Saturday 7th November

It’s 3.30am, we’ve got rain, thunder, lightning, all together finally. The thunder started waking me about midnight, low growls and rumbles in the distance, a bit like a pallet lifter going over a wooden floor, then getting closer till about an hour ago it felt like the house was being hit by a shockwave. The thunder has moved on into the distance again but the rain is now persisting down. And it’s cooler and the air hasn’t got that heavy damp, cloying feeling to it.

Soon it will be the dry days that are the rarity, the usual rainfall on this side of Guadacanal is 12 feet (3.5m) per year, we’ve had maybe 2 foot of it since the dry started, so another 10 foot to come before the end of March. Along with the flooding, the washouts, bridges lost, and maybe an earthquake or two just for fun.

Being Saturday, and I’m still here I guess the world didn’t end yesterday like the idiot w******s running around crying at the 350 World day were claiming. It was all big posters through Honiara the last week, 5 Days to save the World, 4 days/3 Days. HG Wells would have been impressed, all he managed was to frighten the Americans with a radio broadcast, Al Save the Polar Bears Gore has got the entire world running around like Chicken Little. I saw another report, (do they ever put out anything other than reports) now saying that 550 ppm CO2 is inevitable, and mankind and the planet are doomed. All based on computer projections that rely on whatever is feed in. Until one of their hypothesis is proven, and there’s only 4 really, all I can say is it is a load of total bloody garbage. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons still doesn’t make the reasons right. Yes we do need to cut down on the pollution, the waste of resources, but beggaring the western world and sending everyone back to some eco-sustainable living in the woods conversing with the furry little animals isn’t the way to do it.

All the schoolkids here are totally brainwashed about AGW, every tree that falls is one more proof of global warming, the slowly declining fish stocks, the rain, the potholes in the roads, I’m just waiting for the rubbish in the streets to be blamed on AGW as well.

Having Korea, Japan and China run through the seas around the Solomons with giant seine nets scooping up every fish available, stripping the coral reefs of everything and selling it illegally to the Koreans, using dynamite and cyanide to catch fish with, none of those things contribute, it’s all AGW.

I really have to stop writing this at this time in the morning, the part of my brain that usually censors everything is away on holiday or still asleep.

My house is all totally cleaned up again, well, ok, maybe not again, finally, first time since I got here then for the pedants out there. One of the neighbours trees has had a few branches draped over my roof, and the termites decided to travel up the tree and use it as a bridge to my house. They build quite large tunnels on the outside of the tree trunks as super highways, so I had the guys with the spray, the bushknives, saws around yesterday, spraying inside and outside the house, cutting branches, trees down and ripping half the guttering off the side as the branches fell.

I’ll have the guttering repaired hopefully next week, the spray smell is still lingering, and I can’t put anything back into the cupboards for 24 hours minimum, till the fumes dissipate. Everything is stacked neatly? Well, stacked in a heap, in the centre of the floor at the moment, food, cutlery, pots wok, dishes, till later today. It’s good though, I found I had more curry powder than I thought, and a bag of sugar I never remembered surfaced, and the cassava root that was hiding in the corner of the cupboard where I couldn’t see it trying to sprout is now gone.

And I counted 15 dead cockroaches so far in a quick look around, no doubt I’ll get more as the weekend progresses. I hope the spray didn’t affect the geckos, but I can’t see any at the moment, hopeful anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Davids attitude at times with everything. He told me a while back about what has been happening with advisors here, ok, they have been Australians till now, but he said they come, change everything, then when they go it goes back to how it was before. It’s been in the back of my mind since then, and I’ve been quietly and slowly coming to the realisation that while he may be a good motivator for the work crew, he’s not really interested in changing anything. Which makes it harder for me to find that balanced path between what Keithie wants, what I know is possible, and what the work crew can do.

I can see what Keithie wants, and I agree with her about it, I don’t agree with her methods, so I’m trying to get things done in a way that works here. If David is going to be pleasantly obstinate and obstructive, I’m going to stop being the buffer between them and Keithie, and things will not be pleasant. I’m trying to put permanent methods in place that will work, and give Keithie the results she wants, and also improve the work crews abilities, it’s a bit of an uphill battle, but God loves a trier. Well ok, He hasn’t shown me much sympathy yet, but I’ll get His attention one day.

It may come to telling David either accept some change, or if not, then perhaps he should consider going back to SICHE and finishing his Seamans Certification. Having Tiffany and David as CEO and Supervisor is probably not the best thing here, although Rennel/Bellona is more Polynesian that the rest of the Solomons, that patriarchal attitude is there, so being Tiffs husband would make taking orders/instructions from her that little bit awkward for him. Add in his “I don’t want to get involved in management decisions” attitude, and his reaction when he finds out what Tiff and I have been dealing with for months that he hasn’t wanted to know about, it is going to be an interesting time. Not that everything so far hasn’t been.

I finally got all of Andrews paperwork, now I have less than 20 working days to get Aid Funding approved for them to go to NZ for the Polytech Course, and get them enrolled by the end of November. No-one here seems to realise that things sometimes run at someone else’s pace, it is always smiles and a “oh sori, no wariwari, mifala bring tomoro” and then I get stressed out trying to get it all done so they can get the benefits.

And of course if I don’t get it done, it will be “oh hemi whitefala, hemi makem bigfala promis but hemi no deliver nomoa”, and not a thought that perhaps if they had bought all the paperwork in 3 weeks ago as requested it might have been different?