Monday 12th April

Tiff arrived at work looking the worse for wear. We’re still chasing her visa for Brisbane, I can’t see it happening now, well certainly not this Wednesday. Add in that she has another bout of malaria, and it isn’t looking possible. I know all the pros and cons of DDT, but given that cats have wiped out 23 different species of mammals, reptiles and birds on Guadacanal in the last 50 years, I’d be more than happy to wipe out the bloody mosquitos with a few doses of DDT. Plus kill every cat on all the islands here as well.

The Ant Spray men came around Monday morning and left a heap of what looks like shot grit for sandblasting under the corner of my house, and a sign stapled to the house about it being Wild Dog Poison, and to ring them once I see any dead dogs. It doesn’t look like something that animals would eat, but I guess I’m wrong, there are 3 dead dogs within sight of the kitchen window, and one up on the top of the rise by the rubbish bins. As I said I’m of mixed emotions about it, but I’d rather have my steps and ground area without fleas, and no smell on the steps from the dogs. What we could do with is a huge effort to have every male dog in Honiara castrated, just to stop the ceaseless breeding that happens. One of the bitches that I presume has now died, has had 3 litters of pups in the past year, all of which have died from starvation, neglect, or being hit by cars. They aren’t treated as pets as you think of in NZ/Australia/USA etc, just another animal to be maltreated.

It’s mango season again, the second crop, so the ground is littered with fruit that the fruit bats have taken a bite out of and dropped onto the ground. We now have fermenting mangoes everywhere, and the same as last year, it can get a bit overpowering with the heat and humidity. It’s almost like a distillery, but add in a heavy vegetation decomposing smell as well.

I didn’t know about the earthquake till I found something online today, well, I knew we’d had one, I got shaken out of bed by it, but where, how big and how long weren’t questions I had answers for. About 210 km south east of Guadacanal, I don’t know if it made a wave onto the Weather Coast, we won’t know for a day or so until news gets back from there. Samesame with any damage reports, it can take a while for information to travel here. It was originally rated 7.1, then downgraded to 6.8 later.
I’m still waiting for the big one that will hit Honiara one day again. As I’ve mentioned, the hills behind Honiara are coral reef, and it wasn’t from sea levels dropping that they got there. Well maybe, but the sea would have had to have dropped more than a few hundred metres to give the effect.

SIWA are back in the newspaper, this time over lack of water to #9, the main hospital. You keep hoping that you never need to go there, or if you do, it is for something really minor like a broken arm or leg, and you can walk away as soon as possible. There has been a huge amount of Donor money given this year to upgrade #9, but as it went to the politicians, not the Hospital Admin, it is moot as to how much will be spent on upgrading, and how much will go for 4wd vehicles for the wantok. It really is depressing seeing all the money that gets stolen here, or perhaps diverted is a more politically correct term. And everyone treats it as something normal, as long as the MPs spread money around their wantok, everything is settled, and we are left with no health facilities, no water/sewage/electricity systems, a dysfunctional city that even Patrician Vetenari would have trouble managing.

Still we’re getting more and more organised with the nursery, a few setbacks now and then, but overall, it is going ahead on Solomon time even if the pace isn’t my ideal rate of progress.


Tuesday 13th April

We have the lease agreed, 15 years, with renewal after. Time to really start spending money now. Tiff and I will be organising road access, water and power as soon as she returns to work next week. We’ve put off her trip to Brisbane till she recovers from her latest bout of malaria, there isn’t a lot of her, and it really knocks her around.

I’m going to have to have some words about my employment contract, someone keeps insisting I’m here to run classes only, everything else I do is peripheral and once we are settled I’ll be teaching all the time. My TOR states that I’m to oversee the “Local” teacher, and ascertain if they need further training, not run it all. Which would be a stupid thing to be doing anyway, what happens when my contract expires? The teaching portion of my contract is less than 10%, the rest is establishing the nursery, landscaping designs for Honiara, Auki, Gizo, etc. Creating a skilled and trained workforce of people with good gardening and nursery skills.

I know I’m fighting an uphill battle over getting local people employed in positions that were once the preserve of the colonialists, but its been 30 years since independence, time to move on and grow up.

I met the lady that has been employed to watch Tiff, ok, that may be a jaundiced view, but after some of the comments I’m positive it is just a post colonial attitude.

We’re finally getting MYOB installed on the computer, but it isn’t for Tiff to use, as she’s just a local and probably doesn’t understand it. Am I angry? I’m past angry, Tiff has been using MYOB for a damn sight longer than I’ve been here, we’ve been trying to get a full version loaded for a year so she can do all the accounts and keep each funding agency separated, and now we get told she probably won’t understand it?
Ok, moving on, if I dwell on that too long I’ll be writing stuff I’ll have to delete before posting.

I had a laugh this morning, I’ve been taking 2 litre bottles of water in each day for the crew, most of them don’t have water tanks, and I’ve got more water than I’ll use between rainfalls. One bottle ended up with a live mosquito larva in it, which had Hudson, Misi, David horrified. I spent ages trying to convince them that it proved how good the water was, if the water was bad the larva wouldn’t have been alive, so it means the water is really good. I had David scratching his head over that for a while. Anyway, that bottle got poured out, but all the other bottles, all filled from the same water tank were all drank by the time we went home. I’ll put a strainer over the bottles in future, and not tell anyone.

Nearly everything in Brisbane has been ordered and paid for, WetEarth are going to be late with the irrigation stuff, that’s my fault for not having all the details and drawings scanned to send them in time. We can live with the delay, it gives us time to get the fences up, the beds laid out and the trenches and water tanks installed before all the pipework arrives.

The building is going to be a kitset thing from Australia, it comes preassembled in modules, all the wiring/plumbing etc installed, just a matter of putting up a steel frame and connecting the modules. Classroom and office, toilets etc. It has to be lifted a few feet off the ground for the plumbing, and to give the height for the water tanks, which will give some air movement as well and help cool it down.

We’ve got the big garden remake on Thursday, everyone will be glad to finish it I’m picking. There’s a huge amount of work to get done, palms to be pruned, a couple of trees to be taken out, and about ¼ acre of metre high grass to be cut, plus pathways to be restored, gardens to be weeded. Once we all get started it should go fairly quickly though.