Death, the profound mystery!

29 May 2007

Three of our Big Men--Joses Sanga, Bart Ulufa'alu and now, Lloyd Mapeza Gina--all have left us over the past month. Their passing away brings home, in no uncertain way, to each of us that the road they traveled will be ours as well. Some in the near future. For others, the passage of years must flow under the bridge called time but there's no doubt we too will travel the very same road. All are destined to die!

Some call death absurd! But absurd means that which has no meaning and cannot have meaning. Our God can and did not create an absurd world. For most of us, however, death is a mystery . . . something that has more meaning than we have understanding.

Pain and suffering are close relatives to their ugly 'Big Brother', death. But make no mistake about it, these three--pain, suffering and death--are firmly of the same family. All three lie at the heart of the mystery of life. To fully explain one of them would be to make all three clear at the same moment. But since Adam and Eve walked this earth no one, including Christ himself, fully explained death and its two sisters, pain and suffering. They lie, however, at the heart of why God created this kind of world and made all three parts of the normal pattern of living.

On 2 April Solomon Islands was forced to learn the very same painful lesson. The Western and Choiseul provinces' tsunami wiped away in a flash the lives of more than 50 of our people--the very old, the very young and those in the prime of their lives. Our Prime Minister publicly questioned the meaning of such an event. Why had the tsunami happened? Why did it hit us? He found no easy answers!

Some attempt to link the bottomless mystery of suffering and death with there being no God. How can a merciful and all loving God allow such suffering . . . the tiny infant thrown into a fire by a drunken rebel soldier, the mass gas attack by Sadan, Hiroshima, etc? Few of us think this way, however. Others link suffering, pain and especially death to God's punishment . These and similar questions Christ never answers. Instead of answering, Christ acts. Do we want answers to the death, pain and suffering mystery, then we find it at the foot of the Cross!

The Lord works and watches over his creation, which he loves, perhaps not with human love but with, in Dante's words "the love that moves the sun, the other stars."

Death's mystery was so close to us at the Bart Ulufa'alu's burial service at Holy Cross Cathedral on Sunday last. The country's elite--political, business, church leaders--confronted the ultimate in there lives. Death looked us all in the eye and boasted that everyone in that church would be traveling the road some time soon. For death, ten days, ten months or ten years are all the same.

The essential factor that Jesus introduces into the death mystery, however, is the absolute faith in the omnipotence of love. Jesus is a free man, the only truly free man, the only man who has loved and believed with sufficient daring both to free himself from fear, from money, from habit, from the law, and from death, and to free others from the same things. During his life the sick were freed of their infirmities, the greedy were liberated from their love for money, the lustful from needs of the flesh, sinners regained their innocence and even the dead were restored to life--Jairus' daughter, Lazarus, Jesus himself.

The reality of death over the past month has struck the nation like a lightning bolt. We are not only rational creatures but believing ones as well. Death leaves us gasping for understanding, for insight. God owes us nothing yet we are his children! These are the two ends of a chain which we hold in our hands but is tangled up at our feet. Both ends are real even if we can't explain how they are.

J. Roughan
29 May 2007
Honiara.

You've come a long way!

26 March 2007

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

Barbeque smoke says it all!

5 March 2007

The smell of barbequed smoke in the wind announces to one and all that some good things are on the way. The sweet-smelling smoke sends a welcome signal to an anxious and hungry people that sausages, chicken wings, tuna steaks, etc are about ready. This is one way of describing where the Grand Coalitionfor Change Government finds itself at present.

People across the nation have been smelling the political barbequed meat--strengthening the quality of village life, rural development and the 'bottom up approach' for the past nine months and they hungrily await theirturn to finally taste this meal.

In reality, however, villagers have been promised this barbequed meal since 1978. It took 20 years of frustrated waiting but in 1998, they had had enough. After all wasn't this their country! Didn't they own more than 95% of its land, trees, rivers, reefs and fishing areas? More than 84% of them made up the overwhelming majority of the population! And still they hadn't once tasted the barbeque meal in almost thirty years! Their patience snapped and the nation witnessed five years of Social Unrest.

But I think this time things have really changed. Solomon Islanders now smell the odor of the barbeque meat, it's become stronger and stronger since May last year when the new government took charge of the cooking. In past years governments of the day always told villagers to wait. The meat wasn't cooked well enough! Even the GCC government was forced to delay its work until Parliament recently gave the green light to the 2007 Budget. Now,
finally, the budget has been passed.

Fortunately, the government has not been quietly sitting by waiting for the meal to be properly cooked. Last week, for instance, its servants--Cabinet Ministers and their Permanent Secretaries--have been learning how to be better servants, to carefully cook the barbeque, to prepare a meal well, etc. The Commonwealth Foundation working out of its London office sent a
team of top chefs to the Solomons to conduct a three-day servants workshop to strengthen our own local servants and to teach them to cook better.

The workshop was more about the quality of Parliamentarians' and Permanent Secretaries' work ethic and much less about marketing and packaging. It stressed programs, services and products than advertising and public relations. In other words even if the government can boast of an attractive logo or catchy tagline--Bottom Up Approach--the target audience, the village
and the villager, must not be allowed to once again experience all sizzle and no steak. If this happens, it won't take long for our people to see only smoke and realize there's no meat on the grill!

But the exercise of touching the basic lives of village people in practical ways is the responsibility of all Solomon Islanders. Of course the Chief Cooks (MPs) and their senior waiters (PSs) are only the first in a long lineof other workers, not all on the government payroll.

That's why the GCC Government recognizes Church groups with their unequalled village-based structures, the NGO sector with its outreach commitment and villagers themselves as not only necessary but important lines of workers bringing the barbequed meal to those sitting furthest fromthe kitchen.

For too long village people have had to suffer the pain of sitting at the head table and then watching others wolf down the barbeque meal that had really been cooked for them. At long last, we now have a chance to change this event and get the owners of the nation sitting down at the head tableand enjoying the barbeque at long last..

J. Roughan
5 March 2007
Honiara