For the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of activity next door, with a large stack of timber and 3 young guys furiously cutting, drilling, hammering from fairly early morning till night fall. I went over on Tuesday afternoon to find out.
Two of them are from Don Bosco Training School, the other is from a similar school in West Guadacanal, and they have a contract to build 40 school desks for St Nicholas School. Everything supplied, they get $100 per completed desk, they figure 4 weeks from start to finish, so about $330 per week each if there are no hold-ups. On an hourly cost basis they aren’t doing all that great, but the alternative is to be doing nothing and earning nothing, so it is hard to say it isn’t economical. Anyway, here’s a few photos of the 3 of them, Chris, Atkin and Frank.
Tiff keeps coming into work in the mornings, I keep sending her home. As I said to her this morning, I’ve seen dead people look better than she does at the moment. Her skin has a greyish pallor under the natural brown, and she hasn’t any energy left. But she keeps on coming in. She should be back to normal by Monday, it takes about a week for the pills to clear the malaria out of her system, after which she has about a month of immunity, then she’ll be down with another dose. White River is a fertile swamp for malaria mosquitos, there are a few small streams that run through the settlement, swampy areas around every house, no one has mosquito nets to sleep under, the houses are predominately thatch, some have windows, but no screens, the rest have openings without screens. It would take about 3 months of DDT sprayed every couple of weeks, and we’d be clear of malaria, but lets not get into that argument again.
Tessie has a good case of scabies, all over her feet, hands, arms and legs. A few patches on her body, fortunately it is clearing up, but she is getting to dislike going to the Health Clinic for shots and pills every day. I would hate to see the child mortality figures for here, I know the report last year about #9 showed an 80% child mortality figure for children going into #9, but most of that figure is because of the delay in people taking ill children to the clinics. Or simply not having a Health Clinic in their village or area.
Any children that get past 5 or 6 years old here are going to be fairly indestructible, they would have been exposed to a huge range of diseases, infections, accidents. Tb, malaria, Yaws, a huge variety of intestinal and other worms, skin infections, malnutrition, all add up to fairly common gauntlet of illnesses that are all too common here. So people have large families, which is normal in a high mortality lifestyle. Until we can improve peoples lifestyle here, it’s a losing battle. I could go on and on, but I think we all know the answers, the solutions are harder to implement.
We’ve lost Andrew for a while. He decided to check out how sharp the bushknife was, and instead of cutting the tree branch, he slit his thumb open, cutting into the bone as well so he will be off work for a while. Usual story, up a tree, cutting branches and made one mistake. Thankfully it was a bushknife, not the chainsaw.
More to the saga of the little truck. I know everyone is wondering if it will ever be back on the road. I mentioned that we had finally found the battery that went missing, which was faulty, and we were taking it back to Discount Autos for a replacement. Somewhere in Honiara is a BJS vehicle with our battery in, and we were given a faulty BJS battery in exchange. Discount Autos have their own labelling system, Motor Corp, the other battery supplier has theirs. So we are now looking for a battery with a red and white label, SFM58, instead of the blue and white 58ERB that is on the one the mechanic gave us. Luckily the invoice shows the battery designation, which helped this afternoon while I was having a “discussion” with the BJS mechanic. And we know BJS deal with Motor Corp, we deal with Discount Auto. I haven’t told Tony yet, it is just getting too embarrassing catching his mechanic out all the time with the stuff he does. It is like the brake fluid episode from a couple of weeks back, when they kept pouring brake fluid into the master cylinder in the front of the truck, and no one wondered where 5 litres of brake fluid at $145 a litre was going. Until someone looked back and realised they hadn’t reconnected the brake hoses to the rear wheels. Tony agreed that it was a bit steep for us to be paying for it after a bit of a discussion and some “talks”.
As an aside to all this, I finally met Roy Hall, the manager of Discount Autos. He’s another Kiwi, so we had the usual, where are you from conv, Auckland, oh, same same, whereabouts, oh Otahuhu, oh, really same same, I lived in Lippiat road, and that is when it got really weird, Roy is a couple of years older than me, he was looking at me when I said Lippiat road, he grew up in #7, the house opposite me, we used to play together till Mum and Dad moved to the farm at the end of Princes Street. So we had a bit of a remember this and who etc for a while. We went to the same schools, same teachers, worked in a lot of the same places around Otahuhu. When you consider the distance between Honiara and anywhere, it’s a small world when you can meet a neighbour from 60 years ago here.
Tiff and I are going into #9 tomorrow to check on Andrew, with a food carton for him so he doesn’t starve. Luckily it was his left thumb, so he’ll be able to use a can opener still. We’ll get a few tins of tuna, crackers, fruit juice, stuff that won’t go off quickly.
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