10 September 2007
Honiara
The complete collection of Dr John Roughan's "Ting ting blong mi" columns on Solomon Islands affairs. A work in progress!
10 April 2007
Immediately after our recent earthquake/tsunami disaster, it was a straight forward thing to count up our dead, missing and injured. Finding out how many homes. houses, buildings and personal possessions the tsunami wave destroyed, although more difficult to work out, is being addressed as these lines are read. The hardest thing to figure out, however, is how best to
respond to victims personal losses, deep psychological hurts and their feelings of total devastation.
Of course the trauma-effected villagers' immediate physical needs--food, shelter, water, clothing, medicine--are continually being rushed to the affected sites by ship, launch, aircraft and helicopter. Now exactly a week after the disaster struck on 2 April at 7:40 in the morning, many of the above mentioned goods, services and personnel--overseas and local--are reaching out and touching the majority of the 6,000+ victims.
But deep traumatic scars villagers, especially children, experienced are only now slowly surfacing. Almost a week after our Big Shake--an 8.1 earthquake immediately followed by major tsunamis--Solomon Islands National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) continues to process the many reports flooding into its Honiara office lying east more than 200 miles from the
quake centre.
The earthquake by Richter Scale standards was really a severe shake and because the under ocean epicenter was so close to the surface--about 10 miles deep beneath the earth--large roller waves were almost immediately felt in the vicinity. No early warning signal of impending wave action could have been sent. In fact, Australia's eastern coast facing the Solomons, more
than 900 miles from us, felt the very same wave action less than 3 minutes after the first major tremor hit us. Imagine Solomons' villagers sitting less than 20 miles from the quake's epicenter!
Our death toll currently stands about 40 but, unfortunately, is on the rise. Missing people who were thought to have escaped to the hills behind the typical village are now too often being found under the debris of their collapsed homes and buildings. Our death toll would have been far higher, however, had not two factors played their part in keeping many of our village people from perishing.
Unlike the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 Dec. 2004, ours rushed ashore only minutes after the big shake at 7:40 when the vast majority of people were already out of their homes, getting ready for garden work, going about business and living the typical village life pattern. It was literally a life saving experience for them to actually see and feel the strange goings on of the ocean fronting their villages. Reefs, never before seen, now lay exposed. Erratic wave action--up and down the beach in rapid succession--put fear into people's hearts.
The second saving factor that proved helpful was the very word tsunami. This strange expression was no longer a foreign sounding word but one that carried deep meaning. Many had seen TV footage or at least had heard about the terrible events in the Indian Ocean only a few years back. It didn't take people more than a few seconds to put two and two together to what was happening as they stood mutely in front of a seething ocean. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, older siblings, etc. snatched up the smallest of children, ran for their lives to higher ground without turning back to homes for extra clothing, food or anything else. Their most precious possessions, their kids, came first. All else was secondary.
The NDMO is also looking beyond the tsunami victims most pressing immediate needs--food, shelter, clothing, water, medicine, etc.--to the deep scars generated by the earthquake and devastating waves. As in the Indian Ocean tsunami victims, fishermen who had made their lives from the sea now feared it so much as to refuse to return to the sea, to go out fishing. What had
been their friend for many years, now, in a twinkling of an eye, had became a distrustful enemy.
Tsunami affected children are even more at risk. They do not have the words, the vocabulary, to describe their feelings, their hurts from this upsetting incidence. Specially trained trauma counselors will have to come in and be part of any emergency response team. At this moment, the NDMO is actively searching for just such persons. The serious wave action of last week may
have returned to the sea but its movement still swills around Western and Choiseul people's minds and hearts to this day.
J. Roughan
10 April 2007
Honiara
Worldwide there is a concerted effort to push small farmers off their land! This type of action is taking place in spite of the fact that more than half of the world' 6 billion people keep body and soul together through their own efforts to produce the food necessary to feed the whole world. Yet, strong forces are hard at work to force the small farmer, the peasant, the tiller of the soil to abandon their lands.
The reasoning behind such moves is not hard to find. Large, industrialized and urban populations think that the best way to produce food is through the corporate farm structure. Obviously, these huge, agricultural industries produce vast amounts of food, vegetables, fruit, grain, etc. but at serious, expensive and climate-changing costs. Their production methods include absorbing tremendous amounts of water, using serious amounts of chemicals and they have an insatiable thirst for ever scarce fossil fuels. To insure that these serious and mounting investment costs are repaid and repaid at great profit, people across the globe must be forced to buy, certainly not
produce, their own food. Having small farmers who currently feed the majority of people across the world doesn't fit well in with the need for corporate profit.
Our own small farmers on the other hand can not be faulted in the overuse of precious fresh water. The rains alone are the only water they use. Because chemicals and fertilizers are so costly our gardeners hardly make use of them in their food production techniques. Our women gardeners rarely, if ever, depend upon fossil fuel consumption--petrol, kerosene, diesel--to
produce a healthy harvest of organic food.
Our nation's 'Bottom Up' approach--raising the quality of village living--directly fights this modern-day movement. The present government's accent on rural development is not simply an add on to everything else that a government does but the village focus lies at the very core of what it intends to follow for the next three years. Fortunately, our efforts to travel this direction are attracting other like-minded nations. Some of these lie on the other side of the globe and sincerely applaud what they see is going on here in Solomon Islands.
India, for instance, with its 1/2 a million (yes, half a million) villages--as many villages as we have people--is naturally attracted to other nations wedded to the idea of strengthening the lives of village people. When the newly appointed India's High Commissioner, Mr. Satya Mann,
presented his credentials to our Governor General and Prime Minister last week, he went out of his way to promise India's help to our small farmers.
During his formal talks with the PM, Mr. Mann was already promising to send specialists in rural farming to visit our people. He also asked for dedicated teams from our own country to officially visit his country to study how India responded to the needs of the back bone of Indian food
production, its village people. He was particularly outspoken in assuring us that our 'Bottom Up' approach was the wave of the 21st Century.
That is why India's promises to assist our food producers to become more efficient, more connected with the market and more self-reliant is welcome news to government's efforts to reach out to our village population.
But in this very same arena of international assistance, Taiwan, Cuba, Venezuela and Iceland are also singing from the same page as the Solomons. Recently, for instance, Taiwanese food experts traveled to the Solomons to show our farmers the worth of value added products to raise their income levels.
We are all aware of how many pineapples, mangoes and bananas land in our market during the November-February months each year. December, as we know, is our pineapple and mango period. Honiara's Main Market at that time is overloaded with these fruits. We truly have a glut of a good thing. Taiwan's experts, however, demonstrated how the typical farmer, especially the youth of a village, could begin to line their pockets with impressive amounts of money by preserving these fruits, making jams and jellies and drying these delicious fruits for package sales in stores around the country.
But government efforts don't stop there. It currently makes available $10 million in soft loans for farmers to begin small income generating projects focusing on adding value to the crops that the farmers already produce.
Isabel currently markets coffee, Western Province cans tuna, some provinces are eyeing vanilla production and still others are testing out the making of fruit jams and jellies. The Government's $10 million dollar soft loan offer is only a warm up. If local production takes off, then serious amounts of money will be made available. Our Melanesian Spearhead Group, also would
more than welcome these value-added products. These are different ways of helping our farmers, not failing them!
J. Roughan
2 April 2007
Honiara
It seems so long ago but in fact it was only 'yesterday' when one thinks in terms of Solomons' history! Today's story begins in 1958. It was my first experience with gathering children for our small school in Tarapaina, Small Malaita. I had only come recently landed in country sailing from Australiaand I was completely raw to Solomon Islands life.
Traveling along Malaita's East Coast by small launch I was tasked to pick up school children for our small school located at the northern end of Small Malaita. When I would arrive at a coastal village I was suppose to convince parents, especially the father of a child, that it would be great thing for him and his whole family if one of their young offspring would return withme to our small school.
It proved to be a hard selling job! Convincing parents of those days to allow their little ones to travel to a distant school more than three hours away by hard rowing was not something they easily accepted. However, when I thought a father of a child was beginning to come around to my way of thinking, I resorted to a bit of bribery. Producing two sticks of tobacco--a strong currency of that time--out of my hand bag, I was able to convince most fathers that it was a good idea to have at least one of their childrengo to school.
So there it was! School fees during the late 1950s was two sticks of tobacco that I gave the father of the school child. When I tune in these days and listen to SIBC's nightly Surface Messages sent by different schools across the country, I'm speechless. Today's schools now demand hundreds, even thousands of dollars, which parents somehow find and pay it out, year afteryear.
Within in a few years, however,--the 1960s and 1970s--many schoolmasters were actually asking for and getting school fees. Modest amounts, for sure, by today's 'big money' standards but a whole lot more than what I wasreceiving only ten or so years before.
In less than 50 years, then, how far this nation has traveled. In the late 1950s I was forced to bribe a parent to send a child to school. Now, parents actually line up in front of the school, hand over hundreds and in some cases, thousands of dollars to secure class room places for their childrenin schools across the nation.
Back in the late 1950s, as said above, it was hard work convincing a parent to allow his child to attend school, doubly hard if the child was a girl. Yet, slowly, very slowly, people's view of education began to shift. Families experienced the difference that an education could do for their
children. The educated child, at that time basically Standard 7 for the majority, won the job, the overseas university place, the government position, etc.
In other words, it didn't take Solomon Islanders centuries to recognize now valuable education was even if it demanded an investment of 'big bucks' paid up front. The villagers' Education Love Affair has journeyed far. They had originally thought that schooling, education, training being 'a while man's thing' to a worthwhile investment for Solomon Islanders. Society, in less than 50 years, had turned a corner! What had been seen as a strange, foreign idea has now became main stream and has become a major influencethat defines present day Solomons life.
These personal memories are shared with those workers who currently labor in the nation's development trenches, those working to have more women in the halls of power, youth seeking employment, etc. My villager experience has been an eye opener. These people are not dumb, not completely welded to the past and certainly not simply locked into old ways of doing things just because they have always been done that way. Yes, my story of the 'two sticks of tobacco' turning into 'thousands of dollars' took a few decadesbut it shows that it can be done.
J. Roughan
26 March 2007
Honiara