Friday 5th June

Kennedy and Tiffany
Shirelyta giving forth fo rthe TV News

SEB Work Crew World Environment Day March

WED Parade Mendana Ave

It’s World Environment Day. We had a street parade through Honiara, up to the Cultural Park opposite the Solomon Island Bank. Mix of music, the obligatory speeches from the politicians about “Climate Change” and how we can prevent it happening. I keep thinking of King Canute whenever I hear that. Although all he was doing was proving to his courtiers that the King was not omnipotent, and he could not control the sea or nature. It would be nice if the present bunch of scaremongerers would realise it as well.

The music was good, started with a bit of Island style gospel, well, sort of like gospel singing, then the reggae boys came on and it improved considerably. Very heavy on the Bob Marley RIP, and a bit of homegrown music. Most of the work crew stayed on for the day, listening to the music in the sunshine.

Caught up with Keithie there, she’s confident Honiara Council will back and support us more now. There is a new Mayor and Town Clerk who are easier to work with, so we may get more work, and funding from them for the work we do on their behalf through town. Add in the training as well, and it looks like Forestry jumped a bit too soon.

The local tv crew were there, trying to get me in front of the camera talking about environment issues, climate change CO2 etc, but I managed to keep away. I’d probably say everything they didn’t want to hear. Shirelyta had a bit of a say though, the trouble they had wasn’t in getting her to talk, it was more trying to get her to stop.

Kennedy was there, the tourism office is happy with having a statue by him there, but as usual, it comes down to price. We’ll keep working on it. I really want more art work around town, but it’s going to always be a risk at the moment till people start to appreciate stuff more.

Someone drove through the ANZ roundabout last night, not too badly, well, the driving was atrocious, but the damage wasn’t too bad, just a few plants around the edge. And only one of our stake sets in the bougainvillea has been damaged so far, which is better than I expected. I didn’t think they’d last one night, but we still have the weekend to go yet. If they last this weekend, they should be there for a while.

I finally told David today about the Forestry ultimatum, we’ve put off telling him until we had some good news to go with it. Now it appears we won’t be evicted, I took him over by the river to our toktok seat, under the breadfruit tree on the riverbank and gave him a copy of the letter from Forestry. I let him read it, then said we have good news as well, and we have Council backing us finally. He’s very upset over it all, he’s been working for SEB for 7 years now, and really tries to do his best for Honiara, and making the town look good with the parks and gardens. In a way he’s pleased about it, it gives him a reason for letting the 2 night security guys go, they do a good job, but spend too much time with Robert the Forestry employee who lives next to the nursery, feeding him stuff about what we’re doing, and believing the rubbish Robert tells them about what SEB are doing.

I’ll be pleased when things settle down, it’s been one crisis after another since I’ve been here, not major ones like this till now but stuff that suddenly comes up and disrupts everything for a week or so.

One more week, then another weekend on Savo.