Sunday 18th October

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Memorial Garden Henderson Field






Rove Prison front garden now


Another weekend gone by, I’m starting to resent weekends actually. Especially when I have no power or water, and the truck is having another of its fits and won’t start. Ok the truck I can cope with, it has been a constant run of crap repairs for the past 4 months so I can’t say it isn’t unexpected. Not having power really annoys me. I can’t run the laptop for more than a few hours on the battery, and I don’t think fast enough to get everything done in that time.

I’m still writing the VSA report, well, doing a lot of split screen copy/paste then write up thoughts and recommendations under the pasted stuff. I can see Steve and I having to write a whole new project plan and achievement indicators though. My original project is long gone, and it is now trying to establish a new nursery from scratch. Which is good, something I can do, but I hate the seemingly endless amount of paperwork that is also involved.

I was meant to be out at the site at Ranandi yesterday, the container we are going to use as an office was meant to be delivered, but the truck decided it didn’t feel like going anywhere, and I ran the battery flat trying to get it started. Even pushing it around the carpark here didn’t make any difference, it was having a real sulk. All I can hope is the container went onto the blocks we had set out for it.

Missed out on getting to the shops as well, I have enough stuff here to get by on for the week anyway, although I’ll need another 5kg bag of rice. The last one lasted 6 weeks, which is an improvement, I was going through 5kg in a month to start with. More varied diet now though, rice, spaghetti, kumara and cassava and more stir-fry than just rice with curry. Still not losing any weight though, which is more a reflection of how little I actually do all day while we are sorting out the mess we are in.

Keithie noticed the USP payment for last month in the accounts and wanted to know what it was for. It was for a 1 week course in Proposal Writing, which I sent Tiffany to. USP is the University of the South Pacific. Tiffany needed to go, Wills is not going to be available to us to write the Funding Proposals for the Aid Agencies for the rest of the year, and probably most of next year, and I don’t do PC Speak as it is required for the formats. Project descriptions, project costings yes, but the Funding Proposals have a specific writing style that as much as I would like to be able to write, tends to bring out the worst side of me.

Anyway, I have an argument with her booked for this week about it, as far as I’m concerned, it was something that Tiffany needed to do, she is going to be the one writing the Funding Applications up in the future. I’m not going to do it, on the basis that if I do it, it isn’t giving Tiffany any independence, and making her, and SEB dependent on advisors for everything. I’m here to advise, not take over, something Keithie and I have a bit of a difference over.

If you’ve read some of my earlier posts on funding and the formats you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, so much for Saturday, I got water from the raintank, and got the floors mopped, there is an incredible amount of dust comes in despite the fine mesh over all the windows, and all the dead cockroaches cleaned out again. I sprayed Friday night, all the cupboard edges, any cracks in the walls, under the fridge, around the stove etc, and had what looked like a 99% kill rate. I’d like to think I had 100%, but the bloody things just keep coming back.

My geckos are still here, 3 large ones now, and several small ones hanging off the ceiling and walls, 2 small ones live permanently in my bedroom, I’ve not seen them venture past the doorway but the ones in the rest of the house travel through most of the rooms. Lord knows what they find to survive on, I’ve always got hundreds of really tiny ants everywhere, that sting like a sharp hot needle if they get on you, so i guess the geckos don’t bother with them, and I’ve not seen a spider in here in 9 months. Unlike Komunimboko where bloody Huntsman spiders were everywhere.

I gave the truck a try this morning, and of course it started without any fuss, so I went into work and tried to post some bits and pieces, but Telekom were not co-operating. I got a few emails away, or at least I hope they went, I’ll resend them tomorrow morning just to be sure. I haven’t figured out why Skype works really well, but nothing else does. Messenger and YIM are patchy, and opening pages with either FireFox or IE7 can be an exercise in futility at times.

We had the Solomon Island Half Marathon this morning, there were 1,000 visitors in Honiara for it, so I figured that was some of the cause for the crappy internet service today, everyone trying to email out of here after the race. Normally Sunday is the best day for internet, everyone is at church, in the mornings, and the Government offices aren’t open.

As an aside to everything else, I do tend to keep blathering away about the way Government and Council are run here. Apart from the blatant corruption, the bribery, and sheer in your face theft, the other part is the total refusal to deal with things that may be troublesome. Last week Keithie hand delivered to the Mayors office a letter outlining what SEB are doing, and explaining that due to the lack of co-operation, support and expense involved, SEB will not be maintaining all the city parks and gardens in future. It was returned unopened to her office quicker than Keithie herself managed to get back. So now, unless we do what I suggest and have it published in the Star and Island Sun, the mayor can claim he knows nothing about SEB, and what we are doing, and was not informed about the city parks and gardens.

I’ve seen better behaviour from 5 year olds. And this is a Council and Government that calls it self pro-active in attracting business and investment.

Some of the letters in the Star lately have been funny though. There was one last week from someone in Honiara writing about Pacific Casino, just down the hill from me. Wondering why they don’t clean up the roadside outside the Hotel, and pick the rubbish up, cut the weeds, look after the flower beds etc. We used to do it, but as the owner refuses to pay the cost, I stopped the work crew from maintaining the area, well, I stopped all the unpaid work, Pacific Casino was just one of many places. There have been other letters with much the same focus, about other areas of town that we used to maintain, and asking why Council don’t contract SEB to do it, as it is obvious Council do not have the staff, time nor inclination.





I’ve given up with the new phone, I bought a $50 recharge card, but can’t even get the phone to connect so I can put more credit onto it. And I haven’t got a pin number for the phone which is probably not a help either. And that’s another bugbear with Telekom. The recharge cards are only valid for 6 weeks once you activate them, and they only come in 2 prices, $50 and $200, with no credit for any unused amount after 6 weeks. So if you’re like me, and never use the bloody things, it is a waste of $50 every month just to have it in case there is an emergency and Steve needs to contact me.