It's over and out from me as I returned to New Zealand this week. But you can follow the Haus Stori at
https://m.facebook.com/BougainvilleLibraryProject/
And the sak-sak roofs have been woven and two have been put into place.
Big thanks to Allan Gioni and his team for an amazing six months.
Tim
This week at the Haus Stori fellow volunteer Ann Green is exhibiting a series of paintings she has completed while living here. Here is the artist and some of her admirers.
Sago leaves are prepared for the new roof. A sharp central spine is torn away from the leaf itself - but carefully so the leaf remains undamaged. And the more people who help, the quicker it goes.
The Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance has its 2017 meeting at the Haus Stori.
...more a sign that today concrete will be poured, weather-permitting.
And there's just one day left...
https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/hausstorihelp
Vincent the builder comes with his rule and level to start making framing for new, safe, even, permanent steps! The money for this is still being patched together from various sources, so it is not too late to contribute:
https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/hausstorihelp
Thank you if you already have! Now why not lean on somebody else to do the same?!
Another lucky walk to a nearby village and its rather lovely waterfall. Remember you can't just walk anywhere here: the land and all the connecting paths belong to someone, or more accurately some village or clan. So if you get an invitation to walk just about anywhere, you grab it. A small fee is usually negotiated.
A 30 minute walk took 5 hours, but that is also standard: locals skip their way up slippery slopes and boulder-hop their way down rivers like mountain goats. We whities stagger and stumble doing either.
And this is what the Arawa Public Library looked like before the crisis. From a brochure describing all the facilities then on offer to new mine employees and their families.
At last, a trip to Panguna and the giant abandoned copper mine, cause of all Bougainville's problems. Depending on who you ask, re-opening it will either save, or destroy, the country.
A rare privilege: a decent bush walk with peerless views followed by a feast to mark the end of a period of a widow's mourning. Pig after pig after the biggest pig you ever saw were paraded through the village to various sites of slaughter. The video of a screaming pig being pinned on his back while his heart is beaten twenty or thirty times with the back of a felling axe is available on demand.
The Haus Stori needs some running repairs. These steps are exposed to the weather (alternating intense sun and torrential rain) and they plainly need replacing.
The catch is that nobody here has two ha'pennies to rub together - even the staff haven't been paid since November 2016.
Would you give something to an online fundraising campaign?
https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/hausstorihelp
Kathleen Pearce (MFAT Development Adviser) and Annette King MP visit the Haus Stori. The latter was here as an election observer for the two week long national elections which end on Saturday.
But she couldn't leave without visiting the library, now could she?
A lot of time and effort goes into shipping donated books to developing countries. But far too often the wrong books are chosen. Here are two that found their way to Bougainville and caught my eye this morning. Neither is a bad book in itself of course but both are meaningless here.
If you ask google for the pigeon English for helicopter you'll probably get 'magimix bilong Yesus', but take care: magimix will be replaced with whatever the local term for food blender may be: magimix, mixmaster, blender, vitamix...
But that variation is itself the clue that this is nonsense: the word used is'helicopter'. The idea that tok pisin offers endless opportunities for etymological comedy like this is pretty threadbare.
And this came about because although the puppies under the library have not sparked any interest at all, a helicopter flying over it got everyone outside, staring and pointing, in a flash!
Squealing and mewling from beneath the library needs investigating. And here's the cause, five more dogs which has to be the last thing Bouganville needs! An event like that in a New Zealand high school would be at least a talking point and more likely bring classes to a halt, but here it is barely noticed.
My back wheel has developed a wobble. My colleague says his teenage son loves fiddling with bikes and would be happy to fix the broken spokes. I instinctively said I'd pay him for his time, thinking that encouraging entrepreneurship and financial independence in a young man was just the thing to do.
How 'waitman' was that assumption? No, no, I am told, his son must on no account be taught the sordid value of money. If he helps, it's because helping is just a nice thing to do. Payment doesn't enter into it.
It's standing room only at the library this morning as parents of graduating students meet to discuss the Grand Graduation Ceremony that will take place in October.
Planning something this far in advance is simply unheard of and the cynic might say 'Just do the same as last year'!
The decision is that each parent will contribute k40 per student. Easy for some. Completely impossible for others.
The meeting has just ended so heads are bowed in prayer. That's the way every meeting starts and finishes round here.
The streets here are usually ankle deep in litter: empty cans, wrappers, packaging and so on. With a coating of mud and betelnut expectorant. Every so often the Seventh Day Adventist church has a litter blitz and dozens of people, dozens of women and children to be precise, spend the day picking it all up. And here is the result: a clean street. Within a week it will be back to normal I daresay.
We NZ volunteers joined in, wearing stout shoes and rubber gloves of course. The local children did it in bare feet and hands. Until I insisted she stop, one child cheerfully slurped the leftover contents of each can she picked up.
It's either feast or famine in the supermarket and at the moment things are pretty good. I just spent 120 kina (about NZ$50) on essentials like olives, marmalade and Weetbix and could feel the eyes of the other people in the checkout boring into me: 'Why is this crazy white man spending a week's wages on this weird stuff?'
An hourly rate of three or four kina is about standard for local staff so that really is a week's pay. Spent on processed food that won't even make a proper meal.
My brief here is to help create a system for collecting oral histories and adding them to the library collection. An interview I did this week was the saddest by far. We had agreed to talk about extended families and how Melanesian society is founded on family and clan responsibilities and obligations. We got onto one's interactions with in-laws, which are strictly controlled by a complex set of unwritten but widely accepted rules. One's in-laws of the opposite sex are off limits: one cannot talk to them, look at them, share food with them, be alone with them. If you spot them in the street, you turn away. Any contact, even inadvertent, is disrespectful and deeply shaming; it will require a public apology and compensation with food or money. Mere words of apology are inadequate.
How sad that happy and fulfilling relationships with one's partner's parents and siblings, and with one's children's partners, are not allowed.
In Buka, and here we have the local Catholic diocesan offices, meeting rooms, training centre and...BYO pizzeria! How they get hold of olives, anchovies and blue cheese is a miracle.
A quick side trip to Rabaul where the availability of imported food is almost overwhelming. I wander round the supermarket in a daze: chocolate! Olive oil! Peppers! Cheese! Fresh meat! Lettuce! Carrots!
And for dinner an oily, garlicky, salty, bacony, pasta wonder
Nine books picked off the shelf, but which one to read...oh the delicious torture of deciding!!
Here we are getting back to library basics, swabbing the shelves, scraping off the gecko poo and brushing away the dead insects. Many hours of fun.
The Catholics and the Adventists compete to save the souls of Bougainviĺleans. And the former seem to offer a take home service through the local bottle store.
A 'security situation' means that we are all confined to quarters today, Easter Monday, and can only imagine the outside world. Annoying because a walk up into the hills - which itself takes a lot of organizing - was planned.
Last day of term at Arawa High School, so a fashion show is held. Teacher Mrs G gets a big cheer for taking part. And the moment is captured forever on a hundred smartphones.
The blue dot marks the exact spot where I just had a really useful meeting with all the staff of the Bougainville Heritage Foundation. Loose ends tidied, plans explained, progress praised, tardiness mildly criticised...just like a regular meeting with all the usual meeting dynamics and tensions at work and the usual cast of characters: the clown, the grump, the enthusiast, the spectator...
As Young Werther has it: people really are the same everywhere.
All the staff were there except the two who haven't been paid for months and who have therefore had enough. Apparently their salary was approved but then someone at City HQ decided it would be better spent elsewhere and quickly and quietly diverted it. Diverted to which project, nobody can say.
This is how you stack the supermarket shelves - one packet deep - when the stock is running out and the fortnightly ship isn't due for ages.
To the village of Pidia to talk to chief John Duai and Carmelita Tibola. Powerful stories about the crisis and the continuing divisions in the village. The other interviewer is Patrick Keaveney, an Irish artist working here whose photographic project intersected nicely with mine.
Enjoy my pasty, and rarely seen left knee
Word goes out that some expat groceries may be available and two days later I receive four - four! - packets of wonderful glorious processed salty plastic wrapped, river destroying New Zealand cheese. First dairy product for a month if you ignore an ice cream that almost certainly had no actual cream in it anyway.
So now the question: scoff it all in huge chunks and hang the consequences? Or pare it thinly and make it last for months? Which did the chaps in Stalag V do when the Red Cross sent a tin of peaches? The latter I expect, and yet...
A presentation at the Haus Stori to high school students from representatives of the various law and justice agencies: court officials, prison officers, policemen, probation officers and so on. Quite a line-up of heavies delivering some stern warnings: don't smoke pot (like that's the biggest issue here?), stick to your studies, honour your family. One of the speakers was the ombudsman who is supposed to keep the leaders in line and investigate allegations of corruption. In the job for two weeks she made the rookie error of asking for questions. 'What are you going to do about political corruption?', 'How can we stop our leaders building fancy houses and buying fancy cars?'. That last one came from the school principal.
The mood grew tense, but it is a very good question: what CAN she do? The answer in the short term is probably very little.
Both Saturday and Sunday are days of prayer and rest in Bougainville, for Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics respectively. Working out which shops will be closed on which day takes a while. Either way the Sabbath is a big deal.
Even Digicel, the mobile phone operator that specialises in high cost sevice to developing countries, gets in on the act with junk text messages like this.
There's plenty of semiotic ambiguity in this sign, nailed to a tree at Loloho beach. This beach belongs to kiwis? Which kiwis? How come? Since when? Non-kiwis are welcome? Unwelcome? Welcome so long as they behave in some kind of kiwi way? Uphold defined kiwi values? When kiwis come across beach ownership in, say, the Mediterranean they are scandalised, but here is a bit of territory marking of a very similar stripe. Does anyone, could anyone, know what the people in the village right by the beach think?
Is there an Aussie beach? Could there be a Chinese beach? And what about all the other beaches in Bougainville, which lack signs?
Seems to me that this little sign points, perhaps unintentionally but still unmistakably, down the familiar settler society path of re-naming, marking, mapping, pegging, surveying, fencing, owning.
Why not erect a sign 'Loloho Beach'? Why not just leave well alone?
There are three NZ police officers in Arawa. In uniform, but with an 'Adviser' epaulette. They're great people - and I'm not just saying that because of their 42" screen and Sky subscription.
Talking to a group of senior students from the adjacent high school to see if they would like to contribute their stories to the oral history project. I spoke, they listened in silence. Any questions? Not one. What a waste of time that was I thought. But then afterwards eight (eight!) of them came up to me individually and said yes they'd love to help, what a great idea etc etc
After a few wandery days we scored our first interview today, with Paul Nakara, mayor of Arawa. Note the Zoom digital recorder - thank you VSA - on the table. Paul had some tales to tell: his father was a cargo carrier for the US Army in World War 2, he himself drove mine trucks for 13 years when Arawa was the Dubai of Melanesia. Then life in the bush, living off the land for years, and now back in an impoverished Arawa as mayor. A courteous and amusing chap who was a pleasure to meet.
