Thursday 27th August

Further to yesterdays bit about the Governor Generals Staff. I’ve said before in here about the way any form of certification is taken seriously here, I didn’t mention that both newspapers covered the awards, and it will be in tomorrows papers. I keep thinking about the TOPS courses I ran in New Zealand, and the attitudes of the people that were meant to be attending, but couldn’t be bothered. All most of them saw the courses as were something that stopped them from hanging out around Tokoroa, smoking dope, and just in general being useless members of society. There were a few in each course who did take the opportunity, and really used the courses to improve themselves, but they were really in a minority.

Here it’s the other way around, even the kids for whom school doesn’t really work well, still go to other courses to learn something. And everyone makes the most of any opportunity to learn. People actually make notes while you’re talking or demonstrating something, and come up afterwards to clarify things that they may have mis-heard or didn’t quite understand. It’s a brilliant place to teach, and knowing that everyone on a course intends to use any skills or knowledge to go further makes it worthwhile.
I thought I’d seen everything till this afternoon. I know that is a fairly wide ranging statement to make, but there’s nothing much really surprises me anymore. We had a truck pull into the parking area by the river bridge, I was in the office and heard a loud squealing. I knew it was a pigpig, but didn’t think much of it. I wandered out and over to the river and found a guy with a 2 month old bush pigpig taking it for a walk along the stream in the mud. On a lead as well. He’d caught it last month in the bush behind Honiara and kept it to fatten up. In the meantime, if he doesn’t take it for a swim every day it creates havoc at his place squealing and charging around.

He must have a bit of a zoo at home, he’s bringing a couple of salt water crocodiles down tomorrow for a swim, only small, about 4’ long. He says he has them trained to come when he calls. I’m a bit sceptic about that, I think they are just getting him trained so that when they are big enough they’ll have him for lunch. I’ve got a few pics of the pigpig, and hopefully I’ll have pics of the crocodiles as well tomorrow. It’s going to be an interesting Friday, with the usual Zoo Day for the teenagers, and a couple of crocodiles swimming in the swimming holes.

Other than that bit of excitement the day went as usual. The painters are still working on the building, we still don’t know what is happening with the Gardens, but we’re still in the office. All we’re doing now is just managing from one month to the next till we get some more contracts agreed. SolBrew have agreed to take the Town Ground Roundabout, so there is another $1,000 a month coming in from next month.. We just break even on that, but it’s better than before when we were maintaining it and getting nothing back. Central Police Station have decided to get their own gardener to maintain the outside gardens, Tiffany and I both feel it will only be a couple of months till they come back and ask us to take them over. We know the gardener there, I’d say he was a lazy useless git, but that would be insulting any other lazy gits. He’s lost all the tools they started with, well lost isn’t right, he knows where he’s sold them would be better. Plus he has a bad habit of breaking machinery so he doesn’t have to use it, lawn mowers, line trimmers etc. He worked for SEB for a few months last year until they got rid of him for damaging all the equipment.

NPF Plaza Gardens got a good work over this week. I’m hopeful that the tidy appearance will make the other shop block owners think, but I’m not holding my breath over it. Tiffany is doing a letter to take to the shops around the central garden by the chemists, but we both doubt that they will pay anything. It’s all new Chinese in the shops there, and they don’t get involved in anything outside their shop.

It’s past being a joke there now. I was past it today, and there are rats brazenly wandering through the rubbish bags and food scraps there now. In the daytime, with everyone walking past. Good fat rats too, plenty of meat on them, but I guess everyone is too well fed to be catching them. And the dogs wandering through town give them a miss as well, I think the rats would be an even match for the dogs here.