 people, many people would never get the chance to meet.

Traditional dancing at Easter celebrations.

On the other hand, despite this adversity, it hasn’t actually been that hard. Not yet anyway. Work is slowly starting to happen and I have enough friends that there is always someone to chat to on any given day. And if the social pressures on the community look overwhelming, I only have to walk down the footpath (there’s only one in town) just after primary school finishes to see that it’s certainly not all depressing; kids have an amazing and infectious capacity to be happy.

So when I really think about it, it is challenging but it’s not a hopeless situation. It’s “full-on” alright, but that only amounts to it being different from home. Ask me how it’s going in another few months though, and it might be a completely different kettle of tropical fish.